Interesting piece. However, from my background in studying Christian writing in England 1300-1700, I would say the answer is 'Yes and no, but mostly no." The Catholic Church certainly wanted to study everything but it hindered itself significantly with its prior assumptions. 1/2 https://twitter.com/AreoMagazine/status/1265968699661565953

This is, of course, a similar problem to the one we see with Social Justice scholarship right now. It's not that it isn't looking at every aspect of society in great detail right now. It's that its conclusions are necessarily limited by its ideological commitments.

They were/are both also limited by their concepts of forbidden knowledge which means there are some subjects that, if you want to touch them, you have to do so extremely carefully to avoid accusations of sin/blasphemy/thought-crime.

This is well demonstrated by this edition of an anatomical fugitive paper from 1540 with explanatory essay I did as part of my postgrad studies. https://helenpluckrose.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-woman-1540-anatomical-fugitive.html

This was a particularly interesting paper because it was written right on the cusp of both the Reformation and the empirical revolution in anatomy and its attempts to straddle both are remarkable.

So, it claims, somewhat defensively to be producing a (woefully inaccurate) anatomical diagram of a woman for the glory of God which is an explicitly Lutheran phrasing but it also covers her unmentionables with a fig leaf & explains their function in (very bad) Latin.

It justifies producing the image at some length which was removed in later editions when the country was more properly Protestant. This is because the Catholic Church did actually frown upon studies of anatomy as prurient interest especially women's bodies.

Consequently, anatomical drawing and descriptions were still, at this time, very much based on the writings of Galen who was largely speculating upon what a woman's reproductive system looked like after having dissected a female dog. This changed rapidly in the later 16th century

Anyway, I discuss the Catholic Church's attitude to anatomical studies in that essay. There seems to have been less reticence about other forms of science, I admit.

The most amusing account I read during my research for this paper that most clearly demonstrates the limitations of doing science via religion was of late medieval physicians in Christendom refusing to accept the function of the clitoris.

The surge toward empiricism was under way from the 13th century because it was becoming increasingly clear that uneducated 'trial & error' barber surgeons & herbalists were doing better at treating illness than scholars studying ancient Greek & Christian texts.

Consequently, some Christian physicians were seeking newer empirical science and, for this, they consulted texts & physicians from the Muslim world. Muslim physicians had worked out that the clitoris was an organ purely for making sex something women wanted to do.

However, because Christianity held that lust was a sin, Christian physicians were very reluctant to believe that God would have made an organ purely for sexual pleasure & kept insisting that it had some function in urination like the penis did.