Priest’s ‘silencing’ recalls Galileo

The silencing of Fr Tony Flannery (Irish Examiner, Thursday, Jan 24) brings to mind another who spent a lifetime pursuing independent thought and conscience in defiance of the Catholic Church – Galileo.

In 1616 the Sacred Congregation of the Index suspended Copernicus’s book De Revolutionibus (which proposed the heliocentric model that the earth moved around the sun) for the reason that “it was false and contrary to Holy Scripture”. The suspension was in place until astronomers had made corrections to their copies of the book. According to Dava Sobel’s book Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love, Galileo made the corrections to his copy of the book very lightly.

However, at the time, he was concerned about his reputation with astronomers in northern Europe (many of whom, he knew, had not even bothered to make the corrections to their copies of De Revolutionibus) so he made sure to communicate to them that Italian astronomers, such as himself, could tolerate the ‘cognitive dissonance’ of admiring Copernicus on a theoretical level while rejecting him theologically.

In 1933, the year after the publication of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which presented supporting arguments for the heliocentric model, Galileo was sentenced to formal imprisonment at the pleasure of the Inquisition and later commuted to house arrest for the rest of his life.

In the year 2000, the same year that Galileo’s Daughter was published, Pope John Paul II issued a formal apology for mistakes committed by some Catholics in the previous 2,000 years of the Catholic Church’s history, including the trial of Galileo.

Alison Hackett

Dun Laoghaire

Co Dublin