Introduction
At a recent debate, broadcast
worldwide by the BBC, over 87 per cent of the audience rejected the
notion that the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world.
Although the defenders of the Church were confronted by two masters of
rhetoric, there is little doubt that the vote reflected a shift in
attitudes towards Christianity in general and the Catholic faith in
particular.
To put this shift in blunt terms, whereas we were regarded
recently as nice but naïve, today we are increasingly regarded as evil.
As a result, teaching the faith and defending Christian ethics has
become much more difficult.
To address this challenge at its root,
I believe it is vital that we remind ourselves of the extent to which
the Catholic faith is a force for good in the world. Jesus said: “You
will know them by their fruits,” and even some outside the Church
appreciate her fruitfulness. In 2007, for example, an atheist
businessman, Robert Wilson, gave $22.5 million (£13.5 million) to
Catholic education in New York, arguing that, “without the Roman
Catholic Church, there would be no western civilisation.”
Inspired
by Wilson’s insight, I have been working recently with Fr Marcus
Holden, parish priest of Ramsgate and a tutor at Maryvale, to collate
the extraordinary contributions of Catholic culture and Catholic minds.
The following sections provide some samples of this work, which should
be invaluable to anyone who is faced with the question: “What has the
Church ever done for us?”
For a more complete account of the
fruitfulness of the Catholic faith in these and many other fields, see
Lumen: The Catholic Gift to Civilisation, published January 2011 by the
Catholic Truth Society.
Fr Andrew Pinsent is a priest of the
diocese of Arundel and Brighton and Research Director of the Ian Ramsey
Centre for Science and Religion at Oxford University. He was formerly a
particle physicist at CERN. He is co-founder, with Fr Marcus Holden, of
the Evangelium Project, which is dedicated to improving the quality of
Catholic education.
See www.evangelium.co.uk.
1. Light and the cosmos
The
Opus Maius (1267) of the Franciscan Roger Bacon (d 1292), written at
the request of Pope Clement IV, largely initiated the tradition of
optics in the Latin world. The first spectacles were invented in Italy
around 1300, an application of lenses that developed later into
telescopes and microscopes.
While many people think of Galileo (d
1642) being persecuted, they tend to forget the peculiar circumstances
of these events, or the fact that he died in his bed and his daughter
became a nun.
The Gregorian Calendar (1582), now used worldwide,
is a fruit of work by Catholic astronomers, as is the development of
astrophysics by the spectroscopy of Fr Angelo Secchi (d 1878).
Most
remarkably, the most important theory of modern cosmology, the Big
Bang, was invented by a Catholic priest, Fr Georges Lemaître (d 1966,
pictured), a historical fact that is almost never mentioned by the BBC
or in popular science books.
2. Earth and nature
Catholic
civilisation has made a remarkable contribution to the scientific
investigation and mapping of the earth, producing great explorers such
as Marco Polo (d 1324), Prince Henry the Navigator (d 1460), Bartolomeu
Dias (d 1500), Christopher Columbus (d 1506) and Ferdinand Magellan (d 1521).
Far from believing that the world was flat (a black legend
invented in the 19th century), the Catholic world produced the first
modern scientific map: Diogo Ribeiro’s Padrón Real (1527). Fr Nicolas
Steno (d 1686) was the founder of stratigraphy, the interpretation of
rock strata which is one of the principles of geology.
Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck (d 1829), a French Catholic, developed the first theory of
evolution, including the notion of the transmutation of species and a
genealogical tree. The Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel (d 1884, pictured)
founded the science of genetics based on the meticulous study of the
inherited characteristics of some 29,000 pea plants.
3. Philosophy and theology
Catholicism
regards philosophy as intrinsically good and was largely responsible
for founding theology, the application of reason to what has been
revealed supernaturally. Great Catholic philosophers include St
Augustine (d 430), St Thomas Aquinas (d 1274), St Anselm (d 1109),
Blessed Duns Scotus (d 1308), Suárez (d 1617) and Blaise Pascal (d
1662).
Recent figures include St Edith Stein (d 1942, pictured),
Elizabeth Anscombe (d 2001) and Alasdair MacIntyre. On the basis that
God is a God of reason and love, Catholics have defended the
irreducibility of the human person to matter, the principle that created
beings can be genuine causes of their own actions, free will, the role
of the virtues in happiness, objective good and evil, natural law and
the principle of non-contradiction. These principles have had an
incalculable influence on intellectual life and culture.
4. Education and the university system
Perhaps
the greatest single contribution to education to emerge from Catholic
civilisation was the development of the university system. Early
Catholic universities include Bologna (1088); Paris (c 1150); Oxford
(1167, pictured); Salerno (1173); Vicenza (1204); Cambridge (1209);
Salamanca (1218-1219); Padua (1222); Naples (1224) and Vercelli (1228).
By the middle of the 15th-century (more than 70 years before the
Reformation), there were over 50 universities in Europe.
Many of
these universities, such as Oxford, still show signs of their Catholic
foundation, such as quadrangles modelled on monastic cloisters, gothic
architecture and numerous chapels. Starting from the sixth-century
Catholic Europe also developed what were later called grammar schools
and, in the 15th century, produced the movable type printing press
system, with incalculable benefits for education.
Today, it has been
estimated that Church schools educate more than 50 million students
worldwide.
5. Art and architecture
Faith in
the Incarnation, the Word made Flesh and the Sacrifice of the Mass have
been the founding principles of extraordinary Catholic contributions to
art and architecture.
These contributions include: the great basilicas
of ancient Rome; the work of Giotto (d 1337), who initiated a realism in
painting the Franciscan Stations of the Cross, which helped to inspire
three-dimensional art and drama; the invention of one-point linear
perspective by Brunelleschi (d 1446) and the great works of the High
Renaissance.
The latter include the works of Blessed Fra Angelico (d
1455), today the patron saint of art, and the unrivalled work of
Leonardo da Vinci (d 1519), Raphael (d 1520), Caravaggio (d 1610,
pictured), Michelangelo (d 1564) and Bernini (d 1680). Many of the works
of these artists, such as the Sistine Chapel ceiling, are considered
among the greatest works of art of all time.
Catholic civilisation also
founded entire genres, such as Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, High
Renaissance and Baroque architecture. The Cristo Redentor statue in
Brazil and the Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona show that the faith
continues to be an inspiration for highly original art and
architecture.
6. Law and jurisprudence
The
reforms of Pope Gregory VII (d 1085) gave impetus to forming
the laws of the Church and states of Europe. The subsequent application
of philosophy to law, together with the great works of monks like the
12th-century Gratian, produced the first complete, systematic bodies of
law, in which all parts are viewed as interacting to form a whole.
This
revolution also led to the founding of law schools, starting in Bologna
(1088), from which the legal profession emerged, and concepts such as
“corporate personality”, the legal basis of a wide range of bodies today
such as universities, corporations and trust funds.
Legal principles
such as “good faith”, reciprocity of rights, equality before the law,
international law, trial by jury, habeas corpus and the obligation to
prove an offence beyond a reasonable doubt are all fruits of Catholic
civilisation and jurisprudence.
7. Language
The
centrality of Greek and Latin to Catholicism has greatly facilitated
popular literacy, since true alphabets are far easier to learn than the
symbols of logographic languages, such as Chinese.
Spread by Catholic
missions and exploration, the Latin alphabet is now the most widely used
alphabetic writing system in the world. Catholics also developed the
Armenian, Georgian and Cyrillic alphabets and standard scripts, such as
Carolingian minuscule from the ninth to 12th centuries, and Gothic
miniscule (from the 12th). Catholicism also provided the cultural
framework for the Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy), the Cantar de Mio Cid
(“The Song of my Lord”) and La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland),
vernacular works that greatly influenced the development of Italian,
Spanish and French respectively.
The Catholic Hymn of Cædmon in the
seventh century is arguably the oldest extant text of Old English.
Valentin Haüy (d 1822), brother of the Abbé Haüy (the priest who
invented crystallography), founded the first school for the blind. The
most famous student of this school, Louis Braille (d 1852), developed
the worldwide system of writing for the blind that today bears his name.
8. Music
Catholic
civilisation virtually invented the western musical tradition, drawing
on Jewish antecedents in early liturgical music. Monophonic Gregorian
chant developed from the sixth century.
Methods for recording chant led
to the invention of musical notion (staff notation), of incalculable
benefit for the recording of music, and the ut-re-mi (“do-re-mi”)
mnemonic device of Guido of Arezzo (d 1003).
From the 10th century
cathedral schools developed polyphonic music, extended later to as many
as 40 voices (Tallis, Spem in Alium) and even 60 voices (Striggio, Missa
Sopra Ecco).
Musical genres that largely or wholly originated
with Catholic civilisation include the hymn, the oratorio and the opera.
Haydn (d 1809), a devout Catholic, strongly shaped the development of
the symphony and string quartet.
Church patronage and liturgical forms
shaped many works by Monteverdi (d 1643), Vivaldi (d 1741), Mozart (d
1791, pictured) and Beethoven (d 1827). The great Symphony No 8 of
Mahler (d 1911) takes as its principal theme the ancient hymn of
Pentecost, Veni creator spiritus.
9. The status of women
Contrary
to popular prejudice, extraordinary and influential women have been one
of the hallmarks of Catholic civilisation. The faith has honoured many
women saints, including recent Doctors of the Church, and nurtured great
nuns, such as St Hilda (d 680, pictured) (after whom St Hilda’s
College, Oxford, is named) and Blessed Hildegard von Bingen (d 1179),
abbess and polymath.
Pioneering Catholic women in political life include
Empress Matilda (d 1167), Eleanor of Aquitaine (d 1204) and the first
Queen of England, Mary Tudor (d 1558).
Catholic civilisation also
produced many of the first women scientists and professors: Trotula of
Salerno in the 11th century, Dorotea Bucca (d 1436), who held a chair in
medicine at the University of Bologna, Elena Lucrezia Piscopia (d
1684), the first woman to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree (1678)
and Maria Agnesi (d 1799), the first woman to become professor of
mathematics, who was appointed by Pope Benedict XIV as early as 1750.