Our daughter, Felicity, is starting Year 9. She is really good at science and wants to be an engineer. Getting her to Mass hasn’t been easy for a while. Last Sunday she told us she is never going again and refuses to be confirmed. She asked how we could possibly believe in “those religious myths”, when science has disproved it all. We don’t think Felicity is right, but don’t know what to say to her.
It’s important to take Felicity’s concerns seriously. Encourage her love of science; help her see that science and the Catholic faith are complementary. Point out the number of Catholic scientists. Ampère, from whom we get the word “amp”, was one of the fathers of the study of electromagnetism. Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, was an Augustinian friar and abbot. Fr Georges Lemaître, often credited with first proposing the theory of the Big Bang, was a Catholic priest and a professor of astrophysics. There’s even a law of physics (half) named after him: the Hubble-Lemaître law.
