Role of the Church in civilization

Church doctrine and science

Map of mediaeval universities established by Catholic students, faculty, monarchs, or

priests

Historians of science, including non-Catholics such as J.L. Heilbron,[110] A.C. Crombie,

David Lindberg,[111] Edward Grant, Thomas Goldstein,[112] and Ted Davis, have argued
that the Church had a significant, positive influence on the development of civilization.
They hold that, not only did monks save and cultivate the remnants of ancient civilization
during the barbarian invasions, but that the Church promoted learning and science
through its sponsorship of many universities which, under its leadership, grew rapidly in
Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries. St. Thomas Aquinas, the Church's "model
theologian," not only argued that reason is in harmony with faith, he even recognized that
reason can contribute to understanding revelation, and so encouraged intellectual
development.[113] The Church's priest-scientists, many of whom were Jesuits, were the
leading lights in astronomy, genetics, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology, and solar
physics, becoming the "fathers" of these sciences. It is important to remark names of
important churchmen such as the Augustinian abbot Gregor Mendel (pioneer in the study
of genetics), Roger Bacon (a Franciscan monk who was one of the early advocates of the
scientific method), and Belgian priest Georges Lemaître (the first to propose the Big
Bang theory). Even more numerous are Catholic laity involved in science: Henri
Becquerel who discovered radioactivity; Galvani, Volta, Ampere, Marconi, pioneers in
electricity and telecommunications; Lavoisier, "father of modern chemistry"; Vesalius,
founder of modern human anatomy; Cauchy one of the mathematicians who laid the
rigorous foundations of calculus.

This position is a reverse of the view, held by some enlightenment philosophers, that the
Church's doctrines were superstitious and hindered the progress of civilization.

In the most famous example cited by these critics, Galileo Galilei, in 1633, was
denounced for his insistence on teaching a heliocentric universe, previously proposed by
Nicolaus Copernicus, who was probably a priest.[114] After numerous years of
investigations, consultations with the Popes, promises kept and then broken by Galileo,
and finally a trial by the Tribunal of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, Galileo was
found "suspect of heresy" - not heresy, as is frequently misreported. Although the church
includes all his books on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and Galileo was forced to
recant his heliocentrism and spent the last years of his life under house arrest on orders of
the Inquisition,[115] Pope John Paul II, on 31 October 1992, publicly expressed regret for
the actions of those Catholics who badly treated Galileo in that trial.[116] An abstract of the
acts of the process against Galileo is available at the Vatican Secret Archives, which
reproduces part of it on its website. Cardinal John Henry Newman, in the nineteenth
century, stated that those who attack the Church can only point to the Galileo case, which
to many historians does not prove the Church's opposition to science since many of the
churchmen at that time were encouraged by the Church to continue their research.[117]
[verification needed]

Recently, the Church has been both criticized and applauded for its teaching that
embryonic stem cell research is a form of experimentation on human beings, and results
in the killing of a human person. Criticism has been on the grounds that this doctrine
hinders scientific research. The Church argues that advances in medicine can come
without the destruction of humans (in an embryonic state of life); for example, in the use
of adult or umbilical stem cells in place of embryonic stem cells.

Church, art, literature, and music

The School of Athens by Raphael, Apostolic Palace, Vatican

Several historians credit the Catholic Church for the brilliance and magnificence of
Western art. They refer to the Church's fight against iconoclasm, a movement against
visual representations of the divine, its insistence on building structures befitting worship,
Augustine's repeated reference to Wisdom 11:20 (God "ordered all things by measure and
number and weight") which led to the geometric constructions of Gothic architecture, the
scholastics' coherent intellectual systems called the Summa Theologiae which influenced
the intellectually consistent writings of Dante, its creation and sacramental theology
which has developed a Catholic imagination influencing writers such as J. R. R.
Tolkien[118], C.S. Lewis, and William Shakespeare,[119] and of course, the patronage of the
Renaissance popes for the great works of Catholic artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael,
Bernini, Borromini and Leonardo da Vinci. In addition, we must take into account the
enormous body of religious music composed for the Catholic Church, a body which is
profoundly tied to the emergence and development of the European tradition of classical
music, and indeed, all music that has been influenced by it.

Church and economic development

Francisco de Vitoria, a disciple of Thomas Aquinas and a Catholic thinker who studied
the issue regarding the human rights of colonized natives, is recognized by the United
Nations as a father of international law, and now also by historians of economics and
democracy as a leading light for the West's democracy and rapid economic development.
[120]

Joseph Schumpeter, an economist of the twentieth century, referring to the scholastics,

wrote, "it is they who come nearer than does any other group to having been the
‘founders’ of scientific economics."[121] Other economists and historians, such as
Raymond de Roover, Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, and Alejandro Chafuen, have also
made similar statements. Historian Paul Legutko of Stanford University said the Catholic
Church is "at the center of the development of the values, ideas, science, laws, and
institutions which constitute what we call Western civilization."[122]

Social justice, care-giving, and the hospital system

Historian of hospitals, Guenter Risse, says that the Church spearheaded the development
of a hospital system geared towards the marginalized.

The Catholic Church has contributed to society through its social doctrine which has
guided leaders to promote social justice and by setting up the hospital system in Medieval
Europe, a system which was different from the merely reciprocal hospitality of the
Greeks and family-based obligations of the Romans. These hospitals were established to
cater to "particular social groups marginalized by poverty, sickness, and age," according
to historian of hospitals, Guenter Risse.[123]
James Joseph Walsh wrote the following about the Catholic Church's contribution to the
hospital system:

During the thirteenth century an immense number of [these] hospitals were built. The Italian
cities were the leaders of the movement. Milan had no fewer than a dozen hospitals and Florence
before the end of the Fourteenth century had some thirty hospitals. Some of these were very
beautiful buildings. At Milan a portion of the general hospital was designed by Bramante and
another part of it by Michelangelo. The Hospital of the innocents in Florence for foundlings was
an architectural gem. The Hospital of Sienna, built in honor of St. Catherine, has been famous
ever since. Everywhere throughout Europe this hospital movement spread. Virchow, the great
German pathologist, in an article on hospitals, showed that every city of Germany of five
thousand inhabitants had its hospital. He traced all of this hospital movement to Pope Innocent
III, and though he was least papistically inclined, Virchow did not hesitate to give extremely high
praise to this pontiff for all that he had accomplished for the benefit of children and suffering
mankind.[124]

In spite of the lingering problems of the Dark Ages, hospitals began to appear in great
numbers in France and England. Following the French Norman invasion into England,
the explosion of French ideals led most Medieval monasteries to develop a hospitium or
hospice for pilgrims. This hospitium eventually developed into what we now understand
as a hospital, with various monks and lay helpers providing the medical care for sick
pilgrims and victims of the numerous plagues and chronic diseases that afflicted
Medieval Western Europe. Benjamin Gordon supports the theory that the hospital – as we
know it - is a French invention, but that it was originally developed for isolating lepers
and plague victims, and only later undergoing modification to serve the pilgrim.[125]

Owing to a well-preserved 12th century account of the monk Eadmer of the Canterbury
cathedral, there is an excellent account of Bishop Lanfranc’s aim to establish and
maintain examples of these early hospitals:

But I must not conclude my work by omitting what he did for the poor outside the walls of the
city Canterbury. In brief, he constructed a decent and ample house of stone…for different needs
and conveniences. He divided the main building into two, appointing one part for men oppressed
by various kinds of infirmities and the other for women in a bad state of health. He also made
arrangements for their clothing and daily food, appointing ministers and guardians to take all
measures so that nothing should be lacking for them. [126]

The beauty and efficiency of the Italian hospitals inspired even some who were otherwise
critical of the Church. The German historian Ludwig von Pastor recounts the words of
Martin Luther who, while journeying to Rome in the winter of 1510–1511, had occasion
to visit some of these hospitals:

In Italy, he remarks, the hospitals are handsomely built, and admirably provided with excellent
food and drink, careful attendants and learned physicians. The beds and bedding are clean, and
the walls are covered with paintings. When a patient is brought in, his clothes are removed in the
presence of a notary who makes a faithful inventory of them, and they are kept safely. A white
smock is put on him and he is laid on a comfortable bed, with clean linen. Presently two doctors
come to him, and the servants bring him food and drink in clean glasses, showing him all possible
attention.[127]

The Catholic Church as opus proprium, says Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est, has
conducted throughout the centuries from its very beginning and continues to conduct
many charitable services — hospitals, schools, poverty alleviation programs, among
others.