But our objectors add: Not less than you need to admit that the Galileo condemnation proves that the Catholic Church is hostile to science. Some have asserted that the condemnation of Galileo hindered the progress of scientific studies in Europe. For those who don’t have the present GALILEO password, contact us. Blame them if you will for believing too strongly in a current scientific principle, but do not accuse them of any hostility to science. But to say that they hindered the overall progress of science is absolutely false, for the Italy of that period swarmed with scientists and scientific academies.
The Medici family rose to wealth and energy in Florence, Italy in the 1300s. They have been a vital family and one of the richest and most powerful in Europe from the Middle Ages via the Renaissance. John L.Heilbron, Censorship of Astronomy in Italy after Galileo (in McMullin, Ernan ed., The Church and Galileo, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 2005, p. The Pope was naturally angry at the trickery and palpable dishonesty of Galileo, and deprived the censor of his workplace. Years later Galileo wrote that this false surmise of the Pope was the prime cause of all my troubles. The number in parentheses is the player’s years within the league. Within the correspondence school of the Catholic Unity League Library -which implies fifteen thousand letters a yr-the Galileo case is met with regularly.
It proves, the outsiders write, that the Catholic Church is just not infallible; that she is hostile to pure science; that she is terribly intolerant whenever she holds the reins of power. Some non-Catholics are honest and properly-informed enough to admit that the Catholic Churchs doctrine of infallibility shouldn’t be involved, and that she is under no circumstances hostile to science. Urban VIII became hostile to Galileo and he was again summoned to Rome. Had Galileo possessed a modicum of frequent sense, he would have been content material to let issues rest. All the efforts, nonetheless, of his many buddies to have the penalty of imprisonment remitted had been of no avail.
And but despite these constructive statements we must admit that they contradict the final tone of his writings and his conversations with buddies. We predict it presumptious for any one to assert that Galileos solemn disavowal of his writings was insincere. It’s a method for difficult what consultants suppose. The one fashionable writer who holds that Galileo was tortured is Wohlwill: Ist Galileo gefoltert warden? (1887). The acts of the trial which Wohlwill did not possess in their entirety are totally silent on the matter; furthermore he escaped torture due to his age. At Bologna, a pontifical city, had been two well-known mathematicians, Ricci and Montalbani; the Jesuit Grimaldi who discovered the diffraction of gentle; Cassini, who later on was to make the Paris Observatory famous; Castelli, Davisi, and various different scholars. Two of his pals, Sagredo of Venice and Salviati of Florence, take the a part of interlocutors in the e book defending Galileos views, while an imaginary philosopher, Simplicio (imbecile) defends the Ptolemaic theory in a fashion to make it seem absurd. The e-book was printed in Venice with out the corrections of the censor, Msgr. Cardinal Barberini, that he by no means dreamed of ridiculing the Pope in his book.