The book actually deals with what you mentioned (minus the Irish monastaries, but he doesn't dispute that). When I said catholic church, I meant key leaders. For example, he talks about how christian "philosophers" disagreed with certain Greek philosophers and essentially burned over half of the library at Alexandria.

He contrasts this behavior with Islam interestingly enough which he shows to be more tolerant to scientific ideas and diversity (though of course militant when it came to proselyting, as it were). Other famous examples are the whole Galileo gag-order by the Pope, but this guy really did his homework and there's alot of fascinating history showing how prideful or philosophically xenophobic catholic popes/cardinals physically destroyed the only traces of much of the wisdom/learning of centuries before, since it didn't fit with their conceptions of God and the world (the earth is FLAT I tell you!!! hehehe).

To be honest Snow, judging from your posts I'd say you'd like this book, I'm probably not doing justice in reviewing or paraphrasing it...the author doesn't hate religion...just the religious men who destroyed so much knowledge. In that sense he agrees with you on one cause of the dark ages...loss of learning...and he has intriguing historical facts showing that the early Catholic leadership put the Nazis to shame with their book-burning (again, my paraphrase, not his).