History of CST

Twenty-five Centuries of

Michael Hewitt-Gleeson

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(Page under construction – still not completed.)

The Scientific Method (based on observation and measurement) as we understand it today only evolved around 4 centuries ago. It has produced a particular way of thinking, Science Thinking, which is based on the balance of evidence. Because there are better and better observations being made every day and better instruments for better measurement we have seen how the ‘balance of evidence’ constantly shifts and the ‘truths’ of science can be regularly reviewed by peers and updated. Not that it is an easy thing to do. A generation of scientists that holds a particular truth may find it difficult to let it go for an updated version. The Nobel Physicist, Max Planck, famously said, “A new truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light but rather because opponents eventually die and then a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”.

Catholic Thinking can be said to have a history that predates Science Thinking, one that goes back twenty centuries. CST is interested in that area of Catholic Thinking that may overlap or sit well with Science Thinking. Therefore the thinking style we are interested in is metacognition (thinking about thinking). This is the kind of thinking that is important both in the practical application of the Scientific Method and is also behind the extraordinary survival and growth of the Catholic Church over so many centuries. Metacognition is the kind of thinking that is featured in the PFC, Pre-Frontal Cortex, and has to do with strategy, problem-solving, creativity and innovation. It is the kind of thinking required to get things done: Faith without works is dead. (cf. Jm 2:14-26).

In writing a ‘History of CST’ it is these themes of metacognition – strategy, problem-solving, creativity and innovation – that we will be looking for over a span of 25 centuries; going back 20 centuries and forward 5 centuries. In this inaugural short history I’ve chosen one thinker per century (a personal selection) and in this account there will be facts, speculation and even provocation, all of which may be helpful in getting the discussion up and going. In surveying Catholic Thinking there is certainly no shortage of talent so, if you wish, you may choose to make a much better list of your own.

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Century 00 – Joseph of Nazareth

Science thinkers are also creative problem-solvers. They don’t just react to situations they think of ways to work around, to innovate, to search for alternatives, possibilities and new options, often outside the box.

He was not a Catholic but from what we know about Joseph of Nazareth, there was much going on in his PFC. He was a dreamer, a visionary, a problem-solver and a man of action. It is no surprise that such a man should be chosen to be the head of the Holy Family and, 150 years ago, proclaimed by Pius IX to be the Patron of the Universal Church.

In Patris Corde, his Apostolic Letter, Pope Francis describes what he calls Joseph’s “creative courage”:

“Arriving in Bethlehem and finding no lodging where Mary could give birth, Joseph took a stable and, as best he could, turned it into a welcoming home for the Son of God to come into the world (cf. Lk 2:6-7). Faced with imminent danger from Herod, who wanted to kill the child, Joseph … rose in the middle of the night to prepare the flight into Egypt (cf. Mt 2:13-14).”

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Century 01 – Saul of Tarsus

Looking back we can see that getting the Christian Church off the ground was an undertaking not only of extraordinary divine inspiration but also of great human enterprise. Jesus of Nazareth was the founder of the Christian Church. Then, the apostle Saul of Tarsus, Saint Paul, really became the start-up energiser. Travelling widely from Jerusalem to Spain via Rome and other centres he started many communities along the way.

Jesus used the oral tradition and so there were no writings of his own to guide the early church. Paul, who is often regarded as the ‘second founder’ of the church set about to write up a cohesive documentation for the scaling up of the Christian enterprise. Even today, after twenty centuries, his thinking and ideas are the core of the creeds, doctrines, hymns and rituals of the Christian Churches, including Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox.

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Century 02 – Iraneus of Lyon

What did Jesus really say? Hermeneutics is important in history because it is the effort and care taken to choose better interpretations of ancient texts especially taking into account the context of their times. Even in everyday thinking, one of the common errors is the dropping of context. So, hermeneutics is all about the search for a better understanding and interpretation. Why is this important? Because, apart from a literal translation, there are many possible ways to interpret what a person really means by what they said. If your boss says, ‘You’re fired” what could be the possible interpretations? Is it your fault – your incompetence, your tardiness, your inexperience? Is it the board who has told the boss to cut costs? Is it due to the intended sale of the company? Has technology made your position obsolete? etc etc. Even in a contemporary setting it may be difficult to understand the many facets of a situation – like what did your boss firing you really mean in your life?

Imagine the difficulty involved in trying to understand how to interpret ancient situations from centuries ago. So, this is the forensic metacognitive role of hermeneutics. What did Jesus really say? What did he really mean by what he said? How can we better understand how Jesus wanted us to think? etc.

Iraneus offers us an opportunity to think about these things because he was interested very much in what did Jesus really say. Although he lived a century after Jesus (who left no writings of his own) he sought out a direct ‘eye-witness’ connection to Jesus’ sayings through one of the original apostles, Saint John.

Iranaeus sought face-to-face training and mentoring from Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, who was himself personally trained face-to-face by the Apostle John. This was important because Polycarp was able to carry John’s ‘eye-witness’ message to Irenaeus, passing on to him first-hand stories about John. In his own work, Against Heresies, Irenaeus relates how Polycarp told a story of John, the disciple of the Lord, going to bathe at Ephesus, and seeing the heretic Cerinthus inside, John rushed out of the bath-house without bathing, shouting, “Let us fly, lest even the bath-house fall down, because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within.”

This hermeneutic connection for Iraneus via Polycarp to John was made possible because John was the youngest of the apostles (the younger brother of James) and, not ever being martyred, John survived them all living into his 90s. Many scholars believe he not only wrote the Gospel of John but also the Book of Revelations. In the summer of ’84 I spent a week on Patmos in the Greek Islands and visited the cave where he did his writing. It was a deeply moving experience.

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Century 03 – Agatha of Sicily

Catholics are noted for their reverence of women. For example, although Jesus had two parents, Joseph and Mary, they are not equally revered in time and place. Mary easily gets most of the air time. Joseph? Not so much. This Marian bias is important to understand.

Since the early church Agatha of Sicily was such a woman, greatly revered by many millions of Catholics for over 16 centuries. Saint Agatha has also been venerated as Patron of Sicily especially Catania and Palermo and of San Marino, in Malta and in Spain; she has been sought for protection by martyrs, rape victims and sufferers of breast cancer and for the intercession of single women. She is also turned to for help when people suffer from fires. Her feast day is celebrated on February 5.

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Century 04 – Constantine the Great

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Century 05 – Augustine of Hippo

As I write, it is August 28, the feast day of Saint Augustine who, in my understanding, was the greatest marketing genius in history. Why is that? On the Vatican website, I recently found the following announcement:

DECREE OF THE APOSTOLIC PENITENTIARY ON SPECIAL INDULGENCES CONCEDED FOR THE 20TH WORLD YOUTH DAY IN COLOGNE

A Plenary Indulgence is conceded on the usual conditions (sacramental Confession, Eucharistic Communion and prayers for the Supreme Pontiff’s intentions) to members of the faithful who, in a spirit of total detachment from any sin, will take part attentively and devoutly in some of the celebrations for the 20th World Youth Day in Cologne.

Just in case you’re not familiar with indulgences, the announcement above means that those members who qualify are guaranteed to get into heaven when they die. This is a very big offer for any member of the faithful. It’s called a plenary indulgence.

A plenary indulgence is a guarantee that you will receive enough frequent flyer points – divine grace – to go directly to heaven when you die. Like any other loyalty program there are rules and conditions and the Vatican does lay these out from time to time. In this particular case, to qualify for a plenary indulgence a member must have gone to confession, taken communion, prayed for the Pope and attended the 20th World Youth Day in Cologne. Those members who observed these conditions are guaranteed by the Vatican to receive a sufficient allotment of grace to be admitted into Civitas Dei, the City of God – aka heaven.

The popularity of books like The Da Vinci Code reveals the fascination that the Vatican holds for many people – members and non-members alike – and I have always thought that the offer of VIP passes into Heaven is one of the cleverest offers ever invented. The evidence of history has shown how well it has worked. It continues to do so today. This particular invention was created by Saint Augustine. For any loyalty system to be successful you need several things:

• Currency. Some kind of points system.

• Rewards and punishments. Rules for getting points and for losing them.

• Destination. A desirable destination that motivates members to play.

Saint Augustine invented the idea of ‘original sin’ (peccatum originale) which meant that all members of the faithful arrived into the world with debit points – just for being born! Prior to Augustine a newborn baby might be expected to go straight to heaven. After Augustine, babies already had debit points in their heaven account. These debit points had to be wiped out first and then further points were needed to get into heaven. This meant that playing the loyalty game was no longer an option to members. After Augustine you had to play the game because your account was already in the red.

How do you remit your sins and collect the heaven points, the grace needed to get into heaven? This is where the Vatican comes in. The Curia devised a scheme where points were awarded for a wide range of Vatican-approved activities. For example, members have been able to earn points by praying at certain times in certain formats, by attending Vatican-approved sacraments and events. By doing certain good works. By making donations, or raising an army for the Pope or leaving property to the church when you die. In 1343, Pope Clement VI confirmed that the Catholic Church can grant remission of sin through indulgences:

Upon the altar of the Cross Christ shed of His blood not merely a drop, though this would have sufficed, by reason of the union with the Word, to redeem the whole human race, but a copious torrent . . . thereby laying up an infinite treasure for mankind. This treasure He neither wrapped up in a napkin nor hid in a field, but entrusted to Blessed Peter, the key-bearer, and his successors, that they might, for just and reasonable causes, distribute it to the faithful in full or in partial remission of the temporal punishment due to sin.

Loyalty programs can backfire if they exploit their members. The best example of this was when Pope Leo X (born Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici) used the scheme to raise money for his lavish lifestyle and vast Vatican construction projects. Martin Luther blew the whistle on the Pope and the Vatican subsequently lost a big share of the market. This became known in history as the Reformation and led to the establishment of the Protestant churches who broke away from the Vatican because of its loyalty scheme. Commenting on the proceeds of the scheme Martin Luther wrote: ‘At the time I did not yet know who was to get the money. Then there appeared a booklet with the illustrious coat of arms of the Bishop of Magdeburg.’ Wider Hans Worst, 1541.

The Vatican still uses the scheme which has been copied by many marketing organisations worldwide, especially in the travel industry. This is not surprising since Augustine’s original invention relied on a member’s belief in the premise that the Vatican was the official travel agent for the City of God. For example, Virgin Blue airlines’ loyalty program called Velocity was promoted with headlines such as, ‘Isn’t it time loyalty programs redeemed themselves?’ The main benefit of Velocity over other loyalty programs is its ability to redeem your points sooner rather than later. This draws attention to the main drawback of the Vatican’s loyalty program: that you have to die before you can redeem your points!

Century 06 – Gregory the Great

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Century 07 – Alcuin of York

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Century 08 – Pope Stephen II

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Century 09 – Rule of Benedict

Charlemagne had Benedict’s rule copied and distributed to encourage monks throughout western Europe to follow it as a standard. Beyond its religious influences, the Rule of St Benedict was one of the most important written works to shape medieval Europe, embodying the ideas of a written constitution and the rule of law. It also incorporated a degree of democracy in a non-democratic society, and dignified manual labor.

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Century 10 – Pope Sylvester II

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Century 11 – Godfrey de Bouillon

In 2005 British knight bachelor, Sir Ridley Scott, released his epic film Kingdom of Heaven about a knight returning from the Crusades and looking for the son he never knew. The knight is Godfrey (Liam Neeson) and his son is Balian (Orlando Bloom) who just lost his wife. Godfrey and his trusted companion, the Master of the Hospital, persuade Balian to return with them to Jerusalem to join in the Crusades. This film chronicles his journey to the Middle East his rise to power and his knightly mission to protect those unable to protect themselves.

Historically, one of the things the knights actually encountered in the desert was a chivalry often greater than their own even as they fought against the great Islamic teacher and leader, Saladin, who had shown his exemplary wit and mercy to the crusaders on repeated occasions. Among the Crusaders there is an ongoing power struggle between the Hospital and the Temple. Godfrey, Balian and the Knights Hospitaller wanted to establish a kingdom of conscience, treating Christian, Muslim and Jew as equals in a free city. Their rivals, the Knights Templar, simply want every Christian knight to cut the throat of every Muslim. There is an eerie voice-only performance from Edward Norton as the visionary leper King of Jerusalem.

This film is a Ridley Scott classic with his striking visual style, his authentic approach to production design and innovative, atmospheric lighting, which has been influential on a generation of filmmakers many of whom simply copied him outright.
Knights of legend capture our imagination with their romance of faith, their spirit of adventure their rigorous training and prowess in battle. From Sir Galahad to Luke Skywalker the knights and their orders of chivalry have enjoyed a peculiar quality which has lasted for 900 years.

But how did it all begin? …

Western chivalric orders rose to prominence in 1099, during the Crusades, which were started by Godfrey de Bouillon. Godfrey, played by Liam Neeson, was the star of the movie, Kingdom of Heaven.

Born around 1060 AD, Godfrey was a French nobleman, the second son of Count Eustace of Boulogne. As Duke of Lower Lorraine and leader of the First Crusade it was Godfrey who captured Christian Europe’s imagination with his daring chivalric enterprise of rescuing Jerusalem. Godfrey and his army of Christian knights entered Jerusalem, in victory, in 1099. Such a feat would not be equalled by a Christian general for eight centuries, until 1917, when General Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem with his army of British troops.

Duke Godfrey was a courageous and astute nobleman, a born leader and a master of strategy. One of his strengths on crusade, and as ruler of Jerusalem, lay in the loyalty of his sizeable military household. By 1120, he had inaugurated a number of highly specialized military leadership groups. These groups were called Orders of Chivalry, the two most famous survived to become independent Western world powers in their own right:

– The Hospital, The Order of Knights Hospitaler.
– The Temple, The Order of Knights Templar.

The most famous of these Christian Knights of Jerusalem was the Order of The Hospital, which became the oldest and most illustrious order of chivalry the world has ever known, surviving a tumultuous military and hospitaller history of eight centuries through Jerusalem, Acre, Cyprus, Rhodes and Malta right on up to the French Revolution and Napoleon in 1798.

Is the code of chivalry – training and service – still relevant in 2022?

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Century 12 – Teobaldo Boccapecci

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Century 13 – Thomas Acquinas

When it came to the spreading of Aristotle’s Logic, as a way of thinking, no one was more successful than a young Italian nobleman called Thomas Acquinas.

Born in 1225, into powerful nobility near Naples, Aquinas outraged his family when he decided to become a Dominican friar. Thomas discovered a new translation of Aristotle from the Greek and so he set out to synthesize Aristotelian ideas in such a way that it was useful for defending The Truth.

Of course, as far as The Truth was concerned, there was never any doubt for Fra Thomas. No need to look around. No need to search. He already knew exactly where and exactly what The Truth was. There was no further search required for The Truth as far as Aquinas was concerned. Just a matter of defending it and preserving it from any attempt to change it. The Truth, proclaimed Thomas, was the teachings of the Church.

And whose church might that be, Thomas? The Muslims? The Buddhists? The Jews? Picture Thomas opening the envelope, ‘And the winner is … The Roman Catholic Church’. That’s it! Nothing else. Stop looking. Here it is. The lucky winner!

Well, now, the winning True Church also happens to be YOUR church, Thomas old chap. What a coincidence! What a stroke of luck!

As it happened, Thomas’ Church was an information monopoly. All European universities were run by the Church with corporate head office in Rome. Rome literally owned all of knowledge and was busily exporting its corporate education system.

The powerful but flawed thinking software, logic, was the cognitive operating system they used, courtesy of Aristotle via Aquinas.

This educational enterprise amounted to programming brains with what the church taught – verbatim – and repeating it back again. Scholarship was reduced to mere defense of Vatican teachings, which were known collectively as – The Truth.

Only Microsoft’s global export of Bill Gates’ DOS has ever rivaled the Vatican’s export of Thomas Aquinas’ PTV.

I just asked SIRI on my iPhone how many personal computer users there are in the world. The answer was more than 2 billion. When they switch on their desktop or laptop computer the first thing many of them see is ‘Windows’. This is an amazing accomplishment for Bill Gates and Microsoft, in less than 30 years.

This is only beaten by the fact that all 2 billion PC users are also necktop brainusers. And, most of the Western brainusers are using a Vatican-exported logic operating system to work their necktops computers, so they can work their PCs!

In the original Thomist Aristotelian neuroware, the logic operating system worked like this:

TRUTH: Vatican teaching is The Truth.

ITEM: Using Aristotle’s logic to match things up, we are meant to ask:

Does ITEM match TRUTH?

LOGICAL CONCLUSION: If YES, then it is RIGHT and it is TRUTH.

If NO, then it is WRONG and it is HERESY.

Even people with the most superficial knowledge of history know what happened to heretics. I was recently in Amsterdam and paid a second visit to the notorious Inquisition’s Torture Museum. This popular tourist spot features a collection of the ‘truth machines’, an extraordinary array of macabre machines, skullcrackers, racks, bastinados, tongs, garottes, thumb screws, and spikes.

These and other implements of torture were used by the Inquisitors to ‘purify’ the heretics.

One could only marvel uneasily at the cold-blooded ingenuity that went into the design of these instruments of truth.

The Inquisitors, invariably, were Fra Thomas’ fellow Dominicans. They were quite willing to inflict unspeakable horrors on thousands upon thousands of fellow human beings just for disagreeing over minor academic issues about the nature of life and the universe and all in the name of Truth and Virtue. And, they kept creepily meticulous records of their violent punishments, torturings and murders.

Thomist Aristotelian doctrine could show up any contradictions. It could show if a point-of-view did not exactly match The Truth and so therefore they were heretics.

Cut out their tongues! Crank up the rack! Get me the branding iron! Off to the stake! It still sends shivers up my spine.

In the fourteenth century, the ‘Angelic Doctor’ was canonized for his great contribution to the defense of truth and Saint Thomas Aquinas became a kind of god in the church.

There is the famous painting by Zurbaran called ‘The Apotheosis of St Thomas Aquinas’ which shows Thomas, resplendent on a cloud in heaven, in those frightening Dominican Inquisitorial robes, with sundry popes and scholars at his feet. And below on earth, more popes and cardinals look up and pray to him in ecstatic admiration.

John XXII said that to deny Aquinas was tantamount to heresy.

Later, in 1879, Pope Leo XIII proclaimed that Thomist Aristotelian doctrine should be accepted as ‘the official doctrine of the church’.

Since Aquinas imbedded Aristotle’s logic into the Vatican’s education system, it has become the main thinking software of Western civilization, wherever it has been exported. Since then, ‘The Truth’ has been carried to all parts of the world with missionary zeal. In fact, the Western education system may be medieval Europe’s most successful export.

Australia is a good example. Although Australia is geographically in South East Asia, it has culturally been in Europe for the past 200 years.

At that time, along with rabbits, the Western education system was imported into Australia.

Since World War II, however, Australia has become less Eurocentric and more Euro-Asian. Australia is now one of the world’s most successful multi-cultural societies.

Accordingly, ‘unique rightness’ has become a less useful cognitive asset to Australians than ‘tolerance and plurality’.

Today, Aussie kids are less interested in defending a medieval European truth and more interested in designing new Aussie truths that are useful and relevant to life in the in the Third Millennium.

Century 14 – Petrach

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Century 15 – Rene of Anjou

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Century 16 – Jean de la Vallette

It was Voltaire who said, “Nothing is better known than the Siege of Malta!” Yet today, nothing is probably less known than the Siege of Malta. What was it? Why was Voltaire so moved to such superlatives? Voltaire was recalling the event two hundred years earlier, in 1565, when the Knights Hospitaller achieved their greatest victory. Under the order’s most famous leader, Jean Parisot de La Valette, a French nobleman and the 49th Grand Master of the Hospital, the knights defeated the Ottoman Empire at Malta in one of military history’s most famous battles. From the shores of the Golden Horn, Suleiman the Magnificent, Emperor of the Ottomans, had sent the greatest armada since antiquity to wipe out Islam’s most implacable foe, the Knights of Malta.

The Ottoman Empire was the greatest world power of the day and was on the move. Its plan was to conquer Europe. The only remaining obstacle in its path was the little Mediterranean island fortress of the knights – Malta. The Sultan of Turkey, Suleiman the Magnificent, determined to get rid of these knights once and for all and he dispatched one of the largest invasion fleets in history against the Knights of Malta. He attacked with an armada of 130 galleys, 50 sailing ships, and a fleet of transports carrying 30,000 experienced troops with a further 20,000 reinforcements, totalling 50,000. La Valette had only 540 knights and 5000 Maltese militia plus 3000 Italian and Spanish reinforcements, totalling 8500. In other words they were outnumbered six to one!

La Valette was already 71 years old when the Ottoman Empire attacked his sovereign island fortress of Malta. Hopelessly outnumbered he withstood one of history’s greatest sieges. Ernle Bradford’s account The Great Seige is the stuff Hollywood’s epics are made of: “From May until September the Turkish forces remained on the island, and the fighting employed every device and stratagem of sixteenth century warfare. There were conflicts between armed galleys, hand-to-hand combats, siege weapons and artillery duels, cavalry charges, and even armed bands of swimmers. When the Turkish forces at last withdrew defeated, the Ottoman power had suffered an immense reverse. In the long war between East and West the Great Siege of Malta proved one of the turning points in history”.

Grand Master Jean Parisot de la Valette had repelled the Turkish force saving not only his sovereign territory but the heart of Europe itself. It was a heroic defence and prayers of thanks were heard all over Europe. Jean de la Valette was hailed as ‘The Shield of Europe’. Rewards and riches piled in from grateful monarchs. Philip II of Spain sent the Grand Master a fabulous gold sword and dagger encrusted with pearls, diamonds and precious jewels with the punning device ‘Plus quam valor valet Valette’ which today can be seen in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Even in England where Henry VIII had suppressed the order twenty years earlier, his daughter Queen Elizabeth I, directed that prayers be offered and all the bells of England to be rung in celebration. She, too, sent him gifts. Many prizes were bestowed upon the French knight and his order all of which he accepted … except one.

Pope Pius V tried to get La Valette to accept a cardinal’s red hat but he refused! One can scarcely imagine today what it was like in those day’s to be offered a red hat by the pope and what it would have meant in personal prestige for La Valette to wear one. One can imagine even less the level of courage it took to refuse it. Why did La Valette refuse his red hat? It was a matter of sovereignty. Bearing in mind the fate of the Templars, he wanted to maintain the independence and sovereignty of his Order from the meddlesome politics of the Vatican. La Valette knew that while it was one thing for his Order to serve the pope, it was yet another to be under the thumb of Rome so he declined his cardinal’s hat.

In the hot summer of 1568, three years later, La Valette, returning to his Magistral Palace after a day’s hawking, was felled by a stroke. On the 21st of August the knights and their Maltese comrades heard that their Grand master, Jean Parisot de la Valette, was dead. Bradford concludes his book: “The Knights of the Order had his body placed aboard the admiral’s galley and rowed across Grand Harbour to the city, Valetta, that bore his name. Four other galleys shrouded in black, accompanied this greatest of Grand Masters on his last voyage.”

La Valette now lies in the great crypt of the cathedral of St. John. Beside him rests an Englishman, his secretary and faithful friend, Sir Oliver Starkey–the only man other than a Grand Master to be buried in the crypt. The Inscription on La Valette’s tomb was composed in Latin by Sir Oliver Starkey. Translated it reads:

Here lies La Valette, worthy of eternal honour. He who was once the scourge of Africa and Asia, and the shield of Europe, whence he expelled the barbarians by his holy arms, is the first to be buried in this beloved city, whose founder he was.

Around him lie the Grand Masters who were to follow him in later centuries. You can walk above, on the tessellated floor of the great cathedral, and see the arms and insignia of Knights who, for more than 200 hundred years, were to maintain the impregnable fortress of Malta. The Order ruled Malta for over 250 years until the French Revolution when it lost its treasury and many of the knights families lost their heads on the guillotine. What Clement V was to the demise 0f the Templars, the French Revolution was to demise of the Hospitallers.

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Century 17 – Francis de Sales

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Century 18 – Prince de Talleyrand

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Century 19 – Monsignor Georges Lemaître

Monsignor Georges Lemaître is the father of the Big Bang. He invented what is widely known as the “Big Bang theory” of the origin of the universe. It was Lemaître who first proposed the “hypothesis of the primeval atom” calling it “the beginning of the world”. His theory explained that the recession of nearby galaxies was because of an expanding universe. Hubble observationally confirmed his theory which is now known in science as the Hubble–Lemaître law. Lemaître was a pioneer in applying Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity to cosmology. In 1933 at the California Institute of Technology, after Lemaître detailed his primeval atom theory, Einstein stood up and applauded saying, “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.”

Stephen Hawking proclaimed, “Georges Lemaitre was the first to propose a model in which the universe had such an infinitely dense beginning. So he, not George Gamow, is the father of the big bang”. Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître (17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian Catholic priest, astronomer, mathematician and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain.

“It seems that the science of today, by going back in one leap millions of centuries, has succeeded in being a witness to that primordial Fiat Lux, when, out of nothing, there burst forth with matter a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of chemical elements split and reunited in millions of galaxies”. Pope Pius XII

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Century 20 – President John F. Kennedy

When called upon JFK served his country in WWII with leadership, courage and distinction. Yet, he was a ‘peace’ president when he served in the White House. He established the Peace Corps and he commanded American scientists and engineers to ‘put a man on the moon’. In 1962 he said:

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

In 1963, while confronting Communist Russia in the Cuban Missile Crisis, even though the US raised the readiness level of SAC forces to DEFCON 2, President Kennedy managed a peaceful solution rather than an all-out thermonuclear war. For this he is remembered with honour and gratitude by many around the world.

Consequently, tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States trended positively. President Kennedy urged Americans to rethink the Cold War and called for a strategy of peace that would make a safer world. He installed a “Hotline” between the Kremlin and the White House and signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on July 25, 1963, telling Americans, “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

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Century 21 – Pope Francis

My career has been in the military and in science. I’m a cognitive neuroscientist. I’m also a vaticanologist, an observer of the Vatican. I suppose it’s been a kind of intellectual hobby for over 50 years. If one is interested, professionally, in thinking then one is interested in its origins. And, the origin of our Greco-Roman Logic comes to us from the Greeks via the Vatican. In the Western world it is the Vatican that has taught us not only what to think but also how to think. For nearly 800 years, since Thomas Aquinas, the Vatican has taught judgment. However, if Pope Francis has his say, the Vatican may now teach discernment.

Wow! This is a very, very BIG transformational change in global policy. In my view, this disruption is enough to make Francis the greatest lateral thinker in the world. It’s also easily enough for him to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize!

If he does nothing else during his pontificate but switch the Vatican from judgment to discernment then this will be enough to make him one of the greatest popes of all the 266 who ever lived!

Why is this change so significant?

Start with your own case in Australia. If you were taught in the Western education system (Europe, the Americas, British Commonwealth), like I was, then the brain software for thinking that you were given asks: Is it right or is it wrong?

The right/wrong binary judgmental thinking system is what we now call Greco-Roman Logic or critical thinking. It’s the yes/no system. It’s about getting the correct answers to things. Sorting and categorizing. Avoiding mistakes and backflips. Defending your truths. Conflict. Debating your opponents. I-am-right-and-you-are-wrong. Also known as Black Hat Thinking. It’s all about judgment. Often bad judgment. Mostly bad philosophy.

Bad judgment is easy. It’s logical. It’s either black or white. It requires little cognitive effort. You just react to things as they are presented. That’s it. I like it or I don’t like it. It’s all about believing you are ‘right’. Anyone can do bad judgment. It’s inside the box thinking. Sure, logic may be right enough to believe in … but is it true?

By contrast, on the other hand, good judgment is not easy at all. It may even be outside the box. It goes way beyond merely black or white reactions but ventures proactively into the vast grey matter of thinkspace. The cognos. In the School of Thinking we call this Grey Hat Thinking. Grey … or gray if you prefer … involves metacognition. Metacognition is the technical word cognitive scientists use to describe “thinking about thinking”. Metacognition, like mindfulness, is a higher order of perceptual thinking than lower order logic. It’s the business of the pre-frontal cortex (PFC). It requires much, much more than black/white judgmental thinking. It requires good judgment. It requires discernment.

In the wise words of Pope Francis, “Not everything is black over white, or white over black. No! The shades of grey prevail in life.”

What is discernment? The Oxford English Dictionary defines discernment as ‘good judgment’. Good judgment. Nice. Here are ten synonyms to help you to further unpack the value and the meaning of discernment: wisdom enlightenment subtlety insight perception lateral thinking ingeniousness taste refinement sophistication.

Discernment according to Wikipedia: “Discernment is the ability to obtain sharp perceptions or to judge well (or the activity of so doing). In the case of judgment, discernment can be psychological or moral in nature. In the sphere of judgment, discernment involves going past the mere perception of something and making nuanced judgments about its properties or qualities. Considered as a virtue, a discerning individual is considered to possess wisdom, and be of good judgment; especially so with regard to subject matter often overlooked by others.”

The quality of your thinking is a very personal thing. It directly impacts on the quality of your future. If you don’t do your own thinking then others will do it for you. They may not do it well or even in your interests at all. Thinking produces consequences. None of us can ever escape the consequences of the choices we make. This also applies at the group level as well as the global level.

Many people are now saying that the most important thing in the world today is the quality of human thinking. It is said that the quality of our future will be a direct consequence of the quality of our thinking.

At the School of Thinking (SOT) we are engaged with CEOs and their employees to help raise the quality of thinking across the enterprise. If the employees can become much better thinkers then not only will they benefit personally at home and at play but also the future of the company and their jobs will be much, much better. Also, importantly, the return to shareholders will be better. The re-investment of profits into the enterprise, to create more jobs, will also be greater. We call this ‘Return on Payroll’.

Let’s return to the campaign of Francis for the teaching of discernment. Pope Francis insists priests must be taught to see shades of grey. During World Youth Day 2016 Francis had a Q&A session with his fellow Jesuits in Krakow on the high importance of discernment in everyday life. He asked the Jesuits to start teaching discernment over judgment. The pope charged them to begin an outreach to seminaries and diocesan priests.

He has charged Jesuits with sharing the careful art of discernment. He felt that some seminaries are not teaching the skills priests need when facing difficult pastoral situations brought to them by those seeking guidance. He fears they are too judgmental, too black and white. The pope said, “Some programs of priestly formation run the risk of educating in the light of overly clear and distinct ideas, and therefore to act within limits and criteria that are rigidly defined in advance”.

He thinks that priests who weren’t taught during their formation years the “wisdom of discernment”, may later “find themselves in difficulty in accompanying the life of so many young people and adults. Many people leave the confessional disappointed. Not because the priest is bad, but because the priest doesn’t have the ability to discern situations, to accompany them in authentic discernment. They don’t have the needed formation.”

This is what the Pope said. This is what he is saying again and again.The Vatican newspaper noted on that occasion that the Pope referred to the need for discernment 35 times in his papal exhortation! He has been repeating this in his daily homilies where he lives in the Santa Marta Vatican hotel. He is saying this on his travels and sermons Urbi et Orbi. This new Vatican pivot from its sharp, black and white, medieval Thomist philosophy of judgment to a new Franciscan one of grey discernment must have profound global consequences over time. This is, after all, what we have been waiting for, for many years. And, I can’t help thinking that both Jesus and Joseph would approve.

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Century 22 – Apostolic Academy of Sciences

The Pius XI Medal.

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Century 23 – VLO – Vatican Lunar Observatory

It would be no great surprise to see a Vatican Observatory on the moon in 150 or so years.

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Century 24 – Pope #300

Today, after 20 centuries, we have Pope #266, and perhaps in 3 more centuries there’ll be Pope #300. Maybe that pope won’t be all that different to the kind of popes we’ve had in the last century. Or, maybe the difference will be beyond what we can currently imagine. Today, Francis is mostly concerned with world peace, the global environment and climate, human refugee crises and reform in the Vatican and the church. With what would Pope #300 be mostly concerned? Perhaps many of the same things or maybe entirely new things like ‘virtual heaven’, missionaries on Mars, VATFLIX – streaming the Vatican Archives online for monthly membership fees, gender-free cardinals, a second Babylonian Captivity in Beijing. Probably none of these will arise, since no-one can predict the future, but it is still interesting to speculate with possible thought experiments. What can you think of?

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Century 25 – The Second Coming

When many Catholics pray the Nicene Creed they pray about Jesus Christ that … he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in his glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. … We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.

Views about the nature of the Second Coming will, of course, vary among Catholic traditions and among individual Catholic thinkers. Many specific dates in the past have been proclaimed for the Second Coming and others to come in the future. By Century 25 will the Second Coming have already arrived? Or, will it be yet to come?

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