From what I understand it got adapted by the existentialists as well, which is where most people would hear of it. No idea how they got it from the Catholics.

Lately there have been a lot of historians working backward looking for cases of 'history is written by the victor' situations and rewriting the histories. There's a great video out there, based on someone's PhD thesis, that places David Hume in a town in Southern France where a certain Jesuit priest had recently returned from a monastery in Siam and written a book about what he learned about eastern philosophy.

So they can't prove that Buddhism caused the Enlightenment, but we know for sure that one of those guys in those coffee shops had the opportunity to spend time in another coffee shop interviewing an academic who lived with Buddhists.

Edit: it was Siam, not eastern India, and definitely Hume