Bill Donohue is at it again, this time taking George Will to task for, coincidentally, the very column I approvingly quoted below.
If it weren’t for Catholicism, there would be no Age of Science, so it is mind-boggling that Will would suggest otherwise. More recently, as Pope Benedict XVI has said, when faith and reason are severed, serious problems emerge. Will gets the latter but not the former. Neither did the 20th century’s totalitarians.
This is … amazing. Is Donohue so ignorant he actually believes these things, or is he merely making a bleating sound intended to comfort those who are so ignorant that they believe these things?
If it weren’t for Catholicism, there would be no Age of Science …
This claim is so grotesquely at odds with reality that it seems hardly possible that Donohue could actually believe it. The Roman church suppressed the writings of Epicurus, and Aristotle, and its 1000-year long domination of the West is known as the Dark Ages for a reason — because the progress of science, logic, and the arts stopped. Stopped.
There was a supernova in 1054, and for the next 2-years there were 3-lights in the sky — the sun, the moon, and the supernova. Chinese astronomers noted it. Arabic astronomers noted it. Cave-dwellers in the American southwest noted it. Cave-dwellers in South America noted it. But in all the libraries and museums of the world then governed by Rome, there is not a single scrap of paper nor a single pictograph to suggest that anybody noticed it.
That is how dark the West was during the years it was governed by the Catholic Church.
And then Donohue goes on to link Will’s entirely justified criticism to … who, exactly? Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot?
If Donohue had a shred of intellectual dignity, or even ordinary human decency, he would be squirming with shame right about now.