What Has the Catholic Church Actually Contributed to Civilisation?

The Short Answer

A great deal. The Catholic Church built the first networks of hospitals for the poor, gave rise to the universities, sheltered and sponsored much early science, inspired and paid for a large share of the West’s greatest art and music, shaped Western law, and taught that every human being, slave or free, has equal dignity before God. She still runs one of the largest networks of schools, hospitals and charities in the world. Her record also includes real failures, which honest Catholics should name. But the claim that she was simply an enemy of progress does not survive a look at the history.

The popular story is familiar: the Church spent two thousand years suppressing knowledge, persecuting thinkers and keeping people ignorant, and progress happened in spite of her. It is worth testing that story against the evidence.

What the Church Does and Does Not Claim

The Church does not claim:

That she did all this alone. Greek philosophy, Roman law, Jewish Scripture, Byzantine and Islamic scholarship, and countless lay men and women all played their part.
That her record is spotless. The Inquisition, the abuse crisis, the Galileo affair and Christian complicity in slavery and violence are real, and the Church has apologised for many of them.
That good works prove the faith true. They are fruits, not proofs. But they do answer the charge that the Church has been a force only for darkness.

The Church does claim that her works of mercy flow from Christ’s own words: “as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40).

The Record

Hospitals

The ancient world had physicians, but few institutions devoted to caring for the poor and sick for free. Christians built them as a work of mercy. Around 369, St Basil the Great founded a great complex of hospital, hospice and poorhouse outside Caesarea, so large it was called a “new city.” The Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, traditionally dated to 651, has cared for the sick in the heart of Paris for well over a thousand years. Through the Middle Ages, monasteries, religious orders and confraternities ran hospitals, leper houses and hospices across Europe. In the seventeenth century St Vincent de Paul and St Louise de Marillac founded the Daughters of Charity, who helped shape modern nursing long before Florence Nightingale.

Universities

The universities grew up in medieval Christian Europe. Bologna, traditionally dated to 1088, began as a guild of law students; Paris grew out of the cathedral schools around 1200; Oxford and Cambridge followed. Popes granted their charters and protected their independence, clergy filled most teaching posts, and the Dominicans and Franciscans supplied many of the greatest masters, among them St Albert the Great, St Thomas Aquinas and St Bonaventure. The conviction that faith and reason both come from God, and cannot finally contradict each other, gave the universities their confidence that truth could be pursued freely.

Science

Many founders of modern science were Catholics, and many were clergy. Nicolaus Copernicus was a canon of Frombork Cathedral. Fr Giambattista Riccioli mapped the moon, and his names for its features are still used. Fr Francesco Grimaldi described the diffraction of light. Bl. Nicolas Steno, later a bishop, helped found geology. Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar, founded genetics. Fr Georges Lemaître first proposed what became the Big Bang theory. The Vatican Observatory, refounded by Leo XIII in 1891 with roots in the calendar reform of 1582, still does research today. The Galileo affair was a real failure, but it was one episode, not the pattern. (See Didn’t the Church Persecute Galileo for Science?)

Art and music

The cathedrals of Europe, from Chartres to Cologne, rank among humanity’s greatest achievements, and much of the art of the Renaissance and Baroque was commissioned by popes, bishops and religious orders: the Sistine Chapel, Raphael’s Vatican rooms, Bernini’s colonnade at St Peter’s. Gregorian chant grew up in the liturgy, and Western polyphony developed largely in church music, from Palestrina and Victoria to the Masses of Haydn and Mozart.

Law and human dignity

The Church’s canon law, systematised by Gratian around 1140, was one of the first comprehensive legal systems of medieval Europe and shaped Western legal thinking. Historians such as Brian Tierney have traced the idea of natural rights to medieval canon lawyers. In the sixteenth century, the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria and the Jesuit Francisco Suárez argued that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas had natural rights that conquerors were bound to respect, laying foundations for international law. In 1537 Pope Paul III declared that the peoples of the Americas were not to be deprived of their liberty or property (Sublimis Deus).

Behind all of this lies the Christian belief that every human being is made in the image of God, which the ancient world did not share. Infanticide and the exposure of unwanted babies were widely accepted, and Christians were known for rescuing abandoned infants. St Gregory of Nyssa, in the fourth century, preached against slavery itself.

Charity and education

Today the Church is one of the largest providers of health care, education and relief in the world, through hospitals, schools, religious orders and agencies such as Caritas Internationalis and the St Vincent de Paul Society, serving people of every faith and none. In Australia, Catholic schools educate about one in five students, and Catholic hospitals and aged care services are among the largest non-government providers in the country.

Common Objections

”The Church held back science.”

The historical record does not support this. Historians of science today largely reject the “conflict thesis,” the idea of permanent war between religion and science, as a nineteenth-century invention. The medieval universities taught natural philosophy, and churchmen did much of the early work in astronomy, optics and biology. (See Isn’t Science the Only Real Path to Truth?)

”What about slavery?”

This is a fair challenge. For many centuries the Church did not condemn slavery as such, and some popes, such as Nicholas V in 1452, authorised the enslavement of non-Christians. Christian teaching on human dignity eventually fed the movements for abolition, and the Church now teaches that slavery is intrinsically evil. But the record is mixed, and it is right to say so.

”The good deeds don’t cancel out the crimes.”

They do not, and no one should pretend they do. The abuse crisis and the Inquisition are real wrongs to be faced honestly. The point is narrower: the claim that the Church has been only a force for darkness is false, and much of what the modern world values came, at least in part, from her. (See How Do Catholics Respond to the Abuse Scandals?)

In Summary

The Church’s record is not spotless, and honest Catholics name her failures. But the story of her as an enemy of progress is a caricature. Hospitals for the poor, the universities, much early science, some of humanity’s greatest art and music, the roots of human rights and international law, and one of the largest networks of charity in the world all owe a great deal to her. “You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16), and those fruits, mixed with human sin, are real.

This article follows the method St Robert Bellarmine used in his Controversies*: state the question fairly, clear away misunderstandings, make the case, then answer each objection. See How We Answer Objections.*

Sources

Scripture: Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Press). Matthew 7:16, 25:31–46.
Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights (1997).
Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (2019).
David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (2009).
Paul III, Sublimis Deus (1537).
St Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes, Homily 4.