By DEXTER DUGGAN
Forty Catholics Who Shaped the World in Which We Live, by Claire Smith, www.famouscatholics.com, St Pauls Publishing, Staten Island, N.Y., ISBN 978-0-8189-1388-4, 260 pages, paperback, $19.95, 2015.
Souls and salvation are of timeless importance, beginning with the Garden of Eden, but the physical world in which humans live has changed most drastically since the mid-19th century.
Try to imagine a big city, or even a neighborhood, without plenty of bold electrified lighting as night descends. Yet for most of history, the daily departure of the sun meant the enclosure of a tomb of darkness upon a portion of the Earth, broken here and there by such instruments as oil lamps, torches, and, later, gaslights.
For millennia, night was the time to gather protectively around the fire, not saunter out for pizza and movie premieres.
Many of the changes date back just to the times of our own great-grandparents or later. It was only in the closing decades of the 19th century that “germ theory” was verified, confirming the method by which disease is spread.
In 1878, French Catholic microbiologist Louis Pasteur published his paper “Germ Theory and Its Applications to Medicine and Surgery,” building on the work of European physician Robert Koch, who identified a link between bacteria and disease.
The facts of ordinary U.S. medical practice before then seem almost inconceivable to us, such as recorded in the book Fifty Years a Surgeon, by Robert T. Morris, MD, who was born in 1857. His book came out in hardcover in 1935.
The young United States was taking its place among the nations in the 19th century, and New York’s legendary Bellevue Hospital was a leading medical institution, yet Morris writes of flies walking around unhindered on patients’ wounds there, of one or two common sponges being used on all the patients in a ward, and of a physician giving his blade a few strokes across the leather heel of his shoe so as to sharpen its edge before performing an amputation!
“Flies did not worry an operator (surgeon) at all because they were certain to go to the wound and leave him alone,” Morris wrote.
This changed in 1883 or 1884, Morris wrote, when a surgeon who had trained in Prussia arrived on staff and brought enlightenment.
Catholic scientists and researchers were among the people down through history who improved our understanding of and coping abilities in the world, author Claire Smith illustrates in Forty Catholics Who Shaped the World in Which We Live, of whom Pasteur was one with his immensely important work on germ theory.
The process of pasteurization, which he invented to kill bacteria, was another lasting contribution. It keeps various types of liquids safe for human consumption longer.
Pasteur regarded the pursuit of knowledge as entirely compatible with his religious faith, Smith writes, dying with the Last Sacraments and with his rosary in hand after listening to a reading of the life of the priestly benefactor of the poor St. Vincent de Paul.
This scientist couldn’t understand the failure of some other scientists to recognize the demonstration of the existence of the Creator in the world around us.
Scottish Catholic biologist Alexander Fleming started the modern revolution in antibiotics by accidentally discovering penicillin in 1928, but he acknowledged who made it possible, saying, “I can only suppose that God wanted penicillin, and that this was His reason for creating Alexander Fleming.”
What sometimes seems a puzzling turn of events may reveal God having even greater plans. Before their marriage, both of St. Therese of Lisieux’s parents had been turned down in their own attempts to enter religious life in the 19th century, Smith writes, but they went on to have five daughters who survived to adulthood, all of them becoming nuns and one of them being canonized the saint in 1925.
In turn, the parents, Louis and Zelie Martin, became the first spouses in Catholic history to be canonized as a couple when Pope Francis raised them both to sainthood in October 2015.
Smith includes significant Catholic spiritual figures whose light for our eyes is even more important than antibiotics. As marvelous and enhancing as scientific discovery is, it serves for perhaps no more than 100 years of an individual’s earthly existence.
Then, at death, a 21st-century billionaire in his 80s enters the same realm as a man who died sick and poor at age 30 in AD 250: Judgment before God and the transition into the everlasting. Time without end, amen.
People all are on “their flight to God” — but they also have the awesome, horrifying power to reject that heavenly destination.
Some names in the book are familiar, like Saints Peter, Paul, Augustine, Patrick, Francis of Assisi, and Teresa of Avila, explorers Marco Polo and Ferdinand Magellan, artists Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
Others are less so, like 12th-century Doctor of the Church St. Hildegard of Bingen, who undertook four preaching tours throughout Germany upon receiving a command from God, even though religious preaching generally was reserved to men at the time.
Also, 12th-century abbess Herrad of Landsberg, first woman to compile an encyclopedia; 17th-century Venetian philosopher Elena Cornaro Piscopia, first woman to receive a doctoral degree from a university, and 18th-century intellectual Maria Gaetana Agnesi, first woman to author a mathematics textbook.
At age nine, Smith writes, Agnesi “translated into Latin a speech arguing against barriers to women’s advancement in the study of arts and sciences,” and by age 13 had mastered seven languages.
It doesn’t appear that any original scholarship went into producing Forty Catholics Who Shaped the World in Which We Live, but it’s a useful compilation of some significant Catholic contributions.
However, one can question why certain famous Catholics were omitted from the body of the book and only are acknowledged in an “Index of Notable Catholics” at the end, including no less than authors Miguel Cervantes, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Dryden, G.K. Chesterton, and J.R.R. Tolkien, and scholar Rene Descartes.
What’s important in one century may disappear from popular memory a few centuries later.
Understandably for early 21st-century readers, EWTN founder Mother Angelica has her story told on pages 85-93. However, 20th-century luminaries Blessed Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, and Archbishop Fulton Sheen have been relegated just to the “index” at the back of the book. St. John Paul II and St. John XXlll are entirely forgotten.
At least, thank Heaven, bad Catholics including pro-abortion and “same-sex marriage” extremist politicians Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and John Kerry receive not a single word.
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