They sure have harbored some incredible minds.
Many Catholics, both clerics and laypersons alike, have made significant contributions to the development of science and mathematics from the Middle Ages to today. These scientists include Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Nicolas Copernicus, Louis Pasteur, Blaise Pascal, André-Marie Ampère, Gregor Mendel, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, Pierre de Fermat, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Marin Mersenne, Alessandro Volta, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Pierre Duhem, Jean-Baptiste Dumas, Roger Boscovich, Pierre Gassendi, and Georgius Agricola, to name a few.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_scientists
For an institution so steeped in tradition, superstition, and folklore, they sure did evolve (even before the Renaissance) to lay the very foundation for modern science itself.
We're covering Gregor Mendel right now in Biology, his insightful contributions to the study of genetics.
I can't help but to think, if it wasn't for the Church back in the day with all their monasteries allowing such "philosopher monks" to be able to focus all their free time on on matters of the mind instead of endless busy-body work, we would have never gotten out of the Dark Ages.
I'm not so sure that the Church is really all that necessary any more, in this era of free-flowing information and esteemed secular institutes of higher learning, but I will give them props for the role they played back in the day, laying down the building blocks of the explosion of human knowledge and scientific discovery over the past 500 years, especially over the past 200 years alone.
It gives me great hope for the future of humanity, that even from the most guarded halls of dogma and ritual that such forward-thinking perspectives could arise, and even thrive.
Maybe even Islam will eventually come around and change its ways. Come back to contributing to the greater human knowledge like it did in its early days, instead of trying to drag us back down to pre-civilized levels of endless sectarian violence and hate.
We can hope, right?
