Despite all this, there are few studies to date which contrast the Roman Catholic Church’s response to the advances of science in the 19th century with that of Protestants. More often than not, Catholicism’s response is lumped together with the responses of their separated brethren or is seen to straddle some via media between the conservative and modernist Protestant approaches¹. This dearth of studies engenders a wealth of unanswered questions. How did the Church, which was on the side of scientific advancement up till the 18th Century find it self on the other side of the fence in the 19th Century? And how did the Catholic Church which was vehemently opposed to Darwinism in the 19th Century, end up almost accepting the evolutionary theory as a fact in the 20th century?

To understand the answers to these questions, we have to understand both the political and social challenges facing the Church at the start of the 19th century, as well as the changes in doctrinal thought during the course of the century. In doing so, one discovers a picture of the Church grappling with the challenges of the post-Christian era and changing in the process. It is not a monolithic, adversarial Church waging a vendetta against scientific progress, which writers like Draper portray. In his History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, Draper paints a picture of the institutional church repressing the progressive forces of human intellect, and argues that the Catholic Church is more an enemy of science than Protestant Christianity.²

A Reasonable Church

Yet on detailed examination, Draper's arguments do not hold up and reflect his bias against Catholicism.³ Since Aquinas reconciled Aristotelian ideas with the Christian faith in the 13th century, the Catholic Church had always emphasized the proper use of reason in faith. It was this healthy respect for the use of reason that underpinned the Church's support for scientific endeavor throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. Furthermore, because the Catholic Church derives its religious authority from historical tradition rather than from the Bible, as the Protestants do, they are likely to be less antagonistic to the aspersions on literal interpretations of the Bible that the scientific movement of the 19th century cast. With respect to the accommodation of evolution by the Catholic Church, Barbour points out that,

For Roman Catholicism, evolution was not in principle as disturbing as it was for the Protestant conversion. In Catholicism, revealed truth is not to be sought in scripture alone but in scripture and tradition as interpreted by the living church. Moreover, the doctrine that scripture is divinely inspired has not excluded considerable flexibility and diversity in biblical interpretation and the concept of different “levels” of “truth” has always allowed allegorical renditions of problematic passages.⁴