…Monsignor Lemaître vs Pope Pius XII
George Lemaître was a belgian catholic priest who lived from 17 July 1984 to 20 June 1966. Lemaître, even though he was an ordained priest in the catholic church, devoted his life mostly to the studies of physics, especially astronomy.
In 1927 he published his paper “A homogeneous Universe of constant mass and growing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extragalactic nebulae” in the magazine “Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels”. The paper applied Albert Einsteins theory of general relativity to cosmology for the first time, formulating that our universe began with a giant explosion, and since then keeps on expanding.
