Sunday, April 26, 2009

In Memoriam: Father Stanley Jaki

What a loss; Fr. Jaki was such a brilliant man--a true champion for Christ and philosophical realism. He was vastly underappreciated by the liberal establishment of both the Church and the general scientific community. He, however, left an incredibly profound body of work that will be appreciated more and more as the years go by.

Dear Fr. Jaki, may you rest in peace...





One of the most influential scientific minds in the Church died on April 7. He gave respectability to the view that, far from being essentially at odds, Christianity and science are natural allies. His burial will be at Pannonhalma Abbey, Hungary, on April 29

By Robert Mauro

SUNDAY, APRIL 26, 2009 — Father Stanley Ladislas Jaki, OSB (1924-2009), Distinguished Professor of Physics at Seton Hall University, New Jersey, since 1975 and one of the world's leading historians of science and its relationship with religion, died in Madrid on April 7, 2009, reportedly of a heart attack, at the age of 84 (the photo shows him just a few days before his death, in Rome in March of this year). He will be buried on Wednesday in his native Hungary.

Jaki was a prolific writer, authoring dozens of books, articles and essays covering everything from the metaphysics of the Eucharist, to the primacy of the Apostle Peter, to exactly where and how Charles Darwin went woefully wrong. In short, Father Jaki was one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century and his contributions to Catholic thought and culture will be difficult to quantify.

One of the central questions he dealt with was this: How is it that science became a self-sustaining enterprise only in the Christian West? Jaki believed the answer lay in the Christian faith, in belief in the Incarnation, and his life work was to show why this was so.
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