Doing "True Science": The Early History of the Institutum Divi Thomae, 1935-1951

To date, scholars have examined precious little of the relationship between Catholicism and science in America. 3 Those few researchers [End Page 702] who have explored this field have limited their activity largely to studies of the controversy over evolution, Catholic women and health care, apologetics demonstrating how the Church has fostered rather than hindered science, or angry works on the history of sexuality, employing Catholicism as a slow-moving target. 4 Indeed, the story of American Catholics and science, or the absence of a story, can be quickly characterized in a few pages, as Daniel Kevles did more than twenty years ago in his widely read The Physicists. Yet, reading Kevles leads to little satisfaction for one interested in going beyond superficialities, and in particular in placing science within a complex and dynamic social and cultural context. 5