The Catholic Church built Western civilization {Catholic/Orthodox Caucus}

.. it is to the Catholic Church more than to any other institution that we owe so many of the treasures of Western civilization. .., scholars operated for two centuries under an Enlightenment prejudice that assumes all progress to come from religious skeptics, and that whatever the church touches is backward, superstitious, even barbaric. Since the mid-20th century, this unscholarly prejudice has thankfully begun to melt away, and professors of a variety of religious backgrounds, or none at all, increasingly acknowledge the church's contributions.

... modern historians of science freely acknowledge the church's contributions - both theoretical and material - to the Scientific Revolution. It was the church's worldview that insisted the universe was orderly and operated according to certain fixed laws. Only buoyed with that confidence would it have made sense to bother investigating the physical world in the first place, or even to develop the scientific method (which can work only in an orderly world). It's likewise a little tricky to claim the church has been an implacable foe of the sciences when so many priests were accomplished scientists. The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was Father Giambattista Riccioli. The man who has been called the father of Egyptology was Father Athanasius Kircher. Father 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. By the 18th century, writes historian Jonathan Wright, the Jesuits "had contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes, and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics, and electricity.

as the article states " They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter's surface, the Andromeda nebula, and Saturn's rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon affected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light." Their achievements likewise included "star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics." These were the great opponents of human progress? Seismology, the study of earthquakes, has been so dominated by Jesuits that it has become known as "the Jesuit science." It was a Jesuit, Father J.B. Macelwane, who wrote the first seismology textbook in America in 1936. To this day, the American Geophysical Union, which Macelwane once headed, gives an annual medal named after this brilliant priest to a promising young geophysicist. The Jesuits were also the first to introduce Western science into such far-off places as China and India. In 17th-century China in particular, Jesuits introduced a substantial body of scientific knowledge and a vast array of mental tools for understanding the physical universe, including the Euclidean geometry that made planetary motion comprehensible. Jesuits made important contributions to the scientific knowledge and infrastructure of other less developed nations not only in Asia but also in Africa and Central and South America. Beginning in the 19th century, these continents saw the opening of Jesuit observatories that studied such fields as astronomy, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology, and solar physics. "

The Crusades were a disaster for Christianity because they hastened the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and made the schism between East and West permenant.

What pray tell was the justification of the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople in 1204?

Or the burning of Greek monks at the stake?

The Byzantine Emperor petitioned the Pope for a united front against Islam, but instead the Franks turned on the Byzantines.

Had Christendom been united and the West helped rebuild the Byzantine Empire, it might not have fallen in 1453.

Byzantium signed the Union of Florence hoping for a new Crusade, but all that happened was the West turned its back on its Christian brethren in the East.

Coming out of the weather anomaly of 535 AD ~ which maybe lasted until 542, much of Western Europe really didn't exist anymore ~ unless you are willing to buy into the idea that Wales and Ireland were just about the only places deserving of the term "civilization".

I've been working my way forward pretty much a decade at a time and it looks like a "foreign" non Western concept called Monasticism took over most of "religious life" for a very long time, and that, in turn became pretty much the norm for any semblance of civilized life.

A thousand years later monasteries did not have the reputation they'd earned way back then.

As I research into this phenomenon I'm trying to keep two views in mind ~ (1) That monasticism did preserve civilization in a dark period, and (2) That monasticism failed to preserve all of the best elements of civilization.

Currently I'm looking into the period when monasticism came to Brittany ~ who the people were, how did they live, what levels of education they had, why they sent out missionaries, to where, and why did they accept other missionaries from distant lands into their centers.

I already know that eventually the great monasteries fell, even at the hands of their Most Catholic friends and supporters ~ not sure that's a politically unbiased enough period to figure out why they really disappeared as widespread useful institutions. Might be something in that vast body of history to give me some story lines that tie the Bourbonnaise in all their manifestations to the phenomenon of their fall.

Yes and no. the Fourth Crusade was horrible, to put it mildly, but the first three succeeded in keeping the Moslems out.

Byzantine politics mixed with Venetian politics undermined this -- the sack of Constantinople 808 years ago was deplorable, yet was the result of a lot of mistrust, including the massacre of the Latins a few years earlier.

This was due to Venice -- Venice was part of the Byzantine Empire for a long time, so in many ways it was a war between brethren and the Venetians, smart cookies that they were, used the Franks as their weapon. Remember that even the sack was the Venetians diverting the attention of the Crusaders.

We add in the fact that the Byzantines looked down on these barbarians from the West (quite rightly, we Westerners WERE barbarians compared to the Easterners and we sent our warriors, not our civilized folks).

the disunion was due to politics -- not Frankish, dumb bricks that they were.

the problem with 1453 was that ahem, the Empire's attention was diverted to problems in the north (can't mention what exactly in a caucus thread!)

Just a reminder. Caucus threads are for Caucus members only.

Caucus threads are closed to any poster who is not a member of the caucus.

For instance, if it says “Catholic Caucus” and you are not Catholic, do not post to the thread. However, if the poster of the caucus invites you, I will not boot you from the thread.

The “caucus” article and posts must not compare beliefs or speak in behalf of a belief outside the caucus.

There is no tolerance for posters coming onto a caucus thread claiming that they were once baptized into that belief and therefore are still a member of it due to the belief saying they are - even though they are not active in that belief and notoriously dispute that belief on “open” Religion Forum threads. The same holds for those who claim they are members because of their ancestry even though they are not active in that belief and notoriously dispute it on “open” RF threads.

That behavior is finessing the guidelines, it is flame baiting. No dice.

Also, there is little to no tolerance for non-members of a caucus coming onto the caucus thread to challenge whether or not it should be a caucus. Gross disruption usually follows.

http://www.freerepublic.com/~religionmoderator/

"The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial aid and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other, institutions."

-- J.L. Heilbron University of California at Berkley.

The Catholic Church: Impacting History

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

How the (Catholic) Church Built Western Civilization

How Catholicism Created Capitalism

How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and the Success of the West

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.

By the eighteenth century, the Jesuits

had contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter’s surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturn’s rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon effected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light. Star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics — all were typical Jesuit achievements, and scientists as influential as Fermat, Huygens, Leibniz and Newton were not alone in counting Jesuits among their most prized correspondents [Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits, 2004, p. 189].

Seismology, the study of earthquakes, has been so dominated by Jesuits that it has become known as "the Jesuit science." It was a Jesuit, Fr. J.B. Macelwane, who wrote Introduction to Theoretical Seismology, the first seismology textbook in America, in 1936. To this day, the American Geophysical Union, which Fr. Macelwane once headed, gives an annual medal named after this brilliant priest to a promising young geophysicist.

The Jesuits were also the first to introduce Western science into such far-off places as China and India. In seventeenth-century China in particular, Jesuits introduced a substantial body of scientific knowledge and a vast array of mental tools for understanding the physical universe, including the Euclidean geometry that made planetary motion comprehensible. Jesuits made important contributions to the scientific knowledge and infrastructure of other less developed nations not only in Asia but also in Africa and Central and South America.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, these continents saw the opening of Jesuit observatories that studied such fields as astronomy, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology, and solar physics. Such observatories provided these places with accurate time keeping, weather forecasts (particularly important in the cases of hurricanes and typhoons), earthquake risk assessments, and cartography. In Central and South America the Jesuits worked primarily in meteorology and seismology, essentially laying the foundations of those disciplines there. The scientific development of these countries, ranging from Ecuador to Lebanon to the Philippines, is indebted to Jesuit efforts.

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