Ask a Catholic

[abaris]

A nice conclusion..."Oh, someone would have done it...eventually."

The fact is, the Catholic Church DID build all those things.

And obviously there's a mixup between the earlier Cathedral schools and real universities that began to spread between the 11th and 13th century in Europe and basically taught what was called "the arts" in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Law, Theology and Arts.

Also I don't get why the development of the judicial system should be connected to the Catholic church. Anglosaxon case law for example is pretty much a descendant of Roman case law, which was very developed and also based on precedents.

It's out of dispute that the Catholic church and it's monasteries at least preserved some of the knowledge of old. Basically they were the only organization where literacy was widespread. But herein also lies the problem, since they only preserved what had value to them and didn't contradict their dogmas. All through the Middle Ages, the Roman surgeon Galen was still considered the utmost authority when it came to medical knowledge. New research was practically impossible, since the church prohibited autopsies out of dogmatic reasons. It's only with the advent of the Renaissance that researchers, Leonardo Da Vinci among them, started to break the church's commandment and began to study the anatomy of the human body. But they were risking life and limb in doing so.

Another issue that's often conveniently forgotten is the influence the crusades had on gaining new knowledge. Many of the muslim kingdoms were much more advanced than Europe when it came to medicine, hygiene and literacy. It's what Europeans learned by getting in touch with them, which really moved European knowledge forward.