Pope Flat Earth
In a speech delivered in Parma, Italy, March 15, 1990, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger endorsed the opinion of philosopher P. Feyerabend against Galileo. Ratzinger stated:
“At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just.
Joseph Ratzinger, Corriere della Sera, March 30, 1990; 30 Dias, January 1993, p. 34.
Now, Galileo was an imperfect man, as all are, but it is more than a little disturbing to say that it was “reasonable” and “just” to persecute him for his ideas. Remeber, the new Pope was formerly Grand Inquisitor of the same group that formed the Inquisition that persecuted Galileo.
The more things change, the more the Catholic Church clings to it’s medieval power and thoughts.
This entry was posted at 11:59 am on 22 April 2005 and is filed under Social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
I agree that Galileo himself didn’t fully understand his own theory from today’s perspective, and there were holes even from the perspective of the era, however, I think that it is perhaps foolish of Cardinal Ratzinger to not acknowledge that the church was still wrong, even if it was impossible to prove at the time.
Additionally, I think it’s important to differentiate between disagreeing and attempting to discredit, and locking them man up, which is what they did repeatedly.
The report is ambiguous. “Ratzinger stated: ‘At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just.’” This could mean that Ratzinger, quoting Feyerabend, delivered this statement as a quotation and without necessarily agreeing, moreover criticizing Feyerabend. Why don’t you just quote the article from Corriere della Serra?
Responder #1 Wostenberg appears ignorant of the 1633 Galileo trial (as to what it was actually about), not to mention the 1992 “rehabilitation”. Advise respondents to do their homework.
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“The process against Galileo was reasonable and just.” As those familiar with history know, Galileo had no answer to the purely scientific objections raised against Heliocentrism at the time. For example, this was before Newton’s theory of gravity. So if the earth is spinning as fast as required by heliocentrism, why aren’t people flying off due to centrepital force? Why aren’t there hurricane-force winds? Now we have scientific answers; in his time we did not.
Not knowing what reasonable person would have concluded about Galileo’s theory back then, I am not disturbed with the Cardinal’s 1990 assessment that the process was reasonable and just.