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In this episode Trent counts down five Catholic priests whose scientific investigations changed the world.
Transcription:
Trent:
One stereotype of Christian clergy is that they’re just a bunch of anti-intellectual fanatics. But in today’s episode, I’ll show you five priest scientists whose discoveries from the smallest parts of our bodies to the biggest mysteries of the universe helped create the modern world. Number five, father and the bulletproof vest. In 1893, Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison III was assassinated and Father Kasmir Zelan, the Chicago pastor of the largest Polish Catholic church in the US wanted to do something. So he spent the next two years experimenting on bullet resistant materials. Now, criminals from as early as the 1880s used bulky plates under their codes to protect them from gunfire. In 18 94, 1 outlaw named Jim the Killer Miller, wore a heavy metal plate under his coat that protected him from being shot six times at Point. Blake Range by Sheriff Bud Fraser. Did Miller get this idea from Marty Mcflys Hill Valley dual with Buford Mad Dog tannin that took place just nine years earlier?
No way. We got you. Not a chance. Not this time. Father Lin’s early designs resembled these bulky plates, which were good for outlaws who were up to no good, but not good for people like mayors who couldn’t walk around all day wearing heavy body armor. However, in 1881, Dr. George Goodfellow examined a s slain gunfighter and noticed one of the bullets in his body had been stopped by a silk handkerchief. In 1887, Goodfellow published an article called Impenetrability of Silk to Bullets, but didn’t apply the research to any kind of device. However, father Eglin used the research to create a vest and he partnered with another Polish man, Jan Nik, to refine the fabric. What made the vest work wasn’t just the use of silk, but the very particular way it was sewn together to create a structure that could absorb the impact of a bullet.
A 1902 article records the following about Father Lin’s work. The Reverend Mr. Eglin himself submitted to a test in Chicago. He put on a vest of the material and an expert revolver shot fired at the vest at eight paces and no one of the bullets at all disturbed Mr. Eglin. The weight of the fabric is half a pound of the square foot. It is soft and flexible so that all kinds of garments can be manufactured out of it. The most practical form of garment is a vest which can be worn at all times as a protection to life. Later that year, an assassin targeted the carriage of the Spanish King Alfonso xii, but the carriages interior had been lined with Lin’s fabric saving the king and queen’s life. Lin’s initial design became outdated when bullet velocity increased by World War I, but the core of his research paved the way for creating modern bullet resistant fabric that has saved countless lives.
Number four, father Gregor Mendel and the science of genetics. Between 1856 and 1863, the Augustinian Friar Gregor Mendel conducted a series of experiments with pea plants showing how different traits are passed on through living organisms. This culminated in what we now call the Mendelian Laws of Inheritance and led to Father Mendel being called the father of modern genetics. For example, he showed how genes express themselves in dominant and alleles. This can be seen in how blue eyes are a recessive trait that’ll often only appear in people if both of their parents are blue-eyed or at least carry a recessive gene coded for blue eyes. Father Mandel called these dispositions traits and the word gene would not be coined until the early 19 hundreds by Wilhelm Johansen. Thomas Morgan showed that genes were located on chromosomes in the early 1910s. And in 1953, Watson Andrick discovered that genetic material was shaped in a double helix structure, and this contributed to our understanding of how genes are transferred over time. In 1958, the Catholic scientist Jerome Lajeune discovered that down syndrome occurred when an individual possessed an extra copy of the 21st chromosome, which is why Down syndrome is called Trisomy 21. Here is Jerome Lajeune discussing his work in an interview.
CLIP:
If I had the power to suppress the disease, that is to prevent a chromosome number 21 to go the wrong way and to have all the baby conceived with only two 20 ones instead of three in Down syndrome. Surely I would apply that to protect all the babies. When the parents ask me, what are the down babies, my answer is they’re charming little babies. They’re very delightful little ones. That’s not the disease. It’s a good disease. This is a bad disease. I hate it. But those babies have some lan, some tenderness, some absence of ity asa in their form and the character that they’re very laudable.
Trent:
Unfortunately, Dr. La June’s research was later used not to eliminate the bad gene responsible for Trisomy 21, but to eliminate the children with this condition through prenatal testing that would be used for abortion. Dr. Lajeune spent the rest of his life opposing the eugenic repurposing of his research and wrote an article called Test Tube Babies are Babies that was published in 19 93 1 year before his death. The article begins by saying Life has a very, very long history, but each individual has a very neat beginning the moment of its conception. On January 21st, 2021, Pope Francis declared Dr. Lajeune a venerable which refers to heroic virtue and may result in declaration of canonization or being declared a saint. Number three, father Bmu de Go Ma and the science of flight. When most people think of human flight, they think of the Wright Brothers famous airplane flight in 1903, or if they really know their trivia, they’ll cite the Montego brothers.
In a 1783 audience with King Louis the 16th, the brothers transported animals in a hot air balloon, 1400 feet off the ground for eight minutes and then sent three men into the air a few months later. But the history of human engineered flight goes back further than that. In 1709, father Batali mu Dema demonstrated in the court of the King of Portugal, a model of a hot air balloon that 16 feet off the ground, the king rewarded Father Goose Mao’s discovery with a professorship and Father Goose Mao is said to have even created a larger ship in the shape of a bird that flew one kilometer even earlier in the 17th century, father Francesco la de Tursi sketched an idea for a ship that used vacuum pressure to fly through the air. The idea never took off, but Father Tsi is credited with being the father of aeronautics because he desired to promote, in his words, a theory of aerial navigation verified by mathematical accuracy.
As air travel began to develop, the Catholic church considered this a boon to missionary efforts. In 1935, Pope 11th who already possessed a helicopter, sent a plane named Sancti Petrus to aid travel between South African mission posts. He also blessed priests who used planes to evangelize in far off Arctic regions, but there’s always been a desire to fly like the angels in the Catholic tradition as can be seen in an 11th century, monk named Elmer of Malmsbury who glided from the roof of an abbey over the length of two football fields using a pair of self-made wings, a fellow monk from the same abbey recorded of Elmer that agitated by the violence of the wind and the swirling of air as well as by the awareness of his rash attempt, he fell, broke both his legs and was lame ever after. He used to relate as the cause of his failure, his forgetting to provide himself a tail.
We don’t have a drawing of Elmer’s wings, but sketches of Father T’s heirship idea can be found in his 1670 book Prod Drmo, which includes many other ideas, including an entire alphabet of raised dots and dashes for blind readers. Unfortunately, blind readers can’t read dashes very well, so his alphabet wasn’t used until Luis Braille, A man who was blind since the age of three, improved it in 1824. And another fun fact, Luis Braille was a devout Catholic and in spite of being blind, he was the organist at several French cathedrals. Number two, Bishop Nicola Steno and the Science of Geology, Neil Steen later called Nicola Steno was born to a Lutheran family in 1638 and was incredibly bright and inquisitive in the 1660s. He published works on anatomy and paleontology that challenged long held beliefs about fossils. In 1666, he dissected the head of a shark and noticed that its teeth bore a resemblance to fossils that others called tongue stones.
Previous scientists thought that these stones fell from the sky, or even that fossils naturally grew out of rocks. Steeno showed that the teeth could change their chemical composition without changing their form, and so fossils could have once been organic matter. In 1669, steno publishes most famous work on how solid bodies could appear within other solid bodies, which form the basis of our modern understanding of geology, such as the law that rock layers form horizontally and in an undisturbed sequence. Deeper layers are older than shallower layers, and I’m not surprised as somebody who was fascinated with understanding the true history of the earth and all of its intricate foundations was led on a spiritual journey to the Catholic faith through a desire to learn about the historical foundation of the church. After studying the early church fathers Steeno converted to Catholicism in 1667 was ordained a priest in 1675 and then a bishop in 1677.
Pope St. John Paul II beatified him in 1988. Number one, Monsignor George Lara and the Big Bang. In the early 20th century, the Belgian priest and physicist George Lara said that Einstein’s new theory of gravity, general relativity would cause a static eternal universe to collapse into nothingness. Since Einstein’s theory was sound, this only meant one thing. The universe was growing and it had a beginning. In the finite past, Mons LaMere and Albert Einstein would discuss aspects of the theory while walking around together at the campus of Caltech. According to John Farrell and his book, the Day Without a Yesterday, Monsignor LaMere would smuggle Einstein tobacco during these walks because Einstein’s wife hated that he smoked pals before gals, you might say. And although Einstein was skeptical at first in 1933, he proclaimed that Lamare theory of an expanding universe was one of the most beautiful theories he had ever heard.
Monsignor Lamare called his theory the prime evil Adam, but another physicist, Fred Hoyle mocked the theory, he called it the Big Bang. Hoyle believed that a theory of the universe beginning to exist was just putting primitive myths into science. After all, if the universe had a beginning from nothing, then it would need an explanation beyond itself, which would mean it must appeal to a cause that exists beyond time, space matter and energy, what we might call God, Hoyle and others, including Einstein said that Monsignor la Matri theories lacked empirical support. But that changed. In 1965, bell Laboratory technicians Aus and Robert Wilson used radio telescopes to detect a faint uniform glow of static coming from all directions of the sky. The static turned out to be radiation in the form of microwaves coming from deep space that were the byproducts of the Big Bang. And this has been further confirmed through NASA Space probes launched in 1992 and 2003, and despite his religious animosity, Fred Hoyle study of the universe led him to this observation.
A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. So those are five pre scientists and a few lay Catholic scientists as well who changed the world. Now, this isn’t an exhaustive list, and I’ve avoided claims that are controversial. For example, some people say that the future Pope Sylvester II created the first mechanical clock in the year 9 96. But more recent research has shown this may have been a variant of a water clock and not a true mechanical clock. However, Catholic influence over the science of timekeeping is undeniable, given that such timekeeping was necessary for monks to keep their scheduled prayers, and the first mechanical clocks were kept in Catholic churches telling time also not just by the hour, but by the day, week, month, and year was crucial in designing cathedrals so that stained glass windows could properly illuminate the church when the sun changed position throughout the year.
This is why Historian Jail Heel Bro said the Roman Catholic Church gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment than any other and probably all other institutions. For more on the church’s relationship with faith and Science, see my 20 answers booklet appropriately titled Faith and Science Linked Below, which will also be available for free to all of our patrons@trenthornpodcast.com. So get your copy there by signing up to support us for as little as $5 a month@trenthornpodcast.com. And I hope you’ll join us April 11th here in Dallas for our Evangelism conference. Tickets are running out, so be sure to get yours today@conferenceoftrent.com. Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.