Pope John Paul II reopened "the Galileo Affair" at a plenary session of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1979. He urged theologians, scholars, and historians to study the Galileo case more deeply and to recognize "wrongs from whatever side they come," so as to "dispel the mistrust that still opposes a fruitful concord between science and faith."
He appointed several scholars to study the case, including then-bishop Paul Poupard. After more than a decade of meetings, Poupard presented the group's findings. He first defended the church's actions. As Galileo had not yet "proved" the heliocentric system, he wrote in the October 1992 issue of the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, the church was right to give biblical passages describing the earth as immobile more weight than Galileo's theories. But Poupard also admitted that Galileo's judges made an "error of judgment" by failing to distinguish Christian faith from "age-old cosmology," and that they quite wrongly assumed Copernicus's ...
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