The Catholic Church has been teaching and encouraging science for many years

This week is Catholic Schools Week. Within the Catholic Church we have had a long tradition of educating children as well as adults. The title often used for Jesus was Rabbi, which means teacher and one of the things that He did was to teach us about the Father. This has been a mission of the Catholic Church for two thousand years with formal Catholic schools for many hundreds of years. The Catholic Church has had a long history of promoting education, so when I hear the false phrase that the Church is against science I just have to laugh because we have been teaching and encouraging science for many years. Copernicus was a cleric of the Church, which means he received minor orders. Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian Friar, was a pioneer of modern genetics. He did experiments with pea plants to see how using cross fertilization of the plants affected the size and quality of the pea pods. His work was not really accepted during his lifetime, but decades later other scientists found his work and expanded on it.

Msgr. Georges Lemaitre was a cosmologist who was looking at models of the universe and as he studied the models, he started to develop a mathematical formula and proposed the basics for the Hubble Constant (the big bang theory) and a few years ago was renamed to the Hubble-Lemaitre law to reflect the work that Msgr Lemaitre had done.

So… the Catholic Church is not against science! The Catholic Church has been in the teaching business for a long time. The first Catholic school in the United States was opened in 1606 by Franciscan missionaries. Education has been the mission of the Church ever since Jesus walked the earth. Remember, He commands us to go out to all the nations and preach the Gospel. While a school is not the primary mission of the Catholic Church, it helps us with our primary goal and that is to bring all people to Christ and thus to Heaven. I often hear that it is too expensive for families to send their children to Catholic school, but there are many resources available for help. The Education Savings Account, Catholic Tuition Organization, and the Diocesan Ignite campaign, as well as an angel fund are all ways to help families with paying for the education of their children. Parents sacrifice financially to send their children to the school with their tuition payments, and other help of time, talent, and treasure. Teachers, faculty, and administration give because their salary could be higher by working for the public schools. Parishioners and other family and friends help by donating funds, supporting fundraisers, and the many other events that go on in the school. Here at St. Luke’s, we have been growing at a pretty rapid pace, which facilitated the need for phase II and Phase III is coming up fast. We have grown from 176 students the first year I was here to 375 this year and we expect to continue with these numbers for years to come. Catholic schools have been a wonderful part of our tradition and it has been such a blessing to be a part of all of the Catholic schools that I have been blessed to serve.

God bless,
Fr. Ken