Science: Rehabilitating Galileo's Image

Pope John Paul II moves to correct a 350-year-old wrong

During the often stormy relationship between science and religion, no other event has proved so troublesome as the Roman Catholic Church's denunciation of Galileo Galilei. In 1633, at the age of 69, the noted Italian scientist was judged by the Inquisition to have violated a church edict against espousing the controversial Copernican view that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the universe. For the last nine years of his life, Galileo lived under house arrest.

In an age when heretics were...

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