Galileo, Giodano Bruno, and Wycliffe

The church's history has been marred by people within it doing great injustices and, some cases, causing great misunderstandings. To make this situation worse, the Protestant Reformation was rife with anti-Clerical movements and anti-Catholic propaganda that warped our understanding of history to a degree we are still trying to fully overcome. In this, I will be going over three oft-mentioned people: Galileo Galilei, Giordano Bruno, and John Wycliffe. I won't bore you with history lessons so I will jump straight to the criticisms and comments so please know the person before look into the criticisms.

1. Galileo Galilei


>Galileo proved heliocentrism and the church did not support him because he going against scripture

This is somewhat incorrect as there is faults on both sides.

First, Galileo did not prove heliocentrism. He still failed to answer the main objections against heliocentrism in the church community - namely the lack of the parallax of the stars. It would be 100+ years before we were able to realize there actually was parallax and this is because of a lack of understanding of just how far away the stars were. In Galileo's academic time the notion of a firmament was still being dismissed. He provided great evidence for heliocentrism but did not prove it or refute the biggest issues with the idea at the time.

Second, the church did support him often but did make a couple of these problems as well. The Jesuits supported greatly most of his findings and his discoveries of Jupiter got him a hero's welcome in Rome. The issue with him is asserting heliocentrism as truth and trying to personally assert interpretation of scripture. There was zero wrong with it being considered hypothesis (the ban on it later was pending changes that would make it not claim heliocentrism as true. It would be an allowed book if it just asserted the claims as hypothesis) and church officials (notably Bishop Robert Bellarmine) were supportive of interpretation being changed if it was proven to be the case but he never could overcome the main criticisms. Further, a person trying to teach their personal interpretation instead of the church's understandings is easily construed as Protestant thinking which wasn't going to fly at all. Granted, Galileo appealing to the original Catholic tradition of interpreting scripture was absolutely correct to do and to assert. The churchmen are at fault for thinking this was a problem of scripture and for moving away from the original understanding. That is the core problem with the churchmen at the time. The core problem with Galileo was not respecting the church's formal process whatsoever, espousing scientific theories as fact without proof, and trying to espouse personal interpretation of scripture with no authority to defend teaching it as fact.

>The church was being anti-science!

The church asked for scientific proof of his claim and he could not refute the core criticisms. The church supported and praised his mathematical models, as they were sound, but there wasn't enough for modern scientists at the time to assert the claim of Heliocentrism.

>But he was banned from teaching Heliocentrism before the trial!

Some, tied to their faith in the church in all things, tried to accuse him of heresy. It was not considered heresy but he was order to stop teaching belief as truth and causing inroads into scriptural interpretation as it was a violation of the Council of Trent. Galileo agreed.

>The trial sentence says he was tried for heresy!

This is true.

Galileo was commissioned a book by the pope at the time so to bring Heliocentrism v. Geocentrism back into the academic sphere and the pope asked for some of his own arguments to be in the book. The words of the pope were put into the mouth of the bumbling fool of the book, insulting the pope and Galileo's jesuit supporters deeply. The book was not a dialogue on the points of cosmological systems but straight advocacy of the Heliocentric model and theological interpretation without refuting the core criticisms of Heliocentrism. He was now not only promoting what got him in trouble before but doing so under a church order to abstain from it. His rejection of church authority in breaking his previous order lost him the support of those in the church who defended him, leaving him to the will of those who would call him heretic due to him keeping it up. He was placed under house arrest.

>The church banned Heliocentrism!

As I said previously, they banned teaching it as fact. You could bypass the ban by having a copy that would teach it as hypothesis, but those were made until great a while later.

>The church only said Heliocentrism was right in the 1900s!

This one is just entirely false. A statement about Galileo was made in the 1900s in a group of tours Pope John Paul II made trying to respond to Protestants and Protestant propaganda throughout the centuries (of which Galileo's story was used and misinterpreted by Protestants to attack the church) that was praising Galileo and his findings along with admitting to the faults of both the church people at the time and Galileo. This is not the church finally saying Heliocentrism is right. They dropped the ban on books that promoted Heliocentrism just as it was being proven and accepted academically.




2. Giordano Bruno

>Bruno was a martyr for science!

This could not be further from the truth.
Bruno was a priest. He was tried for heresy for being a priest while holding beliefs contrary to: The trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the Incarnation, if Jesus was Christ, the core beliefs of Mary, transubstantiation. He also believed in the transmigration of the human soul into animals and dealt in pagan mysticism. On top of all of this is also the view that the plurality of worlds and their eternity was also something he was sentenced for but this was not cosmic pluralism that he was sentenced for as people assume, as the church leader Nicholas of Cusa held these same beliefs publically. Giordano Bruno was attesting to a form of Pantheism.

>Why is he considered a martyr for science then?

Bruno's story is a quality example of Protestant propaganda. 300 years after his relatively quiet execution his story was revived during an anti-clerical movement ran by Protestants. The story of Bruno was used to show the Catholic Church and religious political institutions to be a bad thing overall and against both human and scientific progress.
The fact the Protestant telling of the story was shown again as historical fact at the first episode of the new Cosmos shows the overarching influence Protestant propaganda has had.

>He was the first to bring up the idea of there being other worlds and that the stars were suns with their own planets!

This is also false. He's sometimes attributed to that but the church leader Nicholas of Cusa was the originator of that.


3. John Wycliffe

>He was killed for translating the Bible into English!

No, as Bibles were made in English well before his time. He was considered a heretic for promoting incorrectly translated versions of the Bible without a license to be translating the Bible (you needed a license at the time) along with holding views that attacked monasticism and common church practices along with playing part in forming a heretical Protestant group called the Lollards.

>They should have not executed him when he's already dead!

No matter what you think of this, this was the secular court's doing. The church declared him a heretic while he was alive and turned him over to the courts. They did the rest themselves.