PHILADELPHIA — As a 19th-century Augustinian friar, Gregor Mendel was expected to pursue his groundbreaking genetics research with the same passion he reserved for his religious studies.

Combining those disciplines isn't popular today. Villanova University, an Augustinian Roman Catholic college, is trying to change that by highlighting Mendel's work.

The school in suburban Philadelphia will declare the Year of Mendel starting this fall and is sponsoring an exhibit on his work at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Since 1928, Villanova has given out its annual Mendel Medal to scientists who balance religious conviction and scientific progress.

"Saint Augustine talked about the pursuit of ... knowledge and truth," said the Rev. Kail Ellis, dean of Villanova's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "Certainly the sciences (are) a key part of our knowledge and our ability to function in the world."

This year's medal recipient, the Rev. George V. Coyne, directed the Vatican Observatory for 28 years until retiring in 2006. An astronomer and astrophysicist, Coyne pointed to the very existence of the observatory as evidence that the church sees faith and science as compatible.

"The same God that created the universe that I study as a scientist is the God who spoke to the Jewish people of old," he said.

But shrill voices from both the scientific and religious communities have created a tense climate for researchers in the United States, said Francis Collins, outgoing director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and recipient of the Mendel Medal in 1998.

Collins said extremes in the debate can be seen in recent books by atheists who excoriate religions and in the new creationism museum in Petersburg, Ky., that has attracted more than 400,000 visitors since it opened a year ago.

"Mendel would be horrified to see the way in which people are being asked to make a choice between God and science," Collins said. "That's an unnecessary choice."

Collins is the author of "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief."

Catholics are more likely than other Americans to believe in evolution. A survey last year by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 58 percent of Catholics believe in evolution, compared with 48 percent of the nation as a whole.

Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Austria has affirmed that the Catholic Church rejects creationism. In a 2007 speech in New York, he said that "the first page of the Bible is not a cosmological treatise about the coming to be of the world in six days." He also said that "the Catholic faith can accept" the possibility that God uses evolution as a tool. But he said science alone cannot explain the origins of the universe.

Mendel's genetics research literally grew from 28,000 pea plants in his abbey garden in what is now the Czech Republic, and his own notated copy of "On the Origin of Species" — Charles Darwin's book on evolution — is included in the exhibit.