The Catholic Church -- Just Not That Repressive.

This is Sherwin Nuland from New Republic via Amy Welborn:

...I found myself at a luncheon where alumni of a large Ivy League university had gathered in the interest of educational sodality and fund-raising, a variety of rite commonly favored by organizations of aging graduates and their alma maters. Perhaps to prepare the mood for the postprandial speaker--a visiting art historian about to discuss the works of Leonardo da Vinci--one of the group's officers was holding forth at my table on a thesis so consistent with common preconceptions about the intellectual backwardness of the Catholic Church that it always finds a receptive audience. With a forcefulness honed by decades as a trial lawyer, he was regaling his attentive listeners with accusations of the obstinacy with which the church opposed human dissection during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This, he pointed out as emphatically as if he were addressing a jury, had necessitated all kinds of clandestine and gruesome activities on the part of those whose aim was to study the human body, whether for scientific purposes or because they were artists of the caliber of Leonardo, Titian, and Raphael. Not only was medical knowledge thus stunted in its advancement, he added in his summation, but such opposition necessitated the well-known horrors of grave-robbing in order to obtain cadavers for study, an unnatural activity that marred the image of the profession of healing until late in the nineteenth century.

Were Benedict XVI present to act as advocate for his long-ago predecessors, he would have entered a plea of not guilty on their behalf. And the pope would certainly have won the ensuing debate, because the overwhelming weight of evidence supports his long-dead clients. Stated simply, the persuasive lawyer was dead wrong. Whatever difficulties may have been faced by Galileo and several other prominent scientists of that and later eras, the anatomists and the artists had few such obstructionist forces to contend with, at least from the Catholic hierarchy of the time. The truth of the matter differs markedly from what might have been thought by the old alums listening with such knowing accord to the disquisition being presented to them.

Not only did the church not stand in the way of dissection, but it frequently provided an atmosphere and means to facilitate it. Perhaps the most direct demonstration of such a supportive philosophy is to be found in a Bull issued in 1482 by Pope Sixtus IV, who responded to a request from the students and faculty of the University of Tübingen by permitting human dissection providing that local clerical permission was granted. In doing this, Sixtus was only acknowledging practices already in effect at the universities of Bologna and Padua, in both of which he had been a student and in neither of which had church authorities ever prevented the opening of corpses for the purposes of research and teaching.

Leonardo's first such studies took place in the mid-1480s, probably at Milan's Ospedale del Brolo, a unit of the Ospedale Maggiore licensed to allow dissections with the consent of the local bishop. And scarcely a decade after the Bull of Sixtus, the prior of the Church of San Spirito in Florence gave dissecting permission to, among others, a young painter named Michelangelo Buonarroti. As for grave-robbing, it is no historical aberration that the best-known escapades of famous grave robbers and their ghastly doings happen to have taken place in Protestant countries, such as England, Scotland, and the United States. The explanation for this phenomenon is clear: it was primarily in Protestant lands, not Catholic ones, that bodies were difficult to obtain, because there were stringent, often clergy-driven, laws against dissection.

I do not mean to imply that my tablemate was an ignoramus, or that his hearers were swayed by his argument because they were uneducated in the facts as presented in standard descriptions of early modern history. It is hardly their fault that current-day literature and even many textbooks have portrayed an imaginary scenario in which the church stood inexorably opposed to the Renaissance mood of rapidly emerging scientific discovery, particularly with respect to delving into the secrets of life. Every schoolboy knows that the new humanism that is the hallmark of the period manifested itself, among other ways, in a fascination with the structure and function of man's body, but every schoolboy has also been taught that the Catholic Church did what it could to halt or at least slow the scientific progress that might be the inevitable result of such a fascination. If he did not learn it in the classroom, the schoolboy read of it as portrayed in every example of the literary fiction that deals with the subject.

Katharine Park's important book has two major themes, and putting to a well-deserved rest the erroneous image of a thoroughly resistant church is one of them. True, there were certainly conspicuous instances--and again, Galileo's is the most prominent--of theological wrongheadedness and maleficent obstructionism, and even an underlying current of belief that made certain scientists of the early modern period interpret objective findings in a way that did not clash with church teachings. But in general Catholicism has taken a rap much more severe than it deserves, especially in the area of anatomy...

There have been many times that I've been in the company of those who are unaware of my Catholicism, who have put forth similar misconceptions about the Church with sure certainty.  And it is true that there are stories about the Church that every young Protestant is told...some taken for granted to be accurate.  Part of that is an American problem, since America has never been particularly receptive to Catholicism. 
I have a friend whose father takes particular pleasure in making jabs at Catholicism in my presence.  He seems alternately to imply that because of the sins of individual members of the Church the institution is rendered defunct, or by ascribing political motivations for Catholic practices (eating fish on Friday, for example) attempting to cast aspersions again upon the institution. 
I find religious discussion with others must always move towards ending at a simple declaration of belief or the conversion of one party to the other's Faith.  To end a discussion otherwise is like unto ending a sentence with a colon:  In truth, I find colons rude little fellows and any concept which can be tenuously connected to them to be distasteful.

I think that my friends who are not Catholic would say that I do not bash people over the head with my religion, nor do I lean on them to convert, but I do draw lines and rise to challenges against my faith.  Sometimes this means I myself am "rude."  Had I been at the dinner equipped with this knowledge, why I would have interrupted that lawyer's grand oration with nary a second thought and ruined everyone's five minutes of entertainment.