The World's Debt to the Catholic Church

In the minds of a great many people the chapter in the Catholic Church's relations to human progress in knowledge of the world around us which would surely be the briefest would be that of science. In the sense of physical science at least, this seems to most of our generation to be the only kind of knowledge worth while talking about and is supposed by a very large number of educated people to have been almost constantly under the ban of the Church. They do not blame the Church but feel that it acted only in self-defense. Churchmen were afraid that the study of nature and of the world around them would disturb the faith of members of the Church and so, just as far as possible, they suppressed the curiosity of men in this direction, or allowed it only to be exercised in such a limited way as would enable them to guide the development of science so as to be sure that it would not interfere with faith. This is supposed to have been the constant policy of the Church from the very beginning with regard to all forms of knowledge, hence the objection to pagan education in the first century, but this policy is presumed to have been emphasized and rendered ever so much stricter when the danger of the development of scientific knowledge, that is, knowledge of the physical world becoming a source of contradiction of the articles of faith, became manifest.

As a matter of fact this chapter on science and the church's relation to it has been the hardest of all the chapters to compress since there is so much material which deserves to be presented and which evidently needs presentation, since there is so much misunderstanding and positive ignorance with regard to it. The Church has been quite as literally the patron of science, that is of physical science, as of art and architecture, of poetry and of philosophy, indeed of everything except charity which, because of Christ's second commandment, has always been a special feature of Church interest.