Much appreciate your scholarly view on it.
Maybe I”ll write the guy and ask for his sources.
Christ will probably return first but shouldn’t hurt.
May our Lord return soon!
The way they tell it to us (in the Episcopal seminary, that is), there was an intellectual explosion around the 1200’s. We mostly don’t appreciate that the Muslims weren’t “over there”, but rather, just down the road a piece.
(I cannot recommend the Penguin Atlas of the middle ages- or whatever they call it— enough. It’s really inexpensive, like $20, and it shows how chaotic things were all around the Mediterranean and through Europe.)
So there was great intellectual ferment shared by the “Abrahamic religions” because all three were strongly represented in what we now call Spain. And the Muslims had all the good Greek stuff.
(I am kind of on fire today because this is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, and a bunch of my lay Dominican friends made life vows today. My life vows, God willing, are next year. Anyway it was a great service with TWO totally awesome sermons, and I’m fired up!)
So this explosion of thought SEEMS to have happened because of texts the Muslims shared with us.(And it’s interesting and sad to report that the best Muslim thinkers and scholars were generally condemned by Islam as a whole.) So IF the Vatican had the texts and were sitting on them we have to come up with a plausible reason why. And it sure didn’t work!
And, for us, though Aquinas was not without his opponents while he lived and, after he died, Albert the Great came to defend his thought at an inquisition, he is the “Angelic Doctor” (doctor = teacher) because of the clarity and comprehensiveness of his thought and the depth of his piety as shown by his hymns.