John Paul II and Galileo
Pope John Paul II will be remembered for his courageous call
to examine the "dark pages" in the Church’s history
what he has called its "deviations from the Gospel." To
start off this work, John Paul II announced the reopening of the
Galileo case at a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
during a commemoration of Albert Einstein on November 10, 1979.
Galileo, the Florentine mathematician, astronomer and physicist,
had held and taught Copernicus’s theory that the sun was center
of the solar system. The Church condemned Galileo, forcing him to
publicly retract his views. Centuries later, this issue is still
considered typical of the Church’s relationship with science.
John Paul II instituted a pontifical commission to study the
Galileo controversy. The commission explored the Galileo case from
four distinct areas of study: exegetical, cultural, scientific and
epistemological, and historical and juridical. Their work was finished
in 1992. On October 31st, Cardinal Poupard delivered
the final report during a papal audience. The fifth paragraph reads:
Certain theologians, Galileo’s contemporaries, being
heirs of a unitary concept of the world universally accepted until
the dawn of the seventeenth century, failed to grasp the profound,
non-literal meaning of the Scriptures when they described the physical
structure of the created universe. This led them unduly to transpose
a question of factual observation into the realm of faith.
It is in that historical and cultural framework, far removed
from our own times, that Galileo’s judges, unable to dissociate
faith from an age-old cosmology, believed quite wrongly that the
adoption of the Copernican revolution, in fact not yet definitively
proven, was such as to undermine Catholic tradition, and that it
was their duty to forbid its being taught. This subjective error
of judgment, so clear to us today, led them to a disciplinary measure
from which Galileo had much to suffer. These mistakes must be frankly
recognized, as you, Holy Father, have requested" (L’Osservatore
Romano, November 1, 1992).
The Galileo case has, in the words of John Paul II, become
"a sort of myth." It was the symbol of the Church’s
supposed opposition to scientific progress and the free search for
truth. This myth has played a significant cultural role. While many
scientists understand that the God of science is also the God of
faith, many others still believe that the spirit of science and
the rules of research are incompatible with the Christian faith.
Science and faith seem to be fundamentally opposed. Yet these sad
misunderstandings belong only to the past.
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