Today's Google Doodle honors Nicolas Steno, the father of geology who also happened to be a Catholic bishop. The Christian Science Monitor tells his story:
Don't feel bad if you've never heard of Nicolas Steno. Even though the 17th century Danish anatomist and geologist made a number of discoveries that are now seen as self-evident – namely, that the heart is a muscle that pumps blood, that tears are formed in the eye, that fossils are the remains of living organisms from previous geologic eras, and that older rocks tend to lie deeper in the earth than younger ones – his legacy, like the mysterious stones that he examined, have since been obscured by layers of historical sediment.
Perhaps some of Steno's obscurity arises from his failure to fit into a narrative that science and religion are adversaries. Unlike Galileo, whom the Catholic church famously threatened to torture if he did not recant, Steno was embraced by the Vatican. Yet his discoveries set in motion a revolution that would ultimately unseat the Bible as the authority on the age of the earth.
Nicolas Steno was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1988. You can read the rest of the CSM article here.
Tim Reidy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jesuit_scientists
and for priests who were scientists
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_Catholic_cleric–scientists
And the conventional wisdom about Galileo is wrong. He was not censored because of religion or science. His crime was political
You will have to read the book to find out how Descartes explained the workings of the heart and how scientists theorized about the seashells found on mountaintops!