Global InformationList of Catholic clergy scientists information
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This is a list of Catholic clergy[a] throughout history who have made contributions to science. These churchmen-scientists include Nicolaus Copernicus, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Roger Joseph Boscovich, Marin Mersenne, Bernard Bolzano, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, Nicole Oresme, Jean Buridan, Robert Grosseteste, Christopher Clavius, Nicolas Steno, Athanasius Kircher, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, William of Ockham,… and others listed below. The Catholic Church has also produced many lay scientists and mathematicians.
The Jesuits in particular have made numerous significant contributions to the development of science. For example, the Jesuits have dedicated significant study to earthquakes, and seismology has been described as "the Jesuit science."[1][2] The Jesuits have been described as "the single most important contributor to experimental physics in the seventeenth century."[3] According to Jonathan Wright in his book God's Soldiers, by the eighteenth century the Jesuits had "contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter's surface, the Andromeda Nebula and Saturn's rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon affected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light."[4]
Because there is a List of lay Catholic scientists, this list does not include lay members of religious orders, such as ordinary monks and nuns, brothers and sisters, or anyone in minor orders at such times that those were not considered clergy.
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- ^ Susan Elizabeth Hough, Richter's Scale: Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a Man, Princeton University Press, 2007, ISBN 0691128073, p. 68.
- ^ Woods 2005, p. 109.
- ^ Lindberg & Numbers 1986, p. 154.
- ^ Wright 2004, p. 200.