By Dennis D. Montoya
An earthquake strikes a city built on a fault line. Water mains rupture. Reservoirs crack. A stable community becomes a desert wasteland overnight. People scramble to hold the city together, racing to get clean water into homes before disease or desperation settles in.
And then you hear it on the radio: They’re calling in a priest.
The knee-jerk reaction is almost universal: What’s he going to do? Give last rites?
The situation must be dire.
But it wasn’t always that way.
Before universities and research labs, who carried the torch of knowledge? Look back at the 12th through the 18th centuries and you find something easy to forget:
Clergy weren’t just keepers of ritual—
they were keepers of knowledge.
Nearly every early discipline—science, botany, agriculture, mathematics, medicine, astronomy—was practiced, preserved, or developed in monasteries, abbeys, or religious schools.
I am serious. Consider the legacy:
- Monasteries brewed beer with a chemist’s precision.
- Abbeys ran hospitals when no one else could.
- Jesuits mapped continents. Franciscans cataloged medicinal herbs.
- Benedictines preserved Aristotle’s works when Europe teetered on the edge of forgetting.
And that inheritance didn’t stop in the Middle Ages.
Before medicine had modern textbooks, religious sisters carried entire hospitals on their backs. Long before “nurse” meant a profession, they tended the sick, refined sanitation, and passed hard-won knowledge through generations.
When Florence Nightingale—the founder of modern secular nursing—began her training in the 19th century, she studied with Lutheran deaconesses in Germany and observed Catholic Sisters of Charity in Paris. Nightingale wasn’t a nun, but she built modern nursing on a foundation the sisters had quietly held for centuries. In her hands, monastic order met emerging science—and the world changed.
Agriculture and genetics owe a similar debt. Today we take for granted the idea of breeding stronger, sweeter, more resilient crops—disease-resistant apples, improved grains, sturdier vegetables. But imagine how primitive our food sources once were, before anyone understood why one plant thrived while another failed. Let that sink in.
Then, in a quiet monastery garden, a monk began to notice patterns. Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian friar tending pea plants behind abbey walls, unlocked the laws of heredity and became the father of modern genetics. Every orchard, every seed company, every geneticist in a lab today stands on knowledge first deciphered in a monastery.
These weren’t isolated moments. They were part of a pattern: religious life as a crucible for learning. You can still find traces of it if you look.
My own hospital—not one I own, but the one I work at—St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Lewiston—opened on February 8, 1902, when Sisters from the Midwest transformed a seven-room frame house into the first St. Joseph Hospital. When I began nursing many years ago, there was still a nun working as an LPN: habit, badge, prayer book, med-cart—not a relic of a distant century, just a coworker finishing her morning rounds. Her quiet competence formed a bridge between two worlds: faith and science, devotion and data.
But time has its own tide. Fewer people enter the convent; even fewer men pursue the priesthood. Many parishes now rely on clergy from overseas to fill roles once handed down for generations.
And it makes me think about that old knowledge tradition—that blend of service, discipline, study, and curiosity that once lived at the heart of religious life. There was strength in it. Practical, steady, grounded strength. A commitment to understanding the world as much as tending to it.
We talk about faith vs. science as if they were natural enemies.
But history shows something different: the faithful, pursuing science, not in opposition, but as devotion.
During the Enlightenment, thinkers like Descartes, Newton, Galileo, and Bacon began to champion reason, evidence, and experimentation over tradition and authority.
Their goal wasn’t to destroy faith—it was to free inquiry from dogma.
Let truth be decided by evidence, not hierarchy.
Let the world speak for itself.
That shift—from revelation to observation—was revolutionary.
They weren’t rejecting God; they were rejecting the idea that any institution could dictate reality.
And the more success they had—predicting planetary motion, building machines, discovering universal laws—the more science began to stand on its own legs. Knowledge started to move from the monastery to the laboratory.
But what those early scientists didn’t abandon was wonder. They still believed the universe had an order worth understanding. They simply changed the method of worship—from prayer to proof.
Sometimes I wonder what the future might look like if that pattern returned in a modern form.
Imagine the Church identifying gifted young men and women with a knack for chemistry, engineering, medicine, or astrophysics—and funding their education. Imagine monasteries once again becoming research centers, not of relics, but of innovation.
Doctors in habits. Engineers in collars. Researchers in quiet shoes moving through hospital halls.
A clergy of scholars—where spirit and science shake hands once again.
Let’s return to that earlier scenario: a water shortage hits a town. Tempers rise. Families panic. No one knows who to trust.
A truck pulls up. The door opens. A murmur ripples through the crowd:
“Oh my gosh… they brought in Father Miguel.”
And the whole town exhales at once.
Because Father Miguel isn’t just clergy—he’s a tenacity-driven civil engineer.
A workhorse who stays until the last valve is fixed and every home has clean water.
Picture him stepping out in a hard hat over his collar, scanning the damage, already calculating solutions.
People move aside not out of reverence, but trust. Because the collar means compassion—
and the engineering degree means he can actually save the day.
Imagine Sister Elena, microbiologist, stepping into an outbreak zone with both a rosary and a centrifuge. Imagine seminaries teaching coding alongside theology. Imagine vows that include disaster relief and scientific service. A modern clergy who shows up when the world breaks—and quietly puts it back together. That’s the kind of thing legends are made of.
Maybe I romanticize it, maybe I see it through a fantasy writer’s lens.
But that doesn’t make it any less worthy.
Maybe the old light never went out. Maybe it’s waiting for someone to strike the match.
Imagine churches hiring from the best universities—chemists, physicists, bioengineers—devoting entire careers to research that benefits everyone: better vaccines, drought-resistant crops, new treatments, new hope.
A kind of modern monk.
Scholarship as service.
Innovation as devotion.
Science says, “There is currently no empirical evidence that can confirm or falsify the existence of God.”
Faith smiles and says, “Not yet.”
The strength of hard science is that it tests everything. Every experiment is challenged, repeated, and refined to see if it holds true. When new evidence emerges—something more correct—science adjusts. It changes what it once believed.
The pursuit of proof—through data, physics, or medicine—isn’t rebellion against the divine. It’s the work of discovery that faith once inspired.
If the future has a meeting place for both, it’s in the lab where a prayer and a hypothesis can share the same air. That’s not contradiction. That’s evolution.
Not faith versus science—but faith fueling science.
One day, perhaps, the prayers of the faithful and the calculations of the curious will speak the same language. That’s when the old light won’t just burn—
it will blaze. All it needs is someone brave enough to strike the match.
✍️ Writer’s Reflection
When I wrote this piece, I wasn’t trying to argue theology—I was thinking about curiosity. About how faith once meant studying the world to understand the divine, and how science—at its best—still carries that same hunger. We tend to see them as rivals, but maybe they’ve just forgotten how much they share: discipline, wonder, and devotion to truth.
I keep thinking about today’s modern miracles born of science—the vaccines, the transplants, the technologies that keep hearts beating and crops alive. Maybe they’re not proof against God, but proof of how far human hands can reach when guided by that same ancient light that first burned in the monasteries so long ago.
🔥 Dennis D. Montoya
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