For years to come, people will remember yesterday as a day of wonderful promise on that long and dicey road toward human enlightenment.
It was in the morning in Rome that a highly important Vatican cardinal made a public statement long overdue.
Cardinal Paul Poupard, who heads the Pontifical Council for Culture, declared that the faithful should always listen carefully to what modern science has to say. If religion tries to ignore the truths of science, Poupard warned, it will sink into "fundamentalism."
Take that, you anti-science zealots who still roam the earth today! It was a powerful rhetorical shot at the American religious right - and not a minute too soon.
As a Catholic, I've been very, very uncomfortable with the growing influence of fundamentalist Christians in general, and their creeping influence within the Catholic Church itself. Nice to see that the Vatican seems to be waking up to the fundamentalist threat, finally. And that secular science education is shaping up to be the battleground where Rome and the Discovery Institute's disciples clash.
All across the country, evangelical groups have been trying to chase evolution out of science textbooks. In its place, they want to install a creationist assertion they call "intelligent design." At the same time, other anti-science crusaders are campaigning against stem-cell research that could very well one day cure diabetes and help paraplegics to walk.
But this supposed conflict between science and religion is vastly overblown. "It's important for the faithful to know how science views things to understand better," Poupard said yesterday.
I'm no apologist for the Vatican's vast array of sins throughout history, but at least it looks like the church has learned something from Galileo, and is going to stand up for the truth against religious zealots who want nothing of the sort.
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