Top Renaissance scientists and
scholars gathered on a grassy hill overlooking Rome one starry spring
night 400 years ago to gaze into a unique innovation by Galileo Galilei:
the telescope.
"This was really an exciting event. This was the first time that Galileo
showed off his telescope in public to the educated people of Rome,
which was the center of culture in Italy at that time," said Jesuit
Brother Guy Consolmagno, Vatican astronomer, as he stood on the same
knoll.
The original gathering April 14, 1611, was sponsored by the world's
oldest scientific academy -- the National Academy of Lincei -- of which
Galileo was a member.
Today, the grassy hill is part of the American Academy in Rome, which
wanted to celebrate its connection to Galileo with a number of events
that included an April 7 discussion of faith and science with Brother
Consolmagno.
Christopher Celenza, the director of the American Academy, told Catholic News Service
that the Renaissance scholars "gathered here to celebrate Galileo and
the invention of what they termed at this meeting, the telescope. It was
the first time the word telescope was used" to refer to the device
Galileo had perfected in 1609 and started using to study the heavens.
The Renaissance men gathered on the Janiculum hill included Jesuit
scholars, such as Jesuit Father Christopher Clavius, who helped devise
the Gregorian calendar 40 years earlier.
Celenza said a 17th-century newsletter archived at the Vatican Library
reported what had happened that night: The men looked through Galileo's
embossed leather telescope in an effort to see what he had been
reporting -- a number of celestial bodies circling Jupiter.
Brother Consolmagno told CNS that the unveiling of the telescope was so
significant because "this is the first time that science is done with an
instrument. It's not something that just any philosopher could look at.
You had to have the right tool to be able to be able to see it,"
because one's own eyes were no longer enough.
"People then wanted to look for themselves and see if they were seeing the same things Galileo was seeing," he said.
People often don't realize that Galileo was in very good standing with
the church and with many church leaders for decades before his trial in
1633, he said.
Just a few weeks after he demonstrated his telescope on the Roman
hillside, Galileo was "feted at the Roman College by the Jesuits, who
were really impressed with the work he had done. At this point, he had
burst onto the scene as one of the great intellectual lights of the 17th
century," Brother Consolmagno said.
"Even at his biggest point of trouble, Galileo was always a faithful son
of the church -- his two daughters were nuns -- and he was friends with
many of the people of Rome, including future popes," he said.
Brother Consolmagno said the real reason that Galileo was eventually
brought before the Inquisition and found guilty of suspected heresy is
still a mystery. Numerous authors have proposed different findings and
the trial is still "a great puzzle for historians," he said.
Thanks to having many friends in high places, Galileo for years managed
to evade any problems for maintaining that the earth revolves around the
sun, the Jesuit said.
Galileo received permission, including from the pope's personal censor,
to publish his book, "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,"
he said.
"He's done everything right, he's followed all the rules and suddenly out of nowhere he's called to trial," he said.
Galileo was willing and eager to make any corrections to the text, he
said, but the inquisitors would not allow it. They were unable to find
him guilty of heresy, however, "so they changed the verdict at the last
minute to found guilty of vehement suspicion of heresy," Brother
Consolmagno said.
"All of which makes me suspect that the trial was a political setup that had nothing to do with philosophy," he said.
"The Spanish ambassador to the Holy See had accused Pope Urban VIII in
public of being a closet Protestant because he wasn't vigorously enough
supporting the Spanish" side in their fight against the so-called
Protestant side, he said.
Punishing Galileo was a way to "pay off some people who were mad at
Galileo anyway; to send a message to the Medici (the ruling family of
Tuscany) to stay out of the war; and to show the Spanish that 'look, I
really am not a closet Protestant,'" he said.
Whatever the political reasons were behind the trial and its verdict, he
said the "terrible mistake" was that the church had used its religious
authority for political ends.
Galileo's reputation was restored in 1992 by a special Vatican commission established by Pope John Paul II.