The governor of the Vatican visited CERN recently to reassure everyone that the Catholic Church “supports” “science.” In fact, according to his speech, the Church has always supported science.
USA Today seems to have reproduced his quote, but for some reason they left out all of the footnotes, which I have carefully reconstructed below:
“The Church never1 fears2 the truth3 of science4, because we are convinced5 that all truth6 comes from God7,” Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, Vatican City’s governor, said Thursday in Geneva. “Science8 will help our faith to purify9 itself. And faith10 at the same time will be able to broaden the horizons11 of man, who cannot12 just enclose himself in the horizons of science13.”
1. certainly not during the pesky Copernicus incident or during the whole Galileo flap
2. “hates” is probably a more accurate description
3. keep in mind that we don’t use that word the same way you do
4. which, as usual, we will mischaracterize in a way that backs up our crazy belief system
5. not, mind you, by evidence, but rather by the assertions of an ancient, mis-translated book of myths
6. see note 3, above
7. who doesn’t actually exist, but bear with us
8. by which we mean “the parts of science we want you to know about”
9. “sell”
10. i.e. believing whatever we tell you to not because it makes any sense but just because we said to
11. “narrow the horizons”
12. because we’ll burn him at the stake if he tries
13. because he might disbelieve our dogma if he did
Although he didn’t follow up this quote with support for science related to embryonic stem cells, IVF, or human cloning, I’m sure that’s just because the interview was running long.
