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Didn't the Church Persecute Galileo for Science?

The Short Answer

In 1633 the Roman Inquisition condemned Galileo Galilei for defending the view that the earth moves around the sun, forced him to recant, and placed him under house arrest for the rest of his life. That was a real injustice, and St John Paul II acknowledged in 1992 that the theologians who judged him were wrong. But the popular legend, that Galileo was tortured and imprisoned in a dungeon for proving that the earth moves, by a Church hostile to all science, is not accurate. The scientific proof was not yet available, Galileo was never tortured, and the case was shaped as much by personalities and politics as by doctrine. It was a failure, not the pattern of the Church’s relationship with science.

The case is still cited as the definitive proof that faith and science are at war. It deserves to be told accurately, including where the Church went wrong.

What the Church Does and Does Not Claim

The Church does not claim:

The Church does claim that faith and reason cannot truly conflict, “because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God” (CCC 159), and that apparent conflicts come from misunderstanding one side or the other.

What Happened

The discoveries

In 1610 Galileo used his improved telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus and the mountains of the moon. These discoveries undermined the old earth-centred astronomy of Ptolemy. The Jesuit astronomers of the Roman College confirmed his observations in 1611 and honoured him.

But the observations did not prove that the earth moved. The system of Tycho Brahe, in which the planets circle the sun while the sun circles the earth, fitted them equally well. And there was a strong objection to the earth’s motion: if the earth moved, the positions of the stars should appear to shift over the year. That shift, stellar parallax, was not detected until 1838.

Bellarmine and 1616

Galileo argued, in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615), that Scripture teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go, a line he credited to Cardinal Baronius. In principle, the Church agrees.

St Robert Bellarmine, the leading theologian in Rome, set out his view in a letter to the Carmelite Paolo Foscarini in 1615. Speaking of the sun-centred system as a mathematical hypothesis was perfectly acceptable, he said. If a true demonstration were found that the earth moves, the passages of Scripture that seemed to say otherwise would have to be explained with great care, and we should say we did not understand them rather than call false what had been demonstrated. But he did not believe such a demonstration existed, and until it did, he held that Scripture should be read in its traditional sense.

In 1616 the Congregation of the Index suspended Copernicus’s book “until corrected,” and Bellarmine, on the pope’s instructions, told Galileo privately that he must not hold or defend the Copernican view. Bellarmine also gave Galileo a certificate stating that he had not been made to abjure or do penance. Bellarmine died in 1621.

The trial of 1633

In 1632 Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which argued strongly for the earth’s motion and put an argument dear to Pope Urban VIII, formerly his friend and admirer, into the mouth of a character called Simplicio. The pope felt betrayed. Galileo was summoned to Rome, tried by the Inquisition, found “vehemently suspected of heresy,” and made to abjure. He spent his last years under house arrest at his villa near Florence, where he wrote his most important scientific work, Two New Sciences, and died in 1642.

Common Objections

”Galileo was tortured and thrown into a dungeon.”

He was not. He was threatened with torture as a formality of the procedure, but not tortured. During the trial he was lodged in comfortable apartments, and afterwards confined to his own villa. The famous words “And yet it moves” are almost certainly a later legend.

”Galileo had proved that the earth goes around the sun.”

He had strong evidence against the old system, but not proof of his own. His main argument, from the tides, was wrong, and he rejected Kepler’s elliptical orbits, which turned out to be correct. Bellarmine’s demand for a demonstration was, in scientific terms, reasonable. Where Bellarmine and the theologians went wrong was in using Scripture to decide a scientific question in the meantime.

”This shows the Church has always opposed science.”

The same Church supported the Jesuit astronomers who confirmed Galileo’s discoveries, reformed the calendar in 1582 using the best astronomy of the day, and later gave the world Mendel and Lemaître. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Church had dropped the general ban on books teaching the earth’s motion. Historians of science today generally reject the idea of a permanent war between religion and science. (See What Has the Catholic Church Actually Contributed to Civilisation?)

”The Church has never admitted it was wrong.”

In 1992, after a commission had studied the case for over a decade, St John Paul II spoke of a “tragic mutual incomprehension,” and acknowledged that the theologians of the time had failed to distinguish between Scripture and their own interpretation of it.

In Summary

The Church did wrong Galileo: he was condemned, forced to recant and confined for the rest of his life for holding a view that turned out to be true. The theologians erred in treating a scientific question as a matter of faith. But Galileo was not tortured, he had not yet proved his case, and the trial was shaped by personal conflict as well as doctrine. Bellarmine’s own principle, that a true demonstration should lead us to reinterpret Scripture rather than deny the evidence, is the one the Church now follows. The case is a warning, not the whole story.

See also Does the Church Accept Evolution? and Isn’t Science the Only Real Path to Truth?

This article follows the method St Robert Bellarmine used in his Controversies*: state the question fairly, clear away misunderstandings, make the case, then answer each objection. Here Bellarmine is part of the story, and the method applies to him too. See How We Answer Objections.*

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