Yesterday, the Church and the Solar System; Today, the Church and Homosexuality

This is from the January 26 issue of The Tablet [London].  Just as the Church was once wrong about the the nature of the solar system, it is now wrong about the nature of homosexuality.  I wonder what some future historian will make of the parallels?  By the way, the esteemed Ernan McMullin, editor of the book under review, is an Irish priest and longtime member of Notre Dame's Department of Philosophy.

Lead Book Review

Sins of the Commission

The Church and Galileo
Ed. Ernan McMullin
University of Notre Dame Press, £23..50
Tablet bookshop price £21.60.

In 1633, the Holy Office found Galileo to be “vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of having held and believed that the Sun is the centre of the world and immoveable”, and this despite a formal warning in 1616 that he must do no such thing. On his knees before the cardinals, Galileo swore an oath in which he abjured this and other errors and heresies; he promised to do nothing in future to give rise to such a suspicion. The penalty for breaking this oath would be death by burning.

The wound the Church thereby inflicted on herself has done incalculable harm. No matter the glorious history of Jesuit astronomers down the centuries; no matter that the papal residence in Castel Gandolfo has two telescopic domes on the roof; no matter that the Vatican Observatory now boasts a major telescope in Arizona: the treatment of Galileo is cited day by day as proof that the Church fears science.

The Galileo Affair, as it has come to be known, took place at a pivotal moment in the histories of both astronomy and of the Church. The task of mathematical astronomers since antiquity had been to save the appearances, to devise geometrical models for the planetary motions that would allow the calculation of accurate tables. That a model – Ptolemy’s or Copernicus’ – worked well for this purpose was no reason for supposing that it corresponded to the underlying reality. But Kepler in 1609 set astronomy on a new path, from the how to the why, from saving the appearances to discerning the physical truth about the heavens. This led in 1687 to Newton’s Principia, after which it would be foolish to maintain that the massive Sun orbited the tiny Earth.

Galileo wished his Church to be in the forefront of the new movement, but his judges understood nothing of this. What they did understand was that when Christ was quoted as saying, “This is my Body”, Protestant reformers had chosen not to take his words at face value. This was no time for invoking the Augustinian doctrine of “accommodation”, that the sacred author was using words accommodated to the understanding of his readers; and yet this was exactly what Galileo was doing when he argued that, despite Joshua’s report that God made the Sun stand still for a very special purpose, in fact it never did anything else but stand still.

The episode is hugely complex, and never a year passes without yet more books on the subject. It was therefore greatly to the credit of John Paul II in 1979 that he asked for a commission to explore the affair in depth, in order to lay the matter to rest by arriving at “a loyal recognition of wrongs from whatever side they come”.

The project was ill-fated from the start. It seems that the members of the resulting Galileo Commission were chosen for the positions they held, not for their knowledge of Galileo (the only member with some expertise in the history of astronomy being Fr George Coyne SJ, director of the Vatican Observatory). One member was soon appointed to a major see and so attended only the first meeting. Others suffered ill-health, among them the president, and it is probably because of his indisposition that after 1983 the commission never once met. A number of historical studies were published under the auspices of an editorial board that included this reviewer, but otherwise the work languished.

Eventually the authorities thought it time to bring the project to some sort of conclusion. Confronted by a subject of such immense complexity, even a well-informed and hard-working commission might have struggled to reach an agreed verdict. It was Cardinal Paul Poupard who drew the short straw. On 31 October 1992, he read out at a Vatican ceremony what purported to be the commission’s findings. They were in fact no such thing: Fr Coyne, for one, had not been consulted and knew nothing of what Poupard was to say.

The “findings” laid the blame not on any of the Church authorities involved but on (unnamed) theologians. According to Poupard, when the motion of the Earth was scientifically proved, which he bizarrely dates to 1741, the Church quickly responded by authorising an edition of Galileo’s opera omnia, and by removing from the Index works advocating the heliocentric theory. In fact, the 1744 edition of the opera had to omit Galileo’s brilliant work on the interpretation of Scripture, now recognised as a classic statement of the Church’s position; and his Dialogo, the book for which he was condemned, could be included only if it was prefaced with both the Holy Office decree and Galileo’s oath of recantation, and further doctored to make the work appear hypothetical. And when the 1757 edition of the Index appeared, Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, Kepler’s Epitome and Galileo’s Dialogo were there, just as before. So much for the Vatican’s eighteenth-century response to the advance of science, and so much for the disinterested scholarship of the twentieth-century “findings”.

Historians worldwide were dismayed by Cardinal Poupard’s address, and by the speech written for the Pope to read in response. Eventually, a conference of Galileo scholars was held at Notre Dame University in 2002. The resulting volume, edited by Fr Ernan McMullin, a leading scholar in the field, must serve in place of the findings of the Galileo Commission. It is a splendid work. Many of the chapters are definitive of our present understanding of these very complex issues, and Fr McMullin’s summary of the affair is itself worth the cover price. All but one of the contributions deal with times past, but Fr Coyne tells the depressing story of the official Commission as far as he has been able to determine it. He concludes: “The picture given in the discourses of October 31, 1992, does not stand up to historical scrutiny … In fact it was the Congregation of the Index, the Congregation of the Holy Office, and Paul V who enacted a hasty decree in 1616, and the Congregation of the Holy Office and Urban VIII who proclaimed a hasty condemnation of Galileo in 1633.”

When the Galileo Commission was constituted in 1981, Poupard was named head of one section and Coyne head of another. They have come to very different conclusions. I, and most historians, believe the evidence supports Coyne. If so, the Vatican has lessons to learn from the Galileo Affair concerning the proper exercise of authority in the Church today.

Michael Hoskin