The Pope's Astrologer

In 1628, Pope Urban VIII sealed himself in a Vatican chamber with a
Dominican friar to perform a ritual of astral magic. Three years later,
he issued the harshest papal condemnation of astrology in Church history.
This is not a contradiction. This is the story almost no one has been
told. For more than a thousand years, the Catholic Church did not merely
tolerate astrology -- it used it. Popes consulted astrologers for the
timing of coronations. Cardinals published horoscopes. Universities paid
professors to teach it. The Vatican itself commissioned the astronomical
work that produced the Gregorian calendar we still use today. The heavens
were God's creatures, and reading them was not heresy -- it was science.
So what changed? The Pope's Astrologer uncovers this forgotten tradition
for the first time. A major work of historical synthesis. The first book
of its kind.