Science is central to modern life. It is because of science that you are reading Aleteia on a screen, via the internet, not on paper, by the light of an oil lamp. This series of articles (click here for the whole series) dives deep into the story of the Catholic Church and science. The story goes back a long way. It is still unfolding today. It is not the story you might think you know. But it is a story you should know, exactly because science is so central to modern life.
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This seven-part series has been a deep dive into the story of the Catholic Church and Science, revealing an ongoing struggle to figure out science. Solid scientific ideas have prompted re-evaluations of interpretations of Scripture. The imperfect process of evaluating and accommodating scientific discovery is almost as old as the Church itself.
Questions lurk in the background, however. One of these is certainly, “What about how the Church treated Galileo?” We have seen how imperfect the Church’s processes for dealing with scientific questions can be. We have also seen how science can go wrong in ways so consequential that some sorts of processes for dealing with such questions will be necessary. Because they will involve people, they will be imperfect.
But the processes brought against Galileo were more than just imperfect. The Catholic writers whose work on evolution was the subject of complaints to the Vatican in the late 19th century were perhaps unofficially asked to retract their work. Retractions — of, for example, articles in scientific journals — are not uncommon even today. But Galileo was sentenced to prison and then perpetual house arrest. What of that?
Galileo had the misfortune to run afoul of a powerful man, Pope Urban VIII. At one time, Urban had addressed Galileo “as a brother” and had written poetry praising Galileo’s telescopic discoveries. Before the publication of Galileo’s Dialogue, Urban’s powerful nephew had said that Galileo had “no better friend” than Urban, and Urban had granted Galileo an audience. After the Dialogue’s publication, Urban would explode into anger at Galileo’s name.
Urban could deal coldly with things that angered him. Once, he had the birds in the papal garden killed when their noise became a bother. He silenced Galileo, too.
Nothing excuses Urban, but recall that the early 17th century was a different time than the late 19th century. Consider the African-American astronomer, Benjamin Banneker, who argued in a letter to Thomas Jefferson that people of African descent were indeed true human beings. The story goes that Banneker had been taught to read and write by his Welsh grandmother. She had fled to the New World to escape a possible death sentence, for petty theft. Consider Claes Visscher’s panorama of London in 1616. Visible atop London Bridge are heads, impaled on poles, of executed people. Those grisly heads were there to be seen by even the youngest children crossing the bridge with their parents. Consider that in this same time, people from Africa were first being brought to what is now the USA to be slaves. A pope abusing his power and unleashing his wrath on a former friend is a reprehensible abuse — one more in a century full of them.
Another question might be, “Doesn’t the Church always lose in these confrontations with science?” After all, despite the abuse brought to bear against Galileo, the Vatican failed to “completely eliminate” heliocentrism (to borrow the Vatican’s language of Galileo’s time). Indeed, heliocentrism prevailed. The Earth circles the sun. Scripture has been reinterpreted to accommodate, just like it was with Genesis and the “two great lights.”
No, it does not always lose. Consider the situation with evolution. Yes, in many ways, evolution has prevailed much like heliocentrism did. A striking example of the Catholic Church reinterpreting Scripture to accommodate an evolutionary view of the universe is the proclamation of “The Nativity of Jesus Christ from the Roman Martyrology,” often recited during the celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours on December 24 and before Midnight Mass at Christmas. Traditionally, this text stated that Christ was born in “the year from the creation of the world, when in the beginning God created heaven and earth, five thousand one hundred and ninety-nine.” Today, the text states that Christ was born “when ages beyond number had run their course from the creation of the world.”
But the evolution that has prevailed is a monogenistic evolution. No reputable scientists today proclaim that there are different species of human (-like) creatures like the scientific racists did in the 19th century. The “most holy dogma” of the unity of humankind has prevailed, while the work of those scientists is now called “pseudo” science.
But the unity of humankind did not prevail because of some Vatican decree intended to protect it and to “completely eliminate” polygenism and scientific racism. We might wish that a decree could have squelched those ideas and remedied “the disorder and the harm” (to again borrow the Vatican’s language) that derived from them. They and their offspring, eugenics, thrived for decades, to the detriment of many, especially those with the least power. Those with the least power needed the Vatican. They were abused by science gone wrong. Yet scholars who have studied the evolution case suggest that the Vatican’s actions were constrained by the shadow of the Galileo case.
A story still unfolding
The history of the Vatican’s efforts to confront evolution reflects the need for a process, a committee, a Congregation, even if imperfect, for confronting fallible science. The history of the Vatican’s efforts to confront heliocentrism reflects the need for vigilance in ensuring that process is not abused. Both histories need an understanding of the Church’s much older confrontation with the matter of the “two great lights” of Genesis 1.
And that brings us to a third question: “Hasn’t the Vatican apologized for all this already?” That is unclear. In 1979, the new Pope John Paul II told the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that he hoped that
“theologians, scholars, and historians, animated by a spirit of sincere collaboration, will study the Galileo case more deeply and, in frank recognition of wrongs from whatever side they come, dispel the mistrust that still opposes, in many minds, a fruitful concord between science and faith”.
In 1992 he again spoke to the Academy, after a Vatican commission had studied the Galileo case. That speech is often interpreted as a sort of apology to Galileo.
It was not quite that, but the pope did describe the Galileo case as a “tragic mutual incomprehension.” He also said that “the new science, with its methods and the freedom of research which they implied, obliged theologians to examine their own criteria of scriptural interpretation. Most of them did not know how to do so.”
“Paradoxically,” the pope continued, “Galileo, a sincere believer, showed himself to be more perceptive in this regard than the theologians who opposed him.” The pope mentioned Galileo’s famous letter to Christine de Lorraine (mother of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and occasionally de facto ruler of Tuscany herself). The letter, the pope said, is “like a short treatise on biblical hermeneutics.”
The pope did not mention the case of the “two great lights” of Genesis. According to Fr. George V. Coyne, S.J., Director of the Vatican Observatory at the time and a member of the Galileo Commission, the commission lacked any historian of science. It seems that the “two great lights” case, widely known in Galileo’s time, escaped the notice of the Commission and the pope. Theologians of that time who knew the “two great lights” surely did know how “to examine their own criteria of scriptural interpretation.”
Even the letter to Christine de Lorraine is a tricky business. Galileo in that letter insisted that astronomers must not be asked to “protect themselves against their own observations and demonstrations,” to “do the impossible.” He went on to urge that knowledgeable people “should see more clearly that it is not within the power of the practitioners of demonstrative sciences to change opinion at will.” Likewise, “no creature has the power of making [the arguments of Copernicus] true or false, contrary to what they happen to be by nature and de facto. So it seems more advisable to first become sure about the necessary and immutable truth of the matter, over which no one has control.”
It all sounds very good, but Christine de Lorraine was not doubting Galileo’s observations — things that anyone with a good telescope could replicate. She was doubting his interpretation of those observations. Moreover, the scientific racist Van Evrie (see Part 3 in this series) used language similar to Galileo’s letter:
“We cannot believe that which we know to be untrue, and to affect such belief however good the motive may seem, must necessarily debauch and demoralize the whole moral structure.... The fact of distinct races or rather the existence of species of Caucasian, Mongols, Negroes, etc., are physical facts, subject to the senses, and it is beyond the control of the will to refuse assent to their actual presence…. [We must] bow to that fixed and immutable standard of truth which the Eternal has planted in the very heart of things.”
Imperfection has been central to our story of the Catholic Church and science, so it should not be a surprise to find that even John Paul II’s Galileo Commission, the process he put in motion to evaluate the processes of evaluating science, should be imperfect. Thus, the story is still unfolding today as we consider overlooked parts of the story that go way back, like the “two great lights.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that true science “can never conflict with faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God [CCC 159].” With both scientists and Churchmen being imperfect, it is that “true” part that is so difficult. Around this matter of science so much of the Church-and-science story has seemed to unfold, and no doubt will continue to unfold.
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This series is based on the paper “The Vatican and the Fallibility of Science”, presented by Christopher M. Graney at the “Unity & Disunity in Science” conference at the University of Notre Dame, April 4-6, 2024. The paper, which is available through ArXiv (click here), contains details and references for the interested reader.
The paper, and this Aleteia series, expands on ideas developed by Graney and Vatican Observatory Director Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J. in their 2023 book, published by Paulist Press, When Science Goes Wrong: The Desire and Search for Truth (click here).
This last part of the series also draws from George V. Coyne, “The Church’s Most Recent Attempt to Dispel the Galileo Myth” in G. Teres (ed.), Faith and Knowledge: Towards a New Meeting of Science and Theology (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2007), 146-170; partially reprinted in C. M. Graney (ed.), From the Director: Selected Works of Fr. George V. Coyne, S.J. (Vatican Observatory Foundation, 2021), 222-239. It also draws from the Vatican Observatory’s Sacred Space Astronomy blog.
