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Despite going to Catholic school from Kindergarten through 12th grade I was taught evolution and the heliocentric theory.  So I was only socially, not scientifically, maladjusted.  Maybe the nuns and Xavierian Brothers were just rebels. 

Or maybe it was just because we were discouraged from actually reading the Bible and passages like this:

Psalm 93:1, 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30 - "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved."
Psalm 104:5 - "the Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved."
Ecclesiastes 1:5 - "And the sun rises and sets and returns to its place."

On June 22, 1633 the astronomer Galileo Galilei was sentenced to three years in prison by the Roman Inquisition for teaching that the Earth revolves around the Sun.  Years earlier the church had ruled that any theory contradicting the Bible must not only be false, but heretical.

Under threat of torture, Galileo recanted. After prison, he was sentenced to house arrest for life and publication of any of his works was forbidden.  The legend is that as he left the court, Galileo muttered "And yet it moves."
As late as 1990, the Church still showed support for Galileo's prosecution as evidenced in a speech by Cardinal Ratzinger (who later became Pope Benedict XVI) in which he stated, "Her (the Roman Catholic Church) verdict against Galileo was rational and just, and the revision of this verdict can be justified only on the grounds of what is politically opportune."
In 1992, the Catholic Church admitted they were wrong in this decision.

However, is it possible that political opportunism and funding might just influence science??









Comments

  1. margaretJune 28, 2021 at 5:28 PM

    Thank you for the laugh. I had rebel nuns and Christian Brothers. Galileo did a lot of his physics work when he was under house arrest. I teach that the church finally admitted their error in 1992. Your right, we just had to regurgitate what they told us.

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