My husband, Mark, and I sat in the dark room at the doctor’s office, excitedly waiting for the ultrasound technician to show us a glimpse of our first unborn child. The tech grabbed the wand, reached for the bottle of gel, asked me to roll up my shirt, and secured it with paper towels to keep the gel from spreading and making a mess. We watched the screen in front of us with anticipation.

When the wand touched my belly, I first saw all kinds of things flit across the black and white screen, outlines of organs and fluids, as science and ultrasound technology enabled us to peer through flesh and bone into what lay beneath. And there, tucked within my uterus, was a 12 week post-conception, tiny person. We watched in awe as the baby, who we later learned was a girl, danced on the screen. Her arms swished as her legs kicked her body in circles. The ultrasound tech laughed with us about how active the baby was.

It was a defining moment for my husband and me, or perhaps I should say the defining moment. Science and faith were perfectly encapsulated within my body in the form of a perfect, little human being. It’s the moment that firmly dragged my husband back to his faith and secured my desire to become Catholic.

The intersection of faith and science happens in these small moments all the time. Even as a middle schooler on a family vacation, I would sneak out to the porch at night to gaze up at the stars and listen to the ocean, because that’s where I could feel the power of God around me.

As humans, it’s natural to take what we can’t see with the naked eye for granted—faith and science have that in common. We take for granted that we exist, often not questioning our souls’ origin. We take for granted that our hands move, or our brains process information, without pausing to think about the nervous system’s intricacies.

For this issue of The Catholic Telegraph, we reached out to the Catholic community, locally and abroad, to learn and share how faith and science collide. The stories of everything from agriculture and farming to space study at the Vatican Observatory made this issue one of the most interesting and exciting we’ve produced. I hope you enjoy it as much as we have and that it inspires you to observe how faith and science support one another in your own life.