HISTORY of SCIENCE and RELIGION: Historically, Catholics are numbered among the most important scientists of all time, including Rene Descartes, who discovered analytic geometry and the laws of refraction; Blaise Pascal, inventor of the adding machine, hydraulic press, and the mathematical theory of probabilities; Augustinian priest Gregor Mendel, who founded modern genetics; Louis Pasteur, founder of microbiology and creator of the first vaccine for rabies and anthrax; and cleric Nicolaus Copernicus, who first developed scientifically the view that the earth rotated around the sun; Laura Bassi. Jesuit priests in particular have a long history of scientific achievement. Catholic Education Resource Centre
GALILEO and the Church: As an intuitive physicist, Galileo understood and communicated the planetary system and was famously condemned by theologians whose understanding of world structure was founded by a literal interpretation of Sacred Scripture. In 1633, the Church pronounced that Galileo was suspected of heresy and condemned to prison of the Holy Office with his writings prohibited. Galileo entered a plea, ceased his heliocentric teachings and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. 300 years later, Pope John Paul II: ‘the error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture.' If only they had recalled St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas who recognised that Scripture often speaks the truth about creation in a nonliteral, non-scientific way.