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... On February 15, 1564, the day that Galileo Galilei was born, everyone in Europe knew that the earth was the stationary center of the universe. Both Aristotle and the Catholic Church approved of this truth, and at the time, it was extremely blasphemous to question either voice. So when Galileo published his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican in 1632, in which he more or less disproved the Church-endorsed stance on earth’s place in the universe, it was only to be expected that he was going to receive an enormous amount of criticism for doing so. However, even after Galileo had apologized for the contents of his ‘heretical’ book, the Catholic Church still kept extremely close tabs on him, and proceeded to do so until the day of his death. Therefore, the question remains, why did the church condemn Galileo with such severity? Moreover, what was it about Galileo that made him the number one target of the church, and what was it about him that made him seem more dangerous than anyone else at the time?
Before leaving to face the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Rome, Galileo wrote a letter to a friend of his in which he stated, “I hear from well-informed parties that the Jesuit Fathers have insinuated in the highest quarters that my book is more execrable and injurious to the Church than the writings of Luther and Calvin.”* Although this may seem like an overstatement at first, it is important to consider the Church’s perspective of the whole situation. First of all, Catholics of the time were expected to accept anything and everything that the Church considered true without question. It had been this way since the very beginnings of the Church. More importantly, Catholics had always assumed that there would never be any reason to question the Church on the grounds that the Church was incapable of being wrong in the first place. As the Church grew increasingly more influential over the years, its infallibility began to apply to all matters religious and non-religious. In other words, if a Catholic had a question about anything, the Church had the correct answer.
So what made Galileo more of a threat than Luther or Calvin? After all, both Luther and Calvin had not only challenged the Church’s infallibility, but had also taken away a significant amount of the Church’s members.
Approximate Word count = 1923
Approximate Pages = 7.7
(250 words per page double spaced)
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