Galileo: "A Great Spirit"

Three and a half centuries ago, the Vatican's Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office forbade the Italian Astronomer Galileo Galilei to "hold or defend" the Copernican theory, which Galileo's telescopes had verified, that the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa. Galileo stayed silent 16 years, then reasserted his view more strongly than ever in his Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems. In one of the world's most famous trials, the Roman Inquisition charged Galileo with heresy, threatened him with torture, and forced him to recant. His Dialogue was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, and Galileo lived under house arrest and a revolving sun until his death in 1642.

The condemnation of Galileo has ever since been cited to demonstrate Roman Catholicism's opposition to science and free inquiry. Later, of course, it turned out to the satisfaction of ev eryone, including the Roman Catholic Church, that the earth does revolve around the sun. Galileo's works were removed from the Index in 1822, and a year ago French Jesuit Franc,ois Russo suggested that the church might also formally repudiate the unjust censures directed at him.

Last week, at the National Catholic Eucharistic Congress in Pisa--where Galileo, according to legend, dropped a cannonball and a bullet from the leaning tower to prove that objects of different weights fall with the same velocity--Pope Paul VI formally praised Galileo, along with Dante and Michelangelo, as "great spirits" of "immortal memory."

It was a graceful tribute and a fitting one: the Pope whose Holy Office first condemned Galileo was Paul V.

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