Since Monday – with a
Wednesday break for fainting-spells and dramatic weight-loss – we've been
looking at and deconstructing a vicious, anti-Catholic broadside:
Let's take a look at it from
the very first line.
roman
catholic PLAGUE
Ah, yes – the plague that
kept literacy and science alive for a thousand years; that gave us the
university system; that even today is ministering to the poorest of the poor,
the elderly, the terminally ill.
What else do you have, John?
it took
the popes in Rome two hundred years to admit that Galileo was right and indeed
it is the earth that goes around the sun
If I roll my eyes right now,
I'll leave the impression I'm not taking Wojnowski's cesspit of accusations
seriously… so I won't roll them. Instead, since he doesn't research his
ignorant parrotings – which I demonstrated to be the case yesterday with a
five-minute search online – let's do some more research for him.
Folks, read this article:
"The Galileo Affair",
by George Sims Johnston. For those of you no more inclined to get to the bottom
of scandalous whispers, I'm also providing some of the main points. Right away,
let's blow away lie that about taking two hundred years; Johnston leads off his
article by pointing out that, in fact, "[t]hat particular debate,
so far as the Church was concerned, had been closed since at least 1741[,] when
Benedict XIV bid the Holy Office grant an imprimatur to the first edition of
the Complete Works of Galileo". I make that to be, what, John – 108 years at very worst?
Let's defer to a more recent
Pope, John Paul II. At his suggestion, the Vatican's Pontifical Academy
of Sciences convened a group of scholars – scientists as well as
theologians – to perform an in-depth study on the matter. And they took from
1981 to 1992 to complete their exhaustive task and report back to him.
(By the way, here's another article that looks
into the matter in much further: Hugo Holbling's "The Galileo Affair"
(coincidence of titles with Johnston's)… which gives you all the depth you
could possibly want – from a slant utterly opposite to Johnston's, by the way
–, including sources… which our friend John Wojnowski didn't bother to do (with
one weak exception; tackled that one already).)
In addressing the Academy
after the study was completed and its findings presented, His Holiness noted
that: "From the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment down to our
day, the Galileo case has been a sort of myth, in which the image fabricated
out of the events was quite far removed from reality. In this perspective, the
Galileo case was the symbol of the Church's supposed rejection of scientific
progress, or of dogmatic obscurantism opposed to the free search for truth."
Echoing the Pope, Johnston
relates that: "Galileo's run-in with the Church, according to the Pope,
involved a 'tragic mutual incomprehension' in which both sides were at fault.
It was a conflict that ought never to have occurred, because faith and science,
properly understood, can never be at odds."
In his article, Johnston goes
on to detail the context – cultural, scientific, and social – in which Galileo
worked, studied, and wrote. Rather forthrightly, he states: "Galileo
was intent on ramming Copernicus down the throat of Christendom. The irony is
that when he started his campaign, he enjoyed almost universal good will among
the Catholic hierarchy. But he managed to alienate almost everybody with his
caustic manner and aggressive tactics. His position gave the Church authorities
no room to maneuver: they either had to accept Copernicanism as a fact (even
though it had not
[yet] been proved) and reinterpret Scripture accordingly; or they
had to condemn it. He refused the reasonable third position which the Church
offered him: that Copernicanism might be considered a hypothesis, one even
superior to the Ptolemiaic [sic] system, until further proof could be
adduced."
Reading on, you'll begin see
where Galileo was arguably the herald of a needless, pseudo-dichotomy that
seems to exist even today, one which – as a solidly science-grounded Catholic –
I cannot countenance: that either science is correct, or the Bible is. Period.
Wrong. While the Church holds
Scripture by its nature to be inerrant – i.e., free of error in any moral
sense; c.f. II Timothy 3:16
– she does not hold that it is literal down to the last word. I need to
take this tangent some other day, though; this alone would be a blog-posting in
itself. Suffice it for now to say that the Catholic church does not hold that
the world is some six thousand years old, created in seven days – the Bible's
not an astronomy textbook, people! – etc., etc.
Johnston's article continues
in honestly examining some of the agenda-driven, less-than-scrupulous Church
officials who threw their own weight around… hardly ones to turn their other
cheek to the inflexible astronomer, despite our Master's command we do just that.
I'm not going to recap "Galileo's
tactless importunity", nor the parade of people – up to and including the then-Pope
himself, Urban VIII – who at the time heated up both ends of the needless
argument, and the few who were able even then to show there was no dichotomy,
no contradiction between the Inspired Word, and the solid findings of science.
Read Johnston's article, and
do what Mr. Wojnowski did not do… and is counting on you not to do, either:
research it, and know what the hoopla's all about (and isn't). Galileo
certainly seems to have gotten a bit of a roughup at the time… but he was also
extremely provocative, and downright incorrect in a number of instances.
Over the centuries since
then, the Church has been getting a horrible bad rap – some through people's
simple misunderstanding and misinformation of the facts… and far too much of it
from others who – like John Wojnowski – continue to proclaim the demonstrably
twisted and long-debunked lies out of a larger and more troubling (and
dangerous) agenda.
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