September 6, 2008
VATICAN CITY – The Roman Catholic Church has for centuries commissioned statues of saints and other pious heroes. It's now wrestling with a more sensitive tribute – a monument to a man who may be its most illustrious heretic.
Nearly 400 years after the Roman Inquisition condemned Galileo Galilei for insisting the Earth revolves around the sun, an anonymous donor to the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences has offered to foot the bill for a statue of the Italian astronomer.
But nothing that revolves around Galileo is ever simple. He has been making waves since the early 17th century.
Galileo is "like a Mexican soap opera; it never ends," says Monsignor Melchor Sanchez de Toca, of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Culture.
Vatican officials had hoped to keep the statue project quiet, at least until it got beyond the planning stage. They feared its mystery benefactor – a private company – might get skittish. But word of the bequest leaked to the Italian press.
PR debacle
For the devout, Galileo has always been a sensitive subject. His 1633 trial and conviction by a church tribunal may be the Vatican's biggest public-relations debacle: It cast the scientist as a martyr to truth, the church as the enemy of reason.
Sanchez, who wrote a book about Galileo and the Vatican, thinks a statue would be a "beautiful gesture" and show that faith and science are branches of the same tree.
But he worries it could stir yet another round of finger-pointing. "Everyone will chime in, saying, 'Ah, now the church is saying it's sorry, 400 years too late.' "
Through the centuries, the Vatican has tried to correct its Galileo gaffe. It began to allow some of his works to be published in 1718. It abandoned the last vestiges of its opposition to the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun in 1835, when it removed all works advocating heliocentrism from its index of banned books. Pope John Paul II in 1992 expressed regret over what he called a "tragic mutual incomprehension."
Today, the church insists it has no problem at all with modern science, and even science fiction. In May, for example, the Vatican's chief astronomer declared that Christian theology can accommodate the possible existence of extraterrestrials. The Bible, he said, "is not a science book."
Friend to foe
Galileo and the church initially got on well. Celebrated across Europe for his scientific writings, his development of an early telescope and other achievements, Galileo had many friends in the church, which, when not pursuing heretics, played a big role in nurturing intellectual talent.
Even Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, who would later, as Pope Urban VIII, condemn him, once dedicated a poem to Galileo.
The Inquisition, a network of ecclesiastical tribunals charged with enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy, took issue with some of Galileo's early writings but let him off with a slap on the wrist. But things got more serious following his publication in 1632 of "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems."
The text defended the then-novel notion of a sun-centered universe – known as heliocentrism – that had been developed by Poland's Nicolaus Copernicus. This view, according to Vatican doctrine at the time, was "false and altogether contrary to scripture." Galileo's book presented what he considered incontrovertible proof that Copernicus, not the church, was correct.
Summoned to Rome to explain his heliocentric heresy, he eventually agreed to plead guilty to "suspicion of heresy" in exchange for a lighter punishment. Pope Urban VIII, whom he once considered a friend, denounced his "very false and very erroneous" ideas.
He sentenced Galileo to prison for an indefinite period, and his works were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books.
Still, Galileo got off easy compared with many others convicted of defying dogma. He was spared the Inquisition's more grisly punishments – burning and beheading.
In fact, he served out most of his sentence at the villas of Tuscan noblemen. Toward the end of his life, he was allowed to attend Mass again – on condition that he not mingle with other congregants.
For the Vatican, though, the affair went from bad to worse. Denouncing a man Albert Einstein would later describe as the father of modern science put the church on the wrong side of history. And when the Enlightenment dawned in the 18th century, the church found itself branded a backward institution bent on stalling progress.
Galileo became a global icon, the Che Guevara of secular science. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration named a spacecraft after him. Europe did the same with a huge satellite-navigation project.
With the statue, comes a new struggle of where to put it. "That's kind of tough in the Vatican," says Nicola Cabibbo, a physics professor and the president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. "You've got a lot of art inside there already. Some of it from great masters. So where do you put a statue of Galileo?"
From: thenazareneway
Communions-owner@yahoogroups.com
Communions@yahoogroups.com
date Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 8:56 AM
subject The Vatican's Most Illustrious Heretic
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