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From: alt.fan.jai-maharaj@googlegroups.com

In article <oC1JD.314861$nH2.220598@fx26.iad>,
FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer <FBInCIAnNSATe...@yahoo.com> posted:

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/31/world/after-350-years-vatican-says-galileo-was-right-it-moves.html

After 350 Years, Vatican Says Galileo Was Right: It Moves

By ALAN COWELL OCT. 31, 1992

More than 350 years after the Roman Catholic Church
condemned Galileo, Pope John Paul II is poised to rectify
one of the Church's most infamous wrongs -- the persecution
of the Italian astronomer and physicist for proving the
Earth moves around the Sun.

With a formal statement at the Pontifical Academy of
Sciences on Saturday, Vatican officials said the Pope will
formally close a 13-year investigation into the Church's
condemnation of Galileo in 1633. The condemnation, which
forced the astronomer and physicist to recant his
discoveries, led to Galileo's house arrest for eight years
before his death in 1642 at the age of 77.

The dispute between the Church and Galileo has long stood
as one of history's great emblems of conflict between
reason and dogma, science and faith. The Vatican's formal
acknowledgement of an error, moreover, is a rarity in an
institution built over centuries on the belief that the
Church is the final arbiter in matters of faith.

At the time of his condemnation, Galileo had won fame and
the patronage of leading Italian powers like the Medicis
and Barberinis for discoveries he had made with the
astronomical telescope he had built. But when his
observations led him to proof of the Copernican theory of
the solar system, in which the sun and not the earth is the
center, and which the Church regarded as heresy, Galileo
was summoned to Rome by the Inquisition. Forced to Recant

By the end of his trial, Galileo was forced to recant his
own scientific findings as "abjured, cursed and detested,"
a renunciation that caused him great personal anguish but
which saved him from being burned at the stake.

Since then, the Church has taken various steps to reverse
its opposition to Galileo's conclusions. In 1757, Galileo's
"Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" was
removed from the Index, a former list of publications
banned by the Church. When the latest investigation,
conducted by a panel of scientists, theologians and
historians, made a preliminary report in 1984, it said that
Galileo had been wrongfully condemned. More recently, Pope
John Paul II himself has said that the scientist was
"imprudently opposed."

"We today know that Galileo was right in adopting the
Copernican astronomical theory," Paul Cardinal Poupard, the
head of the current investigation, said in an interview
published this week.

This theory had been presented in a book published in 1543
by the Polish scientist Nicolaus Copernicus in opposition
to the prevailing theory, advanced by the second-century
astronomer Ptolemy, that the Sun and the rest of the cosmos
orbited the Earth. But the contest between the two models
was purely on theoretic and theological grounds until
Galileo made the first observations of the four largest
moons of Jupiter, exploding the Ptolemaic notion that all
heavenly bodies must orbit the Earth.

Dhanyavaad for posting the article.

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi Om Shanti http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.jai-maharaj

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