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It is a cliché that science opposes reason and vice versa. And it is that in the history of science we find numerous priests who, over the centuries, made very relevant contributions to scientific progress.
Surely if we join science and religion one of the first names that appear in our mind is that of Gregor Mendel (1822-1884). This Austrian Augustinian friar lived in the 19th century and defined the fundamental laws of genetics. His studies with peas are famous in this field of science.
Franciscan, but just as famous, was Roger Bacon (1214-1294), one of the precursors of the scientific method and to whom the phrase is attributed: “mathematics is the door and the key of all science”.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1475-1543), one of the fathers of modern astronomy, was also religious, specifically he was canon of the chapter of Frombork, the seat of the bishopric of Warmia, in present-day Poland.
To him we owe the heliocentric theory, according to which the planets revolve around the sun, and which was made known in his book ‘Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium’ (1543). In spite of everything, Copernicus was not the first to affirm that the Earth revolves around the sun, Aristarchus had proposed it more than a thousand years before, but he was the first to prove it with mathematical calculations.
From the Big Bang to the ovarian follicle
Perhaps less well known is that the creator of the Big Bang theory was a Belgian priest and member of the Les amis de Jesús fraternity. his name was Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966) and his main contribution to the scientific community was to defend that the universe expands and has an origin.
A French monk Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), found that sound propagates at the same speed, regardless of the source that originates it and the direction in which it propagates. His main contribution was the creation of the concept ‘scientific community‘, that is, the awareness that knowledge and discoveries have to ‘circulate’ and be shared. And it is that, as much as it may surprise us, this feeling did not always exist among men of science.
He was also French and a priest René Just Haüy (1743-1822), a mineralogist who is now considered the father of crystallography. This canon of Notre Dame participated together with Lavoisier and other scientists in the creation of the metric system.
Priest, apostolic vicar and bishop were some of the positions held by the Danish scientist Nicolás Steno (1638-1686). In addition to being a geologist, he was a great anatomist, to the point of being the first to observe the ovarian follicle, to describe the duct that starts from the parotid gland -ductus Stenonianus- and to study a cardiac malformation that is currently known as tetralogy of Fallot. .
The priest was also a scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799) who came close to discovering how bats orient themselves almost two hundred years before another scientist discovered ultrasound. Famous is the study of him with fifty bats, whose eyes he removed to then set them free; When he recaptured them a few days later, he found that, despite the mutilation, they could hunt insects and survive, so he deduced that these mammals oriented themselves by hearing.
Priests, scientists and Spaniards
In our homeland we also have some examples of scientific priests. A great lover of botany was the Benedictine cleric Rosendo Salvado Route (1814-1900). This religious, among other merits, is credited with the introduction of eucalyptus in Galicia.
Better known is Jose Celestine Bruno Mutis and Bosio (1732-1808), a Cadiz priest, as well as a botanist, mathematician, geographer and doctor who led a botanical expedition to Colombia (1783-1816). Upon his return to the peninsula he made an impressive catalog with more than 6,600 drawings of plants.
“The spirit depends a lot on the health of the bodies” he pointed out on more than one occasion Friar Tomas de Berlanga (1487-1551), the discoverer of the Galapagos Islands and the architect of what we know today as the Mediterranean diet.
Pedro Gargantilla is an internist at El Escorial Hospital (Madrid) and the author of several popular books.
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