Galileo Affair - Modern Catholic Church Views

Modern Catholic Church Views

In 1758 the Catholic Church dropped the general prohibition of books advocating heliocentrism from the Index of Forbidden Books. It did not, however, explicitly rescind the decisions issued by the Inquisition in its judgement of 1633 against Galileo, or lift the prohibition of uncensored versions of Copernicus's De Revolutionibus or Galileo's Dialogue. The issue finally came to a head in 1820 when the Master of the Sacred Palace (the Church's chief censor), Filippo Anfossi, refused to license a book by a Catholic canon, Giuseppe Settele, because it openly treated heliocentrism as a physical fact. Settele appealed to the then pope, Pius VII. After the matter had been reconsidered by the Congregation of the Index and the Holy Office, Anfossi's decision was overturned. Copernicus's De Revolutionibus and Galileo's Dialogue were then subsequently omitted from the next edition of the Index when it appeared in 1835.

On February 15, 1990, in a speech delivered at La Sapienza University in Rome, Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, cited some current views on the Galileo affair as forming what he called "a symptomatic case that illustrates the extent to which modernity’s doubts about itself have grown today in science and technology." As evidence, he presented the views of a few prominent philosophers including Ernst Bloch and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, as well as Paul Feyerabend, whom he quoted as saying:

The Church at the time of Galileo kept much more closely to reason than did Galileo himself, and she took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's teaching too. Her verdict against Galileo was rational and just, and the revision of this verdict can be justified only on the grounds of what is politically opportune.

Ratzinger did not indicate whether he agreed or disagreed with Feyerabend's assertions, but he did say "It would be foolish to construct an impulsive apologetic on the basis of such views."

In 1992, it was reported in the news that the Catholic Church had turned around towards vindicating Galileo:

Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture....

—Pope John Paul II, L'Osservatore Romano N. 44 (1264) - November 4, 1992

In 2000, Pope John Paul II issued a formal apology for all the mistakes committed by some Catholics in the last 2,000 years of the Catholic Church's history, including the trial of Galileo among others.

In January 2008, as Pope Benedict XVI, Ratzinger canceled a visit to La Sapienza University, the same one he had visited in 1990, following a protest letter signed by 67 of its 4,500 academics, as well as a few dozen of its 135,000 students. The petition included a truncated version of the Feyerabend quotation and asserted that Ratzinger's reiteration of the quoted words had "offended and humiliated" them. The full text of the speech that would have been given was made available a few days following Pope Benedict's cancelled appearance at the university. La Sapienza's rector, Renato Guarini, has been quoted as stating that the cancellation was a "defeat for the freedom of expression"; Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi echoed such concerns. Also notable were public counter-statements by La Sapienza professors Giorgio Israel and Bruno Dalla Piccola.