22
June 1633 A.D. Galileo
Before the Inquisition.
Graves, Dan. “Galileo Before the
Inquisition.” Christianity.com. May
2007. http://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1601-1700/galileo-before-the-inquisition-11630091.html.
Accessed 3 May 2014.
Galileo was frustrated. A web of
deceit and hatred had closed around him. As the sixty-nine year old man faced
the Inquisition on this day, June 22,
1633, he hoped to get at least two changes in the statement his judges
insisted he sign. "Do not make me say I have not been a good
Catholic," he pleaded, "for I have been one and will remain one no
matter what my enemies say. And I will not say that I intended to deceive
anyone, especially with the publication of my book. I submitted it in good
faith to the church censors and printed it only after legally obtaining a
license."
The judges agreed. They rewrote
the words of his "confession"--as they should have been. For, as
Galileo knew, most of the men who were sentencing him held his same
opinions--that the earth spun on its axis and orbited the sun.
With the new injunction before
him, Galileo knelt and repeated the words demanded of him. He was strongly
"suspected of heresy." He had "held and believed that the Sun is
the center of the world and immovable and that the Earth is not the center and
moves..."
Galileo then signed another
statement. "I, the said Galileo Galilei, have abjured [renounced], sworn,
promised and bound myself as above; and in witness of the truth thereof I have
with my own hand subscribed the present document of my abjuration and recited
it word for word at Rome, in the convent of the Minerva, this twenty-second day
of June, 1633."
This is one of the most famous
trials in history. The church often takes all the blame for the fiasco of
justice that took place that day in Rome. It had the unfortunate effect of
branding the Roman Catholic Church as anti-science, when in fact famous
Catholics of the Middle Ages (Grosseteste, Bradwardine, Oresme and others) had
done much to advance and promote science. Galileo himself was a staunch
Catholic.
There is no doubt the church was
in the wrong. A commission formed by Pope John Paul II in the 1980s admitted as
much. But was it fully responsible? There were, in fact, two other parties at
fault.
One was Galileo himself. His
vanity, sarcastic words, contempt for lesser minds and half-truths had earned
him fierce enemies among the intellectuals of Europe--especially among the
Jesuits. Galileo even fudged at least one experiment.
The second set of culprits were
naturalists (the scientists of the day). Advocates of the pagan philsopher
Aristotle resisted Galileo's findings. The pope and cardinals would not have
acted if dozens of these "scientists" had not said Galileo was wrong.
Some hated Galileo, who had hurt their feelings. Others felt that Aristotle and
the Bible should not be overturned without solid evidence. It did not matter
that both Kepler and Galileo had shown that the Bible could be interpreted to
agree with the new science. Their own eyes showed them that the sun, not the
earth moves. Galileo could not provide hard evidence to the contrary. Solid
proof for the earth's movement around the sun was two hundred years away, when
tiny shifts in star positions and subtle pendulum motions were finally
measured.
Bibliography:
1. Gillispie, Charles Coulston.
Dictionary of Scientific Biography. New York: Scribners, 1970 - 1980.
2. Hummel, Charles E. The Galileo
Connection: resolving conflicts between science & the Bible. Downers Grove,
Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1986.
3. Santillana, Giorgio de. The Crime
of Galileo. New York, Time, inc., 1962.
4. Saudée, Jacques de Bivort de la.
God, Man and the Universe: a Christian answer to modern materialism. New York :
P.J. Kenedy, ca.1953, especially p.58ff.
5. Tobin, W. The Life and Science of
Léon Foucault: the man who proved the earth rotates. Cambridge, England; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
6. Various encyclopedia articles.
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