AMERICAN CATHOLICS AND SCIENCE 507 



tenets of the Catholic Church not consonant with scientific 

 endeavor. It might rather be concluded that Catholics are not 

 following the teaching of their church when they neglect the 

 pursuit of truth in the natural sciences, as well as in the divine. 

 How, then, are we to explain the deficiency in scientific achieve- 

 ment among Catholics.^ 



First of all, such a deficiency is not true of Catholics as such. 

 The leaders of the scientific renaissance in the 16th and 17th 

 centuries, such as Copernicus, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, and 

 even Galileo himself, were Catholics and some of them priests, 

 as Conant points out.* 



Catholic missionaries, like the Italian Jesuit Ricci, introduced 

 modern science to China and other newly discovered lands. 

 Others, like Father Marquette and his brethren in Canada, the 

 United States and other American countries, were doing funda- 

 mental scientific research in geography and natural history. 

 Members of the Society of Jesus, and of other religious orders, 

 established colleges and universities where these subjects were 

 taught long before Harvard and Yale were founded. Even to- 

 day Catholics in Europe compare favorably with their non- 

 Catholic colleagues in scientific achievement. Why should 

 there be so marked a difference in the United States of the 

 present.^ It is suggested that this is not a religious but a social 

 phenomenon. 



Catholics in this country are not only in a minority but also 

 labor under handicaps not found among the rest of the popu- 

 lation. Most American Catholics are comparative newcomers 

 to this country. The majority are only first or second genera- 

 tion Americans, and as such have not had time to acquire a 

 tradition of scholarship. Most of the original immigrants came 

 from the lower strata of European society which had had few 

 educational opportunities. This was particularly true of the 

 Irish who constituted the first wave of Catholic immigration 

 to this country. Partly because of the deliberate deprivation of 



* James B. Conant, Science and Common Sense (New Haven: Yale University 

 Press, 1951), p. 78. 



