The Catholic Church has never had a particularly easy relationship with science. After all, this is the institution that sentenced Galileo Galilei as a heretic for his theories on the universe during the Roman Inquisition.
Two thousand years later, the church forgave Galileo and called the whole misunderstanding a “tragic mutual incomprehension” but it remains safe to say the Vatican doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to empirical open-mindedness.