‘If only these clerics would listen to their God, maybe they wouldn’t be so arrogant in condemning people like Galileo who obviously knew what they didn’t.’
IT’S been a journey not unlike that of the Japanese Emperor. Once upon a time, the word of the Pope was law, and any defiance could mean death and/or excommunication. Today, that’s no longer so, just like the Japanese Emperor today is a revered and highly respected symbol of state and people but no longer the God he was once made to be. Today, the Pope is the primus inter pares among the Cardinals, whom they chose with the blessings of the Holy Spirit to follow in the footsteps of Peter (the one who denied Jesus three times, as the story goes).
But this more human and not divine embrace of the Pope is a recent phenomenon, not even 100 years old.
Before that, to challenge the Pope is akin to challenging God himself.
This makes an interesting background to the case of Galileo, aka Galileo Galilei or, in full, Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaluti de Galilei.
Galileo was a brilliant man of science who had his hits and misses throughout his life. He studied the stars not as an astrologer but as an astronomer and applied science in his study of things around him, and around us. He was a “good” Catholic who had children out of wedlock but was respectful of his religion and the Roman Catholic Church. But up to a point.
The big clash that led to Galileo splitting from Pope Urban VIII centered around the matter of heliocentrism, which was the understanding that the Earth, like other planets, revolved around the Sun, which in turn was at the center of the universe.
Galileo, having studied the planets all his life, was a proponent of this belief that was first postulated by Nicaleo Copernicus; but the Church argued otherwise, using the Bible as a basis to argue that it was the Earth that was at the center of the universe and all planets, including the Sun revolved around it — also known as geocentrism.
Galileo was seen as a heretic and condemned by the Inquisition after a trial that the Pope, his old friend and supporter, called for. Heliocentrism could not be accepted because it would project the Holy Scriptures as false, and that would be fatal to the Church. And so, in 1633 it was declared that Galileo’s position was heresy, and he was sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life, and banned from teaching and writing.
The story ended there for Galileo, but it does not for me. Because it only shows that even the Pope himself didn’t know how to separate fact from fiction: the fact that the Sun was at the center around which all planets, including the Earth, revolved, and the fiction (in whatever book it is contained) that it was the Earth that was at the center of the universe.
Now here’s the difficulty for the Roman Catholic Church: since God (as the Church teaches) created everything, including the Sun and the stars, then it was God who made heliocentrism a fact. But if it was then as it is now a fact, then why did the Church leaders not know? Why didn’t the Pope know what God had created — four billion years prior? Why were they condemning to death men of science who were speaking the truth?
Weren’t they in communion with God?
Which brings me to my last point: if the Pope didn’t know in the 1600s what had been a fact for over four billion years, what else do the clergy of today not know or not accept as fact, insisting instead on the fiction they talk about while condemning those who do not agree with their beliefs?
If only these clerics would listen to their God, maybe they wouldn’t be so arrogant in condemning people like Galileo who obviously knew what they didn’t.
Because even the Pope didn’t know.
