The Pope’s words have come back to haunt him, and so they should. The authorities at La Sapienza University in Rome had invited him to come and speak this week at the inauguration of the new academic year, but the physics department mobilized in protest. It was at La Sapienza, 17 years ago, that Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, had declared that the trial and conviction of the astronomer Galileo by the Inquisition in 1633 for asserting that the Earth goes around the Sun was “rational and just.”
The scientists took this to mean that Ratzinger sees religious authority as superior to scientific inquiry, and seized the occasion of his return visit to make a fuss about it. Radical students then took up the cause, festooning the campus with anti-Pope messages, and on Tuesday the Vatican announced that the visit was off. It’s a tempest in a rather small teapot, but he has stirred up a series of such tempests over the years.
In 2006, speaking at the University of Regensburg, he quoted with seeming approval a 14th-century Byzantine emperor’s comment: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”
When Muslims protested, Benedict XVI took refuge in the claim that he was just quoting somebody else, not saying it himself. His defence of the Church’s treatment of Galileo was done in the same style: an outrageous proposition delivered in what he seemed to think was a deniable way.
Galileo was the first man in Italy to build a telescope, with which he discovered the moons of Jupiter — and the sight of them rotating around their much larger planet set him to thinking about the relationship of the Earth and the Sun. Copernicus had published his book asserting that the Earth rotated about the Sun more than half a century before, but a “Copernican” had been burned at the stake for his heretical views in 1600, so Galileo approached the matter carefully. On the other hand, unlike Copernicus, he had a telescope, so he could see what was going on.
And yet it moves
When he published his book in 1632, it was banned. In 1633, he was interrogated in Rome under threat of torture, and condemned for “following the position of Copernicus, which is contrary to the true sense and authority of Holy Scripture.” He recanted his views to save his skin, but they sentenced him to life imprisonment.
But there is a story, perhaps untrue, that as Galileo was led away he muttered defiantly under his breath “Eppure si muove” (“And yet it moves”). True or not, scientists see that scene as the great defining moment in the conflict between faith and reason. Clearly, so does Joseph Ratzinger, which is presumably why he felt compelled, back in 1990, to take one more kick at Galileo.
Speaking at La Sapienza, Rome’s most prestigious university, he declared that the Church had been quite right to try and punish Galileo. Or rather, in a typical Ratzinger ploy, he quoted the maverick Austrian philosopher, Paul Feyerabend, who said: “At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just.”
If you pay attention to what Benedict XVI has been saying all these years, it’s clear that he does see Catholicism as superior to other religions and faith as superior to reason. There is nothing surprising about this. After all, he is the head of the Catholic church. But he does go a little farther, believing that “Error has no rights” (in the old Catholic phrase) and that “error” is whatever the Church said it was at the time. In the circumstances, you can see why the scientists at La Sapienza University were not all that keen on a return visit.
