By Peter Popham
The belief that the Catholic Church persecuted Galileo Galilei for pointing out that the earth goes round the sun was quite wrong, the new secretary of the Vatican's Doctrinal Congregation, Archbishop Angelo Amato, has claimed.
Citing a letter recently discovered in the Vatican's archive, Archbishop Amato, who heads the body formerly known as the Holy Office or the Inquisition, said it proved that the church had treated him very well.
The letter, sent by the Commissioner of the Holy Office to Cardinal Francesco Barberini in 1633, expressed the pope's concern that the trial of the scientist accused of heresy be concluded quickly as his health was poor.
Archbishop Amato told the Italian weekly La Famiglia Cristiana that the letter proved that the church's attitude to the great astronomer was benign. The idea, he said, that "Galileo was incarcerated and even tortured so that he would abjure" was no more than a legend, "transmitted by a false iconography", he insisted.
In fact, he said, he was accorded every civility while residing at the Inquisition's pleasure: "his room was the apartment of the attorney - one of the highest officials of the Inquisition - where he was assisted by his own servant... During the rest of his stay in Rome he was the guest of the Florentine ambassador at the Villa Medici".
At worst, the Archbishop said, Galileo's reception was mixed. "When, in 1610, Galileo published Sidereus Nuncius, in which he upheld the centrality of the sun in the universe, he received the applause both of Johannes Kepler, the great astronomer, and of the Jesuit Clavius, author of the Gregorian calendar," he said.
"He even had great success among the Roman cardinals," he said. "All of them wanted to look at the sky through his famous telescope." Archbishop Amato's remarks are the latest contribution to a long-running attempt by the Vatican to recast the Church, not as the persecutor but the relaxed friend and companion of modern science.
Attempts by Pope John Paul II to mend bridges with science go back almost to the start of his papacy, which celebrates its 25th anniversary in October. On November 10, 1979, at an audience to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Albert Einstein, the Pope requested theologians, scholars and historians to study the Galileo case more deeply.
The commission set up to do this reported its conclusions in 1992. Responding, the Pope admitted errors committed by the Inquisition which condemned the astronomer. "Allow us to deplore certain mental attitudes ... derived from the lack of perception of the legitimate autonomy of science," he said.
Endorsement of the truth of science has been as persistent a theme of John Paul II's papacy as his doctrinal conservatism, Vatican observers say. In a major speech to the Pontifical Academy of Science in 1996, he came close to endorsing the theory of evolution.
"New knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis," he said, adding that the idea of natural selection "has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge".
Today Jesuit astronomers man the sophisticated telescopes on the roof of the Pope's summer palace south of Rome, watching Mars as it comes closer than at any time in the past 60 000 years while the Pope sleeps downstairs. - Independent Foreign Service