The feast of St. Richard of Chichester cannot go by without my remembering a limerick my old pastor Msgr. Richard Schuler would occasionally quote:
There was an old Bishop of Chichester,
Who said thrice (the Latin for which is ‘ter’),
“Avaunt and defiance,
Foul spirit called Science,
And quit Mother Church, thou bewitchest her.”
On this topic of the Church and Science I recommend the book, Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius by William R. Shea and Mariano Artigas and Dava Sobel’s A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos (UK edition HERE). In addition, there is Heilbron’s The Sun In The Church and Galileo by the same.
BTW… St. Richard called for a Crusade against the Saracens. Bless him.
Happy feast of St. Richard!
Science… today we see people doing with “science” things that shouldn’t be done. Just because one can do something, doesn’t mean that it should be done. There’s nothing but trouble down that path.
However, in light of the now ongoing Artemis mission to the Moon, I am mindful that some of the greatest and most revolutionary scientific minds were Catholic priests. Most of the visible characteristics of face of the Moon were named by a priest, in fact.
We are not against science. We are wary of science unbridled. Which seems no longer to science, as it is detached from scientia and sapientia.
