Memorial of St. Albert the Great
Knights of Columbus Mid-year Meeting
Denver, Colorado
November 15, 2025
Science vs. Faith
When I visit parishes and schools, I enjoy talking with young people. In those conversations, the topic of faith and science sometimes comes up. From the internet, social media, and even the classroom, young people have been told that faith and science are incompatible. They are told that faith is little more than a pre-scientific superstition, and that science provides with the only valid sort of human knowledge. Everything else is a matter of taste, opinion, feelings, or self-invention. To their credit, most of the young people I engage with don’t agree with the atheists and agnostics who are pushing these ideas in our culture – but neither do they know how to respond to such ideas, especially when they talking with classmates and friends.
And there are other young people I don’t get to meet because they are absent from our parishes and schools. Sadly, they have already disaffiliated from the Catholic faith. They leave the Church for many reasons, but often it is because they are convinced that faith and science are at odds. Parents, who were poorly catechized and who seldom attend Sunday Mass, are ill-equipped and/or unmotivated to address their children’s objections. We should hope and pray that these young people will recover their faith, that they will encounter someone – a priest, a religious, a campus chaplain – perhaps a Knight of Columbus – who will help them re-discover the faith they rejected so early in life.
St. Albert the Great
If you and I want to equip ourselves to help the young rediscover the faith, then let us turn to the saint of the day, St. Albert the Great. Hailing from the mid-thirteenth century, this amazing saint looked at the world around him with a completely fresh gaze. Commenting on Matthew’s Gospel he wrote, “The whole world is theology for us because the heavens proclaim the glory of God.” What St. Albert passed on to his greatest student, St. Thomas Aquinas, and what he has also given us, is deep insight into the right relationship of faith and reason, and that includes the right relationship between faith and science. St. Albert taught that faith and reason are two fonts of truth. Faith opens us to the supernatural truth God has revealed whereas reason enables us to arrive at truth concerning the natural order. As Pope St. John Paul II taught, there is a unity of truth, natural and revealed, all summed up in the Person of Christ, the Word made flesh. This unity of truth has been described as two books: the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature. Or, St. John Paul II wrote so eloquently, “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”
This describes St. Albert the Great to a tee. He was endlessly curious about nature, about what could be directly observed, or what could be inferred & calculated. With his keen powers of observation and his vast knowledge, he made many “scientific” discoveries and predicted many other discoveries others would later confirm. For example, he was the first to isolate the chemical element of arsenic – thus setting the stage for the play, Arsenic and Old Lace. He was the first writer in the west to give a detailed description of spinach, whose amazing powers would later be demonstrated by Popeye the Sailor. Using mathematic calculations, he speculated that the earth was round, and predicted that there was a large land mass west of Europe – (a copy of his prediction was found in the library of Christopher Columbus). Using the thought of Aristotle & Cicero, he probed the nature of human memory…and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
At the same time, he wrote penetrating commentaries on the Gospels, applied newly acquired philosophical tools to explorations of the faith, and wrote more extensively than any other medieval thinker on the Virgin Mary – indeed, he was a master Mariologist. When Pope Pius XII defined the Assumption as a dogma of the faith, St. Albert the Great was one of the primary authorities he cited. Quoting the Lord in today’s Gospel, we may say of Albert that he brought forth from his inner storehouse both the new and the old.
So here’s this morning’s takeaway: Albert kept faith and reason together, in relation to one another. He gazed upon God’s creation with the eyes of faith all the while penetrating it with the God-given tools of reason. His study of the world around him confirmed his faith and faith shed light on what he learned through study and observation. Later on in history, faith and reason would part ways, and we’ve been living that divorce, and its consequences, for centuries. It has led to distrust and deceit, to disaster and despair. It still does.
The Upshot
The world today is vastly different from Albert’s day but he still has much to teach us as we grapple with the new technologies such as AI and with ways of thinking that marginalize or suppress God thus undermining human dignity and the common good. Thanks in part to St. Albert’s legacy of holy brilliance, the Church has emerged in our day both as the authoritative teacher of the fullness of the faith and as the great defender of the power of reason to attain truth – both the kind of truth you can measure, slice, and dice – and also the truth and beauty that comes from art and literature, the truth and insight that comes from intellectually sound philosophy, and the practical truths we learn in every worthy human endeavor.
We see this in the life of our founder, Blessed Michael McGivney. He was neither a philosopher nor a so-called “professional” theologian, but he was a pastor with the deepest and purest kind of faith, and also an eminently practical man. When pastoral necessity required him to master the intricacies of life insurance, that’s just what he did, and we’re still using what he learned. Fr. McGivney’s knowledge of life insurance did not diminish his faith, but rather enabled him to expand the horizons of his faith-filled ministry, and to keep countless Catholics close to Christ and to the Church.
With Albert the Great as our teacher, exemplar, and intercessor, let us equip ourselves as never before “to offer reasons for our hope”, and may God bless us and keep us always in his love.