{"id":95,"date":"2008-04-22T20:44:31","date_gmt":"2008-04-22T20:44:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/daily-pope-question-no-7.html"},"modified":"2008-04-22T20:44:31","modified_gmt":"2008-04-22T20:44:31","slug":"daily-pope-question-no-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/daily-pope-question-no-7.html","title":{"rendered":"Daily Pope Question No. 7"},"content":{"rendered":"

Q: Did a pope really condemn Galileo for saying the Earth revolves around the Sun?
\nRead more from the papal answer man, Chris Bellitto<\/a> and his new book, 101 Questions on Popes and the Papacy<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n


\nA: The answer is yes\u2014kind of.
\n\"Bellitto%20Book%20Cover.jpg\"The thing to remember is that the issue was less about astronomy and science than authority. The pope in question was a complex man, Urban VIII (1623-1644): a very well-educated aristocrat, humanist, diplomat, patron of artists and architects (including Gianlorenzo Bernini, 1598-1680), and generous supporter of missions and evangelization, but also a pope guilty of nepotism, greed, absolutist tendencies, and poor political decisions. Some scholars think of him as the last Renaissance pope in the best and worst senses. Like some of his predecessors, Urban VIII was fascinated by astronomy and supported scientists in their work, including his friend Galileo (1564-1642), whom he had praised in print and defended from condemnation while still a cardinal.
\nAs long as Galileo asserted that the idea of the Earth revolving around the Sun was an experiment or hypothesis, he was left alone. He had been warned to do so by none other than the papal defender, the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621). With the election of his friend as Pope Urban VIII, Galileo felt comfortable in going further to state as scientific fact the Copernican or heliocentric model of the sun as the center of the solar system. When Galileo did so, he ran into trouble since it conflicted with the church notion of the Earth as the center of the universe.
\nWe must remember that the ultimate interpreter of the Bible was the pope and he would not give up this authority, especially only a century after the Protestants had said everyone could read and interpret the Bible for themselves. Galileo must have been surprised (if not shocked and even betrayed) to find that his former defender, now Urban VIII, had moved the conversation from astronomy, mathematics, and science to theology, authority, and obedience. In 1633, Galileo was faced with condemnation and chose to take back his scientific statements; he spent the rest of his life under house arrest and was unable to teach or write publicly.
\nTo jump a few centuries ahead: the rehabilitation of Galileo was one of the earliest tasks John Paul II explored, starting just a year after his election. The pontifical commission he ordered to reopen the case concluded in 1992 that Galileo\u2019s critics had misunderstood scripture and had mistakenly taken it as not only fact, but religious doctrine, that the Earth must be the center of the universe. As a result, John Paul II declared the church had made a mistake in condemning Galileo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Q: Did a pope really condemn Galileo for saying the Earth revolves around the Sun? Read more from the papal answer man, Chris Bellitto and his new book, 101 Questions on Popes and the Papacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nDaily Pope Question No. 7 - Benedictions: The Pope in America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/daily-pope-question-no-7.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Daily Pope Question No. 7 - Benedictions: The Pope in America\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Q: Did a pope really condemn Galileo for saying the Earth revolves around the Sun? 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}