One regularly repeated element in the mythic version of the Galileo story is the claim that the Catholic Church did not even admit Galileo had been right about heliocentrism until 1992, which is when Pope John Paul II finally issued an apology for his persecution. This factoid forms a satisfying coda to the popular version of the Galileo Affair, when the righteous martyr for reason is finally vindicated and the Church is shown to be an antiquated behemoth, belatedly dragged into modernity by the power of science. The true story is, as usual, more complex and more interesting. And the Church comes out of it looking both somewhat better and, in some ways, perhaps worse.

In 2009 two atheists, Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry, took on two Catholics, Anne Widdecombe and Nigerian bishop John Onaiyekan, in a televised Intelligence Squared debate on the topic “The Catholic Church is a Force For Good in the World” and, by any measure, absolutely wiped the floor with them. Even fellow Catholics would surely have found the shrill and querulous Widdecombe hard to like and the hapless Archbishop of Abuja came across as startled and confused by turns. Hitchens, by contrast, was characteristically funny and merciless and Fry was likeable and passionate, even if a bit confused on details. His gaffe about Galileo being tortured (he was not) only slightly undermined his otherwise strong case. In his opening statement for the “No” case, Hitchens had great fun with a catalogue of the Catholic Church’s many historical sins, taking as his text the Jubilee Year sermon by Pope John Paul in 2000 which asked for forgiveness for the Church’s many wrongs over the previous 20 centuries. Among them he mentioned Galileo, noting:

… the admission that Galileo was right [pause for audience laughter] about the relationship between the Sun and the earth in other orbs which came in 1992. One might say … and I won’t say it, it’s too easy to say … better late than never.

The idea that it took 376 years for the Church to admit it was wrong about heliocentrism is too good to pass up for anti-theistic polemicists. So, in an error-laden address as part of a debate on “Has Christianity Conflicted with Science?”, the anti-theist activist who calls himself “Aron Ra” concluded by saying:

There’s no such thing as a true faith. Faith is convincing yourself of things that are not evidently true and then refusing to admit when you’re wrong. So, the Catholic Church stuck to this ruling until 1992. That’s 376 years of Christianity being increasingly conflicted with science on many different fronts.

Over time the idea that it took centuries for the Church to admit Galileo was right has evolved into the claim that it not only did this in 1992, but the pope also apologised to Galileo. A search on Twitter on the keywords “Pope apology Galileo” turns up hundreds of hits declaring that there was a “formal apology” by the pope or even an “official pardon”, along with repetition that it was only in 1992 that the Church admitted Galileo had been right. So it is hardly surprising this has become a mainstay of some atheists’ grasp of history – our old friends on the Reddit group /r/atheism take it as historical gospel.

These are all references, in more or less garbled form, to the October 31, 1992, address by Pope John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences – which can be read in full here. Of course, few have actually bothered to read the address, let alone try to understand its context and meaning. But the media at the time all seemed to give it the same angle:

“Vatican Science Panel Told By Pope: Galileo Was Right” – New York Times, Nov 1, 1992.

“Vatican Finds Galileo ‘Not Guilty'” – Washington Post, Nov 1, 1992.

“Vatican admits Galileo was right” – New Scientist, Nov 7, 1992.

None of this reporting makes any mention of an apology, but the idea that “the pope apologised to Galileo” seems derived from these articles. The New York Times stresses that “the Pope acknowledged that the Church had done Galileo a wrong” but adds “he said the 17th-century theologians were working with the knowledge available to them at the time.”. It also assures its readers that “Galileo was forced to recant his scientific findings to avoid being burned at the stake”. The Washington Post is less succinct and plays up the “better late than never” angle, stressing that the Church had “has admitted to erring these past 359 years”, though it at least notes that there were earlier stages in the Church’s rehabilitation of Galileo. It says it took the Church “two centuries to begin to come to grips with Galileo’s ideas: his Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was not removed from the Index of Prohibited Books until 1835″, though it too claims Galileo only recanted “to save his life”. The New Scientist rather contradicts its own headline by saying “the Church finally admitted he was right in the 19th century.” It also makes some effort to talk to a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on the matter, the head of the Vatican Observatory, Father George Coyne, though it also manages to misspell his surname as “Coine” no less than three times.

The address these journalists reported on, with varying degrees of confusion and inaccuracy, was the culmination of a process which had begun back in 1979, when the then relatively new Pope John Paul II used another address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on the anniversary of the birth of Einstein to institute a formal Commission to focus on the Galileo Affair and its historical and theological implications. So it is worth examining this Commission and its place in the history of the Catholic Church and its evolving attitude to Galileo.

The Shifting Consensus: 1633-1729

Contrary to the smug idea that John Paul II’s 1992 speech was a sudden and dramatic new admission of error by the Vatican, it was actually a culmination of a process of several centuries of reinterpretation and response to the Galileo Affair by the Catholic Church. In fact, the reason the journalists who wrote the reports on the speech noted above did such a poor job is the pope’s speech assumed his rather learned audience at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences understood this historical context, whereas the journalists seemed either wholly ignorant of it or worked to make their rudimentary grasp of it fit their narrative of a dramatic new admission of error by the Church. The history of what we can call “the rehabilitation of Galileo” has been documented and analysed in exhaustive detail by the great Galileo scholar, Maurice Finocchario, in his masterful book Retrying Galileo: 1633-1992 (University of California Press: 2005).

Contary to the many mythological version of the Galileo story, his 1633 trial and condemnation was a primarily political affair that barely touched on anything scientific. The Church had been untroubled by Galileo’s well-known Copernican views prior to 1616, and the Inquisition even gave approval for the publication of his Letters on Sunspots in 1613, despite him openly stating his Copernicanism in it and using this as the basis for several of his arguments. It was only in 1616 that, partially in response to Galileo’s own dabbling in the theological implications of Copernicanism and his attempted reconciation of it with certain Biblical verses, the Inquisition ruled that, given heliocentrism and geokineticism (the motion of the earth) were not proven and were rejected by almost all astronomers at the time, that Copernicanism could not be taught as a fact but only as a hypothesis. Galileo himself was also given a personal injunction to drop the subject and not discuss or debate it further.

When, seven years later, a supporter of Galileo became Pope Urban VIII, Galileo saw this as an opportunity to overturn the 1616 ruling. The new pope comissioned a book from Galileo that would lay out the arguments for and against heliocentrism in an objective and even-handed way, showing that the Church’s position was founded on a good understanding of the pros and cons and concluding only that no final conclusion could be drawn. Galileo took this as his chance to actually present the Copernican position as the strongest one. He also conveniently neglected to mention to the pope the 1616 injunction that he could not “hold, teach or defend [Copernicanism] in any way whatever, orally or in writing.” His book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), purported to be the even-handed assessment commissioned by the pope, but was actually very clearly a polemical argument for Copernicanism. Its publication therefore made it seem the pope was endorsing a position the Inquisition had ruled as “formally heretical” and embarrassed Urban politically at a time when he was being attacked by the Spanish for being too lax on heresy. When the pope subsequently found out about the 1616 injunction that Galileo had hidden from him, he was even more angry. The Inquisition was told to make an example of the upstart Galileo.

So the 1633 trial was not about science. Technically, it was about whether he had ignored the 1616 injunction and whether his book was counter to the ruling about presenting Copernican purely as a hypothesis rather than a fact. But in reality it was about an angry Renaissance prince putting an impertinent and deceitful former court favourite firmly in his place. So, politics. (For much more on the social, theological and political context to the 1633 trial see “Cosmic Skeptic Bungles Galileo” and, hopefully soon, my upcoming long article “The Galileo Myths”).

In 1633 the Church expected the condemnation and abjuration of Galileo was the end of the affair. After all, the 1616 theological ruling it was based on was, in turn, substantially based on the strong scientific consensus that heliocentrism was wrong and there was no expectation that this would change. This remained the case well after Galileo’s death in 1642. In 1651 the astronomer and Jesuit priest Giovanni Battista Riccioli published his massive Almagestum Novum: a huge, comprehensive comparision of the Ptolemaic, Tychonian and Copernican systems with an exhaustive analysis of the pros and cons of each. Riccioli’s rigorous survey came to the conclusion that the Ptolemaic system was effectively debunked, but that it was the Tychonian system that fitted the evidence best, not the Copernican. This was the consensus among scientists generally in the mid seventeenth century.

But things soon began to change. A wider use of the previously neglected Keplerian model for astronomical calculations and the growing influence of his Three Laws of Planetary Motion meant astronomers slowly overcame their reluctance about Kepler’s elliptical orbits, which had previously been a stumbling block for earlier scientists, including Galileo. So, in the second half of the seventeenth century, the consensus began to shift away from geocentric models (e.g. Ptolemy’s) or geo-helio ones (e.g. Tycho’s and its variants) to Kepler’s (not Copernicus’) heliocentrism. This shift was consistently confirmed and reinforced by a succession of scientific developments that, culminatively, strengthened and eventually confirmed heliocentrism. Namely, in summary, Newton’s universal gravitation (1687), Bradley’s stellar aberration (1729), Guglielmini’s eastward deflection of falling bodies (1789–1792), and Calandrelli’s annual stellar parallax (1806).

A quick observation of those dates shows that it took a very long time before it could be said that heliocentrism was actually “proven”. But certainly by the end of the seventeenth century it was generally accepted as fact by a majority of scientists. In 1690 Galileo’s student and “last disciple”, Vincenzio Viviani, by then an old man, wrote to the Jesuit professor of Mathematics at the Collegium Romanum, Antonio Baldigiani, as part of his ongoing campaign to have the anti-Copernican censures eased or lifted. Among his arguments he noted that “scientists on the other side of the Alps … nowadays, through so many new discoveries made with the telescope, … subscribe more to Copernicus’s opinion than to any other”, arguing easing the restrictions on heliocentrism would remove a cause for these “ultramontanes” to “question the other determinations that are made here about subjects concerning the holy [Catholic] faith.” (Letter, August 22, 1690, quoted in Finocchario, Retrying Galileo, p. 91).

Of course, as already noted, the consensus was toward Kepler, not Coperncius, and was among more than just Protestants over the Alps. Viviani was making an emotional argument that was more about religion than science, though it is significant that we see here a plea for a rehabilitation of Copernicus and Galileo based on the shifting scientific consensus. But Viviani’s arguments were not persuasive enough. As we will see, churchmen – even highly scientifically literate ones like Baldigiani – had a huge relucance when it came to admitting that, perhaps, the Church had been wrong in 1633. The shift in the science was effectively complete by the time of Bradley’s observation of stellar aberration in 1729. It would take much longer for a shift in Church attitudes.

Viviani was not the first to make an argument for a rehabilitation of Galileo. Back in 1665 the French astronomer, Adrien Auzout, had discussed the reasoning behind the 1616 ruling against presenting heliocentrism as a fact. At this stage it could not be said that the consensus had shifted (though it was certainly moving in that direction), but Auzout made a number of strong arguments, and noted that even though heliocentrism had not be definitively proven, it should be acknowledged that by 1665 “this hypothesis is neither absurd nor false in philosophy, as one believed at first; nor is it in any way prejudicial to the Faith” (Finocchario, p. 95). Auzout was noting that, even if someone still rejected the thesis, analysis by people like Riccioli showed that, at the very least, the idea was a valid one.

It was not just Catholic scholars who worked to chisel away at the Church’s restrictions on heliocentrism. Though a Protestant himself, Gottfried Leibniz was dedicated to efforts to reconcile Protestantism and Catholicism. As a scientist, he was acutely aware that the anti-Copernican rulings were an an obstacle to his ecumenical program and tried to argue against them in a way that would be persuasive to Catholics. He too noted the shifting consensus writing in 1688:

For this hypothesis is now confirmed by so many reasons, taken from new discoveries, that the greatest astronomers hardly doubt it any longer. Some very competent Jesuits (such as Father de Challes) have publicly acknowledged that it would be very difficult to ever find another hypothesis that could explain everything so easily, so naturally, and so perfectly; and one sees clearly that nothing but the censure prevents him from openly yielding to it. …. It is hard to believe how much harm is done by the censure of Copernicus. For the most learned men of England, Holland, and the whole North (to say nothing of France) are almost convinced of the truth of that hypothesis, and so they regard that censure as unjust slavery. (Quoted in Finocchario, p. 102)

Again, this overstates the case somewhat and, for polemical reasons, allows the Copernican model to stand in for what was actually an increasing acceptance of the Keplerian one. But it shows how there was an increasing understanding that the consensus was shifting and the Church’s restrictions were increasingly drifting from their moorings. Leibniz was one of the first to argue that, while valid given the understanding of scientists at the time, the 1616 ruling (and the 1633 condemnation of Galileo) were “merely provisional” and so could be revised. Once again, Leibniz was not successful in revising the Church’s theological position, but the shift in the consensus was becoming difficult to ignore and soon had to be acknowledged at least in some manner by the Catholic Church.

The Quiet Retreat: 1729-1820

The response of the Church to the shift in the scientific consensus came not in any public announcement or official change to the 1616 theological ruling but rather in a number of quiet but significant relaxations of restrictions. For example, in 1718 Tommaso Bonaventura and Dom Guido Grandi sought and gained permission to publish a three volume edition of Galileo’s works, minus his Dialogue (1632) – the work that had triggered his trial and condemantion in 1633. This Opere di Galileo Galilei was published in Florence with permission from the Inquisition, though without any official Imprimatur, despite Galileo’s works remaining on the Church’s Index of Prohibited Books. Eighty-five years after his condemnation, the Church’s attitude to Galileo was beginning to soften.

On 29 September 1741 Paolo Ambrogi, an inquisitor in Padua, wrote to the Roman Inquisition for its opinion on a proposed edition of Galileo’s works, this time including the troublesome Dialogue, proposed by a Paduan seminary. The proposal was to revise the Dialogue to make it “hypothetical” and to include Galileo’s 1633 abjuration and any other material the Inquisition required. Permission was granted on October 9 1741. However the revision of the work proved difficult, so on February 10 1742 Ambrogi proposed leaving the Dialogue intact and instead addending a Preface, Galileo’s abjuration and the Inquisition’s 1633 sentence; though he also proposed to include a copy of Galileo’s theological arguments in the form of his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615). This was a much bolder proposal, particularly given the draft Preface presented to the Inquisition, while not criticising the Church, was quite favourable to Galileo.

The work was approved and in 1744 it was published in Padua, edited by Giuseppe Toaldo, with two Imprimaturs from the Inquisition; one for the Dialogue and another for the rest of Galileo’s works. Significantly, the text of the Dialogue was not revised, though some of its marginal postils were “corrected” to emphasise that the thesis presented was “hypothetical”. The proposed Preface was revised by Toaldo to emphasise that the motion of the earth was “a “pure mathematical hypothesis”; a phrase taken from Galileo’s own Preface.

In July 1753 Pope Benedict XIV issued a bull, Sollicita ac Provida, on reform of the Index of Prohibited Books. The Index was periodically revised, with new books added and others quietly removed, but Benedict ordered reforms of the criteria for censure and prohibition of works. In light of this, the Secretary of the Index, Agostino Ricchini, proposed the lifting of the prohibitions on the works of Descartes, Copernicus and Galileo. So, in 1755 one of the Congregation of the Index’s consultants, the Jesuit Pietro Lazzari, professor of church history at the Collegium Romanum, was asked to make a recommendation on the general prohibition of “all books teaching the earth’s motion and the sun’s immobility.”

Lazzari wrote a long, detailed and carefully argued memorandum recommending the prohibition be dropped. Echoing the arguments of Azout, Leibnitz and Viviani in the previous century, Lazzari argued the 1616 ruling had been justified at the time but was no longer valid. Like those predecessors, he noted the obstacle that the prohibition posed for Protestants who may be inclined to reconciliation with Catholicism. And he argued at length how and why the scientific consensus had shifted between 1633 and 1755, noting correctly that this was “mostly through the work of Kepler” (Finocharrio, p. 142). So, on 16 April 1757, with the approval of Pope Benedict XIV, the Congregation agreed to drop the general prohibition from the 1758 edition of the Index.

But this was not the end of the rehabilitation process. While the general prohibition was lifted, five specific heliocentric works were left on the Index. These were Paolo Foscarini’s Lettera (1615), Diego de Zúñiga’s Commentary on Job (1584), Kepler’s Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (1618-21), the uncorrected edition of Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (1543) and, of course, Galileo’s Dialogue (1632).

So why, given the strength of Lazzari’s arguments and their acceptance by Pope Benedict and the Congregation of the Index, was a prohibition maintained on these works? Finocharrio notes that Lazzari’s brief had been very specific: the general prohibition of “all books teaching the earth’s motion and the sun’s immobility.” His arguments had been founded not only on the fact the scientific consensus had changed, but also on the idea that the original condemnations of 1616 had been justified at the time. To remove the proscription on these five books would undermine that latter argument. As Finocchario summarises it:

For, as we have seen, the consultant was as clear and forceful in arguing that the general prohibition was no longer justified, as he was in maintaining that originally it was reasonable and prudent. To remove those five books from the Index might have tended to suggest that they had not deserved to be prohibited earlier, whereas to keep them was a reminder that the original prohibition was justified. (Finocharrio , p. 153)

Once again, the Catholic Church showed that it was not good at admitting an error. This remained the state of the question for the next 63 years. With the general prohibition lifted, devout Catholics no longer needed to pay lip service to the idea that heliocentrism and geokineticism were only “hypotheses” and acceptance of the consensus of astronomers was the norm. This was until 1820, when a Vatican official threw a spanner in the works.

The Settele Affair and its Aftermath: 1820-1979

Giuseppe Settele was a canon and Professor of  Optics and Astronomy at the Sapienza University in Rome. In 1819 he published a textbook on optics that was to be the first in a two volume work, with the second covering astronomy. This work was highly unremarkable; being essentially Settele’s university lectures on these subjects in book form. In January 1820 Settele requested an Imprimatur for his second volume, fully expecting it to be granted just as one had been given for the first volume. But this was refused by the Master of the Sacred Palace, the Dominican priest Filippo Anfossi, on the grounds that the book upheld the thesis of the earth’s motion. This came as a surprise to pretty much everyone, not least Settele, so he consulted with two senior members of the Inquisition: Dominican friar, Inquisition consultant and Old Testament scholar, Maurizio Olivieri, and fellow Dominican and Inquisition chief legal advisor, Antonio Grandi. With their advice, Settele appealed to Pope Pius VII, who referred the matter to the Inquisition in March 1820.

In a ruling that resulted in the Inquisition that had once condemned Galileo arguing in detail in his defence, Grandi adjudicated in favour of Settele and recommended that his book be published. On August 16 1820 the Inquisition accepted this ruling and it was duly ratified by the pope the same day. But, remarkably, Anfossi objected to the ruling and appealed to the pope.

What followed was a textbook case of Vatican bureaucratic wrangling, theological pettifogging and legal convolutions that are too long and too bewildering to detail here. Suffice it to say that Anfossi was a reactionary contrarian obsessed with any erosion of the authority of the Church. In a back and forth that went on for months, he argued strenuously in favour of maintaining the old conception of heliocentrism as merely a “hypothesis”, noting some fairly fringe reservations by contemporary scientists about certitude regarding the key scientific bases for the thesis. It should be noted that Anfossi was not merely some ignoramus or even just a conservative – the issue for him seems to have been more about hierarchy, bureaucracy and (very likely) some personal rivalries and animosities. As Master of the Sacred Palace he was, officially, the Chief Censor of the Catholic Church and he saw it as his perogative to ban Settele’s book if he so chose.

The whole affair was noted, with no little amusement, by the European press and the pope, keen to avoid more attention and to defuse a confrontation between the Master and the Inquisition, came to a compromise whereby Anfossi’s name was not on the Imprimatur given to Settele’s book. The book was duly published in December 1820.

The whole affair had been embarrassing for the Church and had highlighted the absurdity that any restrictions on books or publications about heliocentrism still remained at all. So on 20 May 1833 the new pope, Gregory XVI, ruled that the five heliocentric books remaining on the Index be removed. Thus the final stage in the Church’s slow retreat from its 1616 ruling was reached, though with no fanfare. Probably in recognition of the embarrassment caused by the Settele Affair, the removel of these works was done with any public notice or explicit comment. The next new edition of the Index, published in 1835, simply had no works about heliocentrism listed.

Despite this, the Galileo Affair remained a burden for the Catholic Church. As the nineteenth century progressed, the Church was buffeted by huge social, cultural and intellectual changes and challenges. Science developed in ways that led to questions about faith and reason. Darwin’s theory presented a particular set of potential problems for theology, though – drawing on the experience of the Galileo Affair – the Catholic Church wisely witheld formal judgement or official theological comment on it until the science was more or less settled. But by the end of the century there was a growing secularisation of western society which often took on polemical and sometimes militantly anti-religious forms. The Draper-White Thesis or Conflict Thesis, that painted the history of science as one long struggle against religious oppression, became very popular despite being rejected as simplistic and misleading by twentieth century historians. And this Conflict Thesis took the Galileo Affair as its central example of supposed antipathy between the Church and science.

So this is the context in which, in 1979, a new, vigorous and reforming pope, John Paul II, commissioned a re-examination of the relationship between science and the Catholic Church from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences; a commission which ultimately resulted in John Paul’s speech in 1992.

The Pope’s Speech: 1979-1992

John Paul II was both a conservative and a reformer who set out to bed down the modernising reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65 – which, among other things, led to the abolition of the Index and reforming of the Inquisiton into the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) while also anchoring the traditions of the Catholic faith in the context of a rapidly changing world. He was also a Pole who, like most Poles, claimed Copernicus as a compatriot and was a philosopher and a vehement anti-Communist who had lived through the Nazi occupation of his country, so he had strong views on freedom of speech in the face of totalitarianism. It is not surprising therefore that he decided to revist the Galileo Affair and its significance in relation to the Church’s relationship with science.

On 10 November 1979 the Pontifical Academy of Sciences held a meeting to commemorate the centennial of the birth of Albert Einstein. The pope gave an address titled “Deep Harmony Which Unites the Truths of Science with the Truths of Faith”, in which he affirmed the Second Vatican Council’s declarations on “autonomy of science in its function of research on the truth inscribed in
creation by the finger of God.” But he then turned to the Galileo Affair with a discussion of implications. He noted that Galileo “had to suffer a great deal at the hands of men and organisms of the Church”, which was a significant and new public admission by a pope or any senior churchman. He went on to call for further studies of the Galileo Affair by the Pontifical Academy, laying out three principles for this examination, summarised here by Finocchario:

[i] bipartisan collaboration between the Galilean scientific side and the ecclesiastical religious side; [ii] open mindedness on the part of each to its own wrongs and the merits of the other side; and [iii] validation of the harmony between science and religion. (Finocchario, pp. 340-41)

These were to be the principles that guided the Papal Commission established after this speech, though it is the third one – the required emphasis on the assumed harmony between science and religion – that is significant for any understanding of that Commission’s work, its findings and the 1992 speech John Paul II gave at its conclusion. In his 1979 address, the pope supported this principle by noting that Galileo himself had believed in the harmony of faith and science, that he had explicitly said he worked to read and understand the cosmic work of God and that his interpretation of Scripture, harmonising it with science, had actually proven to be correct. This 1979 address was actually quite a remarkable departure for the Church: a marked contrast to the implicit and fairly quiet rehabilitaiton of Galileo by the Church of the previous 346 years. It was noted and commented on to some extent by the press, but not with any great fanfare and so – despite it being the first real public break with former Church approaches to the subject – it does not have the pop culture notoriety of the later 1992 speech.

The Commission that was established as a result of the 1979 speech was announced at a synod of bishops in Rome in October 1980 and the media paid rather more attention to this than to the speech that had instigated it. They immediately began the narrative that the Commission was to review and overturn Galileo’s conviction, with headlines like “Vatican Reviewing Galileo’s Conviction for Heresy” (New York Times, October 23); “Vatican Opens Study on Clearing Galileo” (Los Angeles Times, October 24); and “World Takes Turn in Favor of Galileo: Vatican Agrees to Reopen Heresy Trial of 17th Century Astronomer” (Washington Post, October 24). Journalists seemed uninterested in the actual focus of the Commission, which were the theological implications of the Galileo Affair and the (pre-assumed) harmony between science and religion.

The Commission itself began on 3 July 1981, with the appointment of its constituent membership. In some respects its members indicated how seriously the project was being taken by the Vatican. It was headed by a cardinal, Cardinal Gabriel-Marie Garrone, and supported by the adminstration of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. It was divided in to four sub-committees: exegetical, cultural, scientific-epistemological, and historical-juridical. Each of these was headed by a very senior churchman and made up of learned and able scholars. Yet, strangely, it did not include any experts in Galilean scholarship, and had no non-Catholics at all and just two laymen.

Contrary to the excited press reports, the Commission’s official remit was not to review the original trial or its findings or sentence. The commissioning letter by Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, instead declared that the Commission was to:

… rethink the whole Galileo question, with complete fidelity to historically documented facts and in conformity to the doctrine and culture of the time, and to recognize honestly, in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council and of the quoted speech of John Paul II, rights and wrongs from whatever side they come. (quoted in Finocchario, p. 344)

Casaroli goes on to make it clear that this was not a re-trial of the Galileo case:

This is not to be the review of a trial or a rehabilitation, but a serene and objectively founded reflection, in the context of today’s historical-cultural epoch.

This seems to be an attempt at correcting the media’s impression from the year before. But it also seems to have been totally ignored by the media, both at the time and, as we will see, in 1992. The Commission then began its work, with occasional meetings, much correspondence and, as several years passed, the publication of papers and several monographs. It was hindered in no small part by the ill health of its President, Cardinal Garrone, and this appears to have been the reason for a very long gap in its activity between the date of its last official meeting (22 November 1983) and the announcement of the conclusion of its work by its work a full seven years later (13 July 1990). So it was that the Commission was able to present its final conclusions at the 31 October 1992 meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which heard first the address by Cardinal Paul Poupard, who had taken over the chairmanship of the Commission from the ailing Cardinal Garrone, and then the famous speech by Pope John Paul II.

The key point to be noted here is that neither Poupard’s summary of the findings of the Papal Commission (which went largely ignored by the media) and the Pope’s widely-reported speech in response explicitly stated any culpability on the part of the Church in relation to the Galileo Affair, let alone made any apology for it. Despite the media reports and the repetition since of the claim that this is what the speech did, it actually very carefully avoided apportioning any blame, except in the vaguest terms, and did not include any apology at all.

Poupard’s report worked to adhere to the Commission’s founding presupposition: that there was no conflict between science and the doctrines of the Church, when both are properly understood. So why was Galileo condemned if this is the case? This was, Poupard argued, because of a mutual misunderstanding. On one hand, he notes that Galileo lacked conclusive proof or demonstration of heliocentrism. On the other, he says “certain theologians” and “Galileo’s judges” chose a narrow interpretation of Scriptures:

Certain theologians, Galileo’s contemporaries, being heirs of a unitarian concept of the world universally accepted until the dawn of the 17th century, failed to grasp the profound, non literal meaning of the Scriptures when they describe the physical structure of the created universe. This led them unduly to transpose a question of factual observation into the realm of faith. {Poupard, quoted in George V. Coyne, “The Church’s Most Recent Attempts to Dispel the Galileo Myth”, Vatican Observatory, 28 January 2017, pp. 1-29, p. 5)

Poupard makes a similar point a little later in his speech:

It is in that historical and cultural framework, far removed from our own times, that Galileo’s judges, incapable of dissociating 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. (poupard, quoted in Coyne, p. 5)

That reference to “Galileo’s judges” is about as close as these two 1992 speeches get to being specific about who was responsible for Galileo having to “suffer”. The Pope’s speech is more vague, referring to Galileo’s “adversaries” and again to “the majority of theologians”, without pointing the finger at anyone in particular. This vagueness allows both Cardinal Poupard and John Paul II to talk about, in the Pope’s words, “a tragic mutual incomprehension” without zeroing in on who was responsible and whether, therefore, the errors of these “theologians” have any implications for the authority of the Church. As Michael Serge puts it in his analysis of the two speeches:

By accusing the ‘majority of theologians’, the Pope creates the impression that the circles of those responsible was wide. What he actually does is dilute the accusations; the responsibility no longer resides with the judges – who are also the official representatives of the Church – but with unspecified theologians. (Serge, “Galileo: A Rehabilitation that has Never Taken Place”, Endeavour 23/1, 1999, pp. 20-23, p. 22)

A further awkwardness for both Poupard and the Pope was the role of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine in both the original 1616 ruling on heliocentrism and the personal injuncton against Galileo that he delivered personally at the same time; both of which were central to Galileo’s 1633 condemnation. Bellarmine’s close proximity to the events was a problem because he could not be consigned to the margins by vague and evasive references to unspecified “theologians” or “adversaries”. And it was hard to distance him from the authority of the Church, since his theological authority had been paramount at the time , also he had been made a saint in 1930 and officially declared a Doctor of the Church (Doctor Ecclesiae Universalis) in 1931.

So both Poupard and John Paul refer directly to Bellarmine and hold him up as a champion of a reasonable, middle way between Galileo and “his adversaries”. Indeed, the Pope’s speech almost depicts him as on Galileo’s side:

In fact, as Cardinal Poupard has recalled, Robert Bellarmine, who had seen what was truly at stake in the debate, personally felt that, in the face of possible scientific proofs that the earth orbited round the sun, one should ‘interpret with great circumspection’ every biblical passage which seems to affirm that the earth is immobile and ‘say that we do not understand, rather than affirm that what has been demonstrated is false’. (Papal Address to the Plenary Session, 1992)

This is referring to a key phrase in Bellarmine’s 1615 “Letter to Foscarini”, which famously lays out his reasoning for the 1616 ruling on heliocentrism:

I say that if there were a true demonstration [of Copernicanism] then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary and say rather that we do not understand them, rather than that what is demonstrated is false.

But as Coyne points out in his critique of the two 1992 speeches, neither Poupard nor John Paul bother to quote the very next line: “But I will not believe there is any such demonstration until it is shown to me.” Bellarmine’s reasoning here did leave the door open for a future demonstration (if only just), but to present him as somehow reasonably witholding judgement is a distortion. As Coyne notes:

The final report [by Poupard] interprets Bellarmine as saying that, as long as there are no proofs for the movement of the Earth about the Sun, it is necessary to be cautious in interpreting Scripture. What Bellarmine actually says is that, should proofs be had, then we must go back and reinterpret Scripture. The difference is: Bellarmine did not say: “Theologians should be cautious now in interpreting Scripture in expectation that proofs for Copernicanism might appear” but rather: “If a proof were to appear, then on that day in the future theologians would have to be cautious in interpreting Scripture.” (Coyne p.7, his emphasis)

So far from overtly accepting responsibility for what happened, these two speeches put as much rhetorical distance as possible between the Galileo Affair and any implications for the authority of the Church. Serge puts his finger very precisely on the contradiction that the speeches try to obscure:

The problem is obvious: either Catholic theology, independently of time, allows room for science, including scientific mistakes, in which case Saint Robert Bellarmine was wrong, or, if he was right, there must be some incongruity between Catholic theology in Galileo’s day and theology today. (Sege, p. 22)

So the fact these speeches skip around this issue shows that, whetever the pope’s intentions in 1979, the 1992 conclusion of the Commission ended with results that were vague and slightly evasive.

Conclusions

History is never neat and almost never resolves itself into material for witty quips, not at least without substantial simplification. Hitchens also never bothered much with checking historical facts, which usually got in the way of his getting the laughs his rhetoric relied on. The story that the Vatican took 376 years to admit it was wrong about heliocentrism and was forced to apologise to Galileo is funny, but it is also not what happened.

The real story is, as ever, far more complicated and nuanced and not as easily played for chuckles. The Church based its stance in 1616 and its condemnation of Galileo in 1633 on the scientific consensus of the time. That consensus shifted over the next thirty to fifty years and so it took the Church (never the most agile of institutions) some more decades to begin its slow, quiet and sometimes institutionally reluctant process of reversing its ruling and the consequences of it.

The slowness and also the backroom nature of this process was due, in no small part, to the problem of an institution that pretends to infallible theological authority dealing with the awkward fact it had backed the wrong horse. This means that not only did the 1992 speech by Pope John Paul not actually admit an error and apologise for it, but it danced around the fact of the error, attributing it to a vague penumbra of “theologians” and distancing it as far as possible from Pope Urban VIII, Saint Robert Bellarmine and, most importantly, the modern post-Vatican II Catholic Church. So, in the end, the Church comes out, in some respects, looking worse than Hitchens’ quip implies.

Further Reading

George V. Coyne, “The Church’s Most Recent Attempts to Dispel the Galileo Myth”, Vatican Observatory, 28 January 2017, pp. 1-29

Maurice A. Finocchario, Retrying Galileo: 1633-1992 (University of California Press: 2005).

Michael Serge, “Galileo: A Rehabilitation that has Never Taken Place”, Endeavour 23/1, 1999, pp. 20-23