A Day in Astronomy: Galileo Warned Away from Heliocentrism

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Portrait of Galileo by Robusti. (Royal Museum Greenwich)

On this day in 1616, on behalf of Pope Paul V, Cardinal Bellarmine ordered Galileo Galilei to abandon his position on the Earth moving around the Sun. The same year saw the banning of Nicholas Copernicus’ book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, which also theorized a heliocentric system. All of this was still 17 years before the formal sentencing of Galileo leading to his house arrest for the rest of his life.

It wasn’t until 1992, following an investigation initiated by Pope John Paul II, that the Catholic Church acknowledged its unfair persecution of Galileo. As The New York Times noted on October 31, 1992:

With a formal statement at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Saturday, Vatican officials said the Pope will formally close a 13-year investigation into the Church’s condemnation of Galileo in 1633. The condemnation, which forced the astronomer and physicist to recant his discoveries, led to Galileo’s house arrest for eight years before his death in 1642 at the age of 77.

And to think we complain about the slow pace of government decisions in modern times.