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.

In conclusion, despite Galileo’s good intentions, he was a seen as a direct threat to the foundation and legitimacy of the Catholic Church. His book, Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican changed the course of science forever, and it is seen now as one of the most important contributions to science that has ever been made. However, the book questioned the infallibility of the most influential institution in Europe, and suggested much more than Galileo had intended it to. Therefore, like many visionaries, Galileo’s genius could not be fully acknowledged during his own lifetime, or for many years afterward for that matter. In fact, it wasn’t until 1835 that Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican was dropped from the Inquisition’s Index of Forbidden Books. Furthermore, it wasn’t until 1992 that the Church formally and publicly declared that they endorsed Galileo’s theories. In the end, Galileo can be looked back upon as a martyr for science, and in a way, he can be looked at as a model Catholic.

The fact that Galileo had attempted to scientifically disprove something written in the Bible had far reaching implications. For example, if one element of the Bible had been proven wrong, it seemed like it could only be a matter of time before someone else had the nerve to prove something else in the Bible wrong. Then eventually, if enough of the Bible was proved wrong, the clergy would lose any authoritative power they had once had. In short, the Church saw Galileo as a threat to the legitimacy of the Bible, which in turn threatened the foundation of the whole entire Church.

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