[reaperducer]

People love to wallow in the stereotype that the Catholic Church is old fashioned and anti-science. That's mostly propaganda leftover from 300 years ago.

Catholic nuns were instrumental in the development of computers. A Catholic priest is fundamental to the Big Bang Theory†. Dozens of craters on the moon were named by and for Catholic clergy who discovered them.

†https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître

[dhosek]

I follow a couple Jesuit brothers on Blue Sky who work at the Vatican Observatory. One of them was tapped to receive an award for another astronomer at a ceremony she couldn’t attend. Beforehand, he said that he would be doing this but couldn’t name the astronomer but said that it was someone well-known and I realized that the only contemporary astronomers I could name were either Jesuits or Neil DeGrasse Tyson. (I don’t remember the actual astronomer, but she was none of these).

Amongst scientific clergy, there’s also Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit who was part of the team which discovered the Peking Man fossils (although looking at the Wikipedia page, it appears his legacy is a bit more complicated than one can address in an HN comment).

[bombcar]

It’s said when they found the first uncomplicated Jesuit they made him Pope ;)

[dhosek]

Although he’s still pretty complicated. I’m reminded somewhat of a Franciscan sister friend of mine who runs a blog (and until recently, a podcast) called “Messy Jesus Business” which leans into how complicated the whole being Christian thing can get.

[bombcar]

There's one of those "midway" memes with a peasant on one side, saying "God is Love" and Aquinas on the other, saying "God is Love" and the middle is a bunch of Jesuit complications. :)

[lo_zamoyski]

It is indeed a historically recent lie propagated by the Church's enemies, most notably Enlightenment talking heads and Protestants. It is part of the founding myth of scientism. It needs this myth to sustain its opposition and arrogation of science onto itself, just as Protestants need their countless myths about the Church to sustain their opposition and rebellion.

Historically, however, this framing of opposition would have been incomprehensible to Catholics. Scholasticism itself provided the intellectual foundations for modern science. Historically, you won't find a sustained and fertile scientific enterprise anywhere but the Christian West. As Jaki puts it, everywhere else, it was stillborn.

This battle between Religion vs. Science is an ignorant myth repeated by the ignorant and by tendentious bigots.