Please tell me that was just a very ill-chosen figure of speech. I certainly have my share of doctrinal differences with it, but even I think that statement was GROSSLY unfair. I mean, I know everyone sneers at the way they treated Galileo, but without all those monks LITERACY would not have survived in Europe after the fall of Rome. Europe has the Catholic Church to thank for scholasticism, and thus both its first universities and the rational paradigms that produced things like the Renaissance, the Scientific Method and the Enlightenment, to name but a few of the Catholic Churchs most significant intellectual legacies.

This is actually a pet peeve of mine, because so many modern intellectuals (and pseudo-intellectuals) like to pretend the Christian Church as a whole is and has always been just a bunch of superstitious ignorami to whom they owe nothing (as opposed to, like, virtually everything.)

How about all the Catholic charities around the world that have been feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, healing the sick and, yes, even educating the ignorant, for two millennia? How about all the Catholic clergy who went to concentration camps for sheltering Jews during the Holocaust? Or Pope John Paul II and others like him who defied the Soviets authoritarian domination of Poland and other Warsaw Pact countries?

That is just the big stuff that comes to mind off the top of my head after twelve hours of below zero construction work. The Roman Catholic Church has made plenty of mistakes, some of which it perpetuates, but just because an organization is not progressive or forward-thinking (or sufficiently so for all tastes) does not make it meritless and/or irredeemable. Any more than inventing jets makes the organization that did THAT a paragon of virtue.