His crime was looking up the truth.

Those lines from an Indigo Girls song, a song I actually like a lot, display the kind of ignorance of the relationship between Science and religion that the engines of socialist revolution preach, and anti-theists swallow like free ice cream, and then spread far and wide. I call them ABG’s- people willing to believe in “Anything BUT God”

There is a common myth that the ignorant love to parrot that the Church persecuted Galileo for “being right”. Everyone believes it, and nobody questions it, but it’s dead wrong.

The famous feud actually begins with Copernicus.(1) He managed to figure out a way to make some mathematical sense of the movement of the planets, and… well, I’ll let James Burke explain it to you, he does so with great eloquence. Do watch, it’s most infotaining. You can watch the whole thing, or stop at the 3:30 mark or thereabouts.

Galileo wasn’t actually talking about anything new and revolutionary, therefore, when he published “Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo”, the tome that got him in dutch with the Church at the time. it wasn’t that the church assumed he was wrong, they already had accepted the idea of heliocentrism (Logically) but were unwilling to spring it on the public for fear that they would shake the foundations of people’s faiths. “Give us a little time” they said, “we’ll get around to it. We understand that you’re right, but you just can’t spring this on the public all at once” OK, this isn’t anything like a real quote, but.. hey, let me go to James Burke again. It’s right at the beginning of the clip, so you won’t have to watch long. One of Galileo’s sponsors and friends, Urban VIII, even went to far as to put his personal Imprimatur on Galileos earlier work, “Il Saggiatore”. (2) When Dialogo was first proposed, it wasn’t even the science of it that was questioned or disliked by the Church, it was the philosophical errors that were considered potentially heretical, and it wasn’t, frankly, until Galileo started running around mouthing off about what dumbasses everyone was who didn’t believe his thories that a WHOLE BUNCH of folks told him to www.shhhh.com. Witness this missal from Saint Robert Bellarmine: (3)

“I say to you that it seems to me that Your Reverence would act prudently to content yourselves with speaking ex suppositione [hypothetically] and not in an absolute manner, as I have always believed Copernicus spoke. For to say that you suppose the earth moves and the sun stands, all the appearances are saved better than eccentricities and reversals. This does not present any danger and is proper for mathematicians. But to want to affirm that the sun really is fixed in the center of the heavens and only revolves around itself …. is a very dangerous thing, not only by irritating all the philosophers and scholastic theologians, but also by injuring our holy Faith and accusing Holy Scriptures to be false ….

“But I tell you that if there were a true demonstration that the sun was the center of the universe …., that the sun did not travel around the earth but the earth circled the sun, then it would be necessary to proceed with great caution in explaining the passages of Scripture that appear contrary. And we would rather have to say that we did not understand them than to say that something was false which has been established.”

In other words, just say “Hypothetically” or “theoretically” in front of what you’re saying, and you’ll be fine. He didn’t listen. From Italian author and journalist Vittorio Messori

“Galileo was not condemned for the things he said, but for the way he said them. He made statements with a sectarian intolerance, like a ‘missionary’ of a new gospel …. Since he did not have objective evidence for what he said, the things he said in his private letters to those men [of the Roman College] made him suspect of dogmatism supporting the new religion of science. One who would not immediately accept the entire Copernican system was ‘an imbecile with his head in the clouds,’ ‘a stain upon mankind,’ ‘a child who never grew up,’ and so on. At depth the certainty of being infallible seemed to belong more to him than to the religious authority”*

So Galileo was put under House Arrest. Which meant…. he had to stay home. That was his punishment. Harsh, I know, but The Man really knows how to keep you down. He was murdered in his sleep by evil minions of the church died of old age at the age of 77, where the Man further punished him by… burying him in a place of honor in a cathedral (well, not at first, but eventually)

Many years later, in Vatican II, this statement was made referring(or so most think) to the Galileo incident.

““The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are. We cannot but deplore certain attitudes, not unknown among Christians, deriving from a shortsighted view of the legitimate autonomy of science; they have occasioned conflict and controversy and have misled many into opposing faith and science”

and even in our lifetime, John Paul II commented

“Like the majority of his adversaries, Galileo did not make a distinction between what is the scientific focus of the natural phenomena and the philosophical considerations about nature that generally follows it”(4)

1(A priest. Yes, I know, priests never contribute to science, because there is science and there is religion and never the twain shall meet, right? Actually, a good deal of early scientists WERE priests, as they were the most educated people on the planet. And they understood even then, that science and God are utterly inseperable.)
2(Imagine! A Pope helping a scientist!!)
3(he wasn’t, of course, a saint at the time)
*many quotes in this piece are taken from a website called “A swan song of Galileo’s myth”, which is not particularly gentle to the Church on the subject but is honest in it’s reporting of the facts.
4: John Paul II, L’Osservatore Romano, November 1, 1992

(yes, I still read L’osservatore Romano. You want to make something of it?)