Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

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(Gerard, 2003).
It is true that to some church officials of the time, Galileo was thought a greater threat
to the Catholic Church than Luther, or Calvin, because Galileo challenged notions that
were in a sense, even more fundamental. Yet, only some involved at the time were anti-
Copernicans. In fact, the Copernican heliocentric theory was never condemned ex
cathedra. As the Pontifical Commission later pointed out, the sentence of 1633 was not
irreformable. Galileo’s works were eventually removed from the Index and in 1822, at
the behest of Pius VII, the Holy Office granted an imprimatur to the work of Canon
Settele, in which Copernicanism was presented as a physical fact and no longer as an
hypothesis. One must also keep in mind that the Roman Church, an organizational
culture shaped by the Middle Ages, does not conduct its affairs at the same pace as a 21st
Century corporate entity. It moves with a deliberate, methodical pace.
Pope John Paul II (1920-2005) revisited this matter, asking the Pontifical Academy of
Sciences in 1979 to study the celebrated case. They reported to the Pope eleven years
later, on October 31, 1992, acknowledging the ‘errors’ of the Cardinals who judged
against Galileo centuries earlier (Ross, 1989:21). Contrary to popular and often very
inaccurate accounts at the time, Pope John Paul II was not admitting defeat, or the errors
of his predecessors. Rather, the matter had been officially ‘closed’ since at least 1741
when Benedict XIV and the Inquisition granted an imprimatur to the first edition of the
Complete Works of Galileo. Following the guidelines of the Second Vatican Council,
Pope John Paul II wished to make clear from this, that science has a legitimate freedom in
its own sphere, and that this freedom was unduly violated by Church authorities of the
time. He said further that the entire matter involved a “tragic mutual incomprehension”
(Ross, 1989:21), where both sides were at fault that the conflict should never have
happened, for in proper light, faith and science are never at odds.
The story has often been used as a bludgeon against Christianity and the Catholic
Church. Interestingly, revisiting the matter in the early 1990’s added fuel to
contemporary controversies involving homosexuality, cloning, abortion, pornography,
etc. As is so common in contemporary debates, the church is misrepresented as being at
war with ‘enlightened’ thought and science. A fair-minded assessment of the historical
University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa