How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization Email

What shapes your view of the Church?

Given the recent scandals involving the Catholic Church, the public may be tempted to discount the Church's influence on Western civilization and simply write Catholicism off as a corrupt religion. But that would be a mistake.

In How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, you will come to comprehend the Catholic Church’s monumental impact on society and Western civilization as a whole.

Western civilization has given us the miracles of modern science, the wealth of free-market economics, the security of the rule of law, a unique sense of human rights and freedom, charity as a virtue, splendid art and music, a philosophy grounded in reason, and innumerable other gifts that we take for granted as the wealthiest and most powerful civilization in history.

But what is the ultimate source of these gifts? Bestselling author and professor Thomas E. Woods, Jr. provides the long neglected answer: the Catholic Church.

Woods goes far beyond the familiar tale of monks copying manuscripts and preserving the wisdom of classical antiquity.

In How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, you’ll learn:

Why modern science was born in the Catholic Church
How Catholic priests developed the idea of free-market economics five hundred years before Adam Smith
How the Catholic Church invented the university
Why what you know about the Galileo affair is wrong
How Western law grew out of Church canon law
How the Church humanized the West by insisting on the sacredness of all human life

No institution has done more to shape Western civilization than the two-thousand-year-old Catholic Church—and in ways that many of us have forgotten or have never known. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization is essential reading for recovering this lost truth.

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Thomas E. Woods, Jr. is the acclaimed author of many articles and books, including a New York Times bestseller. He holds four Ivy League degrees, including an A.B. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Columbia. He teaches courses in Western Civilization at Suffolk Community College on Long Island and lives with his family in Coram, New York.

Recently, Woods wrote a synopsis of his new book How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization . Below we share some of his thoughts about the chapter "The Church and Science".

By far the book’s longest chapter is "The Church and Science." We have all heard a great deal about the Church’s alleged hostility toward science. What most people fail to realize is that historians of science have spent the past half-century drastically revising this conventional wisdom, arguing that the Church’s role in the development of Western science was far more salutary than previously thought. I am speaking not about Catholic apologists but about serious and important scholars of the history of science such as J.L. Heilbron, A.C. Crombie, David Lindberg, Edward Grant, and Thomas Goldstein.

It is all very well to point out that important scientists, like Louis Pasteur, have been Catholic. More revealing is how many priests have distinguished themselves in the sciences. It turns out, for instance, that the first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was Fr. Giambattista Riccioli. The man who has been called the father of Egyptology was Fr. Athanasius Kircher (also called "master of a hundred arts" for the breadth of his knowledge). Fr. Roger Boscovich, who has been described as "the greatest genius that Yugoslavia ever produced," has often been called the father of modern atomic theory.

In the sciences it was the Jesuits in particular who distinguished themselves; some 35 craters on the moon, in fact, are named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

The Galileo case is often cited as evidence of Catholic hostility toward science, and How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization accordingly takes a closer look at the Galileo matter. For now, just one little-known fact: Catholic cathedrals in Bologna, Florence, Paris, and Rome were constructed to function as solar observatories. No more precise instruments for observing the sun’s apparent motion could be found anywhere in the world. When Johannes Kepler posited that planetary orbits were elliptical rather than circular, Catholic astronomer Giovanni Cassini verified Kepler’s position through observations he made in the Basilica of San Petronio in the heart of the Papal States. Cassini, incidentally, was a student of Fr. Riccioli and Fr. Francesco Grimaldi, the great astronomer who also discovered the diffraction of light, and even gave the phenomenon its name.

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