Comment by reaperducer
10 hours ago
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.
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).
It’s said when they found the first uncomplicated Jesuit they made him Pope ;)