Bishop Anthony Fisher OP says the popular perception of Galileo as persecuted purveyor of the truth is out of kilter with the truth.
By Anthony Barich
RESEARCH suggests that Galileo Galilei’s trial for heresy was a ruse by the Pope of the day to save the 17th century Florentine astronomer from a fate much worse, Sydney Auxiliary Bishop Anthony Fisher OP told a recent Eucharistic Festival in Melbourne.
“Though many people today believe the 19th Century Whig propaganda that the trial of Galileo was a battle between science and religion, recent research supports what everyone knew at the time: that there was much more to it than a squabble over planets and periscopes,” Bishop Fisher told the festival on June 13, organised by the Dominicans. Bishop Fisher, 49, who lectures at Oxford University, cited historian Pietro Redondi, who argued that Galileo was really under attack for making ontological and theological claims which undermined the Eucharistic dogma of transubstantiation – where the host becomes the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ.
“Redondi suggests that Galileo’s trial for heliocentrism (that the earth revolves around the sun) was an elaborate ruse by his patron, Pope Urban VIII, with the Dominicans in tow; by trying, convicting and punishing Galileo with the rather light penalty of sending him home to live and practise his science quietly, they saved him from the fate of a heresy trial for denying transubstantiation”, considered to be a much worse crime, Bishop Fisher said. Other theories abound, but credible ones all appear to debunk the notion that the Galileo case was a conflict between faith and reason. Historian David Marshall Miller revealed in an article in the History of Science journal last year that Galileo was merely a pawn used by the Church for a political tussle. Miller said that Pope Urban VIII, who had been elected with support of French cardinals, was suspected and accused by Spaniards and others of sympathising with France, which opposed the Holy Roman Empire in the war.
“The apparent contradiction between Galileo’s widely publicised ‘imprisonment’ and his actual treatment suggests that his trial and ‘house arrest’ were largely symbolic gestures – the Pope’s concession to his political critics, and a way for him to demonstrate his Catholic credentials,” as some doubted them, Miller said.
In any case, evidence shows Galileo was not imprisoned, nor ‘brutally tortured in order to extract a confession from him’, as atheists and popular authors like Dan Brown broadcast.
Apologist Patrick Madrid notes that Galileo first appeared before the Inquisition in 1615 and was neither imprisoned nor tortured but received “a mild censure and was sent on his way”.
By 1633, he was again summoned to Rome to face the charges that he had persisted in promoting Copernicanism – the notion that the Earth revolves around the sun, rather than the prevailing belief to the opposite – as though they were matters of faith and provable by the Bible. He was, in fact, ‘incarcerated’ in the palace of Niccolini, the Tuscan Ambassador and a great supporter of Galileo.
In a February 13, 1633 letter to the King of Tuscany, Niccolini said that Galileo had “a servant and every convenience”. “The Pope told me that he had shown to Galileo a favour never afforded to another by allowing him to reside in my house instead of the (apartments) of the Holy Office,” Niccolini said.
Historian Thomas E Woods, in How the Catholic Church Built Civilisation (2005), says that “the condemnation of Galileo, even when understood in its proper context rather than in the exaggerated and sensational accounts so common in the media, proved to be an embarrassment to the Church, establishing the myth that the Church is hostile to science”.
Galileo believed Nicolaus Copernicus’ theory to be literally true rather than a hypothesis, but is believed to have lacked any evidence to support this; and said Scriptural verses to the contrary had to be reinterpreted.
Regardless, Galileo appeared in good standing with the Church, receiving high honours from three successive popes: Paul V, Gregory XV, and Urban VIII.
“Pope Urban VIII told him that the Church had never declared Copernicanism to be heretical, and that the Church would never do so,” Woods said.
He conceded, however, that when Galileo’s 1632 Dialogue on the Great World Systems, written at the urging of the Pope, ignored the instruction to treat Copernicanism as a hypothesis, and was declared suspect of heresy and Galileo ordered to desist publishing on Copernicanism, “this unwise censure of Galileo has tainted the Church’s reputation”.