A couple of recent remarks by the new Pope Francis turned some heads these days: On the plane back from Brazil, he told reporters "If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” and in a letter to an Italian newspaper he wrote “You ask me if the God of the Christians forgives those who don’t believe and who don’t seek the faith. I start by saying – and this is the fundamental thing – that God’s mercy has no limits if you go to him with a sincere and contrite heart. The issue for those who do not believe in God is to obey their conscience."
Long perceived as the stodgy, gloomy, ultra-conservative old guard of Christian faith, you might be surprised, but such remarks are in total agreement with the Catholic Church's doctrinal stand for at least the past 50 years, if not longer. In the Vatican II Council (1962-1965)'s "Dogmatic Constitution on the Church" it states:
"Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience."
Sounds a bit drab and stuffy still, but quite a contrast to the bible thumping "believe or burn in hell" shouts coming from some Evangelical Protestants sometimes.
The Catholic Church is also often times accused of anti-rationalism and suppressing scientific development throughout the Medieval Europe period (500-1500 AD), the so-called Dark Ages between the end of Western Roman Empire and the beginning of Renaissance and modern Age of Enlightenment.
The truth of the matter is even though early Christianity did have concern about "pagan knowledge" from the Greek philosophers and their Roman successors, it soon accepted that just as God had given the Jews a special insight into spiritual matters, so He had given the Greeks a particular insight into things scientific, and that if the cosmos was the product of a rational God then it could and should be apprehended rationally. Throughout medieval history, the Church was actually the greatest promoter and sponsor of early universities and "natural philosophy" study all over Europe and laying the foundations for the rise of modern science as we know it, according to historical records and scholastic studies.
How about that infamous "trial of the century" "Religion vs Science" persecution against the great astronomer/physicist Galileo, that the all-mighty Church going after one scientific purist who insisted on saying that "the earth circles the sun" (the heliocentric theory), rather than the long held "the sun circles the earth" (the geocentric theory) view of the world?
To begin with, Galileo did not "invent" the heliocentric theory, nor was he the first to propose it. It was proposed by another astronomer/mathematician Copernicus 32 years before he was born, and was among a few world models suggested by many "natural philosophers" (later called "scientists") at that time. What Galileo brought into the debate was his observation through his telescope (that he did invent) of the phases of Venus and satellites orbiting Jupiter.
Due to the lack of convincing evidences and opposition from many of fellow natural scientists at that time, the Church decided to stand by its traditional geocentric position--which incidentally was one of the pagan Aristotelian ideas that the early Church adopted--and ordered Galileo in 1616 not to "hold, teach, or defend in any manner" the Copernican theory regarding the motion of the earth. Galileo obeyed the order for seven years, partly to make life easier and partly because he was a devoted Catholic.
Things made an interesting turn, however, when Galileo's long time friend and admirer Cardinal Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII in 1623. He allowed Galileo to pursue his work on astronomy and even encouraged him to publish it, on condition it be objective and not advocate Copernican theory. In 1632, Galileo published a book titled "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems", in which he used three fictional characters engaging in an imaginary conversation. One character, who would support Galileo's side of the argument, was brilliant. Another character would be open to either side of the argument. The final character, with a pejorative name Simplicio ("fool" in Italian), was dogmatic and foolish, representing all of Galileo's enemies who ignored any evidence that Galileo was right. Worse yet, whether knowingly or deliberately, Galileo put some of the arguments used by Urban VIII into the mouth of Simplicio.
Angered by this, the Pope effectively withdrew his support for Galileo and allowed him to be tried by the Inquisition for breaking his agreement of 1616 in the way he argued in the Dialogue. The Inquisition found that he had and he was punished for this. He was placed under house arrest in his villa in Florence for the remaining nine years of his life, where he completed several of his most important works before he died.
In retrospect, the Catholic Church did not (and does not) teach that the Bible had to be interpreted literally. The Catholic Church, then and now, taught that any given Bible verse or passage could be interpreted via no less than four levels of exegesis--the literal, the allegorical/symbolic, the moral and the eschatological. Of these, the literal meaning was generally regarded as the least important. This also meant that a verse of Scriptures could be interpreted via one or more of these levels and it could potentially have no literal meaning at all and be purely metaphorical or symbolic.
All this means that the Church was quite capable of changing its interpretations of Scriptures that seemed to say the earth was "fixed" (e.g., Psalms 104:5 says "The Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved."; Ecclesiastes 1:5 states that "The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.") if it could be shown that this was not literally the case. It just was not going to do so before this was demonstrated conclusively--something Galileo had not done. As Cardinal Bellarmine, who was a well qualified natural philosopher himself and acquainted with the state of the heliocentric/geocentric debate, as many of the clergymen were at that time, noted in his 1616 ruling on Galileo's writings:
"If there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the centre of the world and the earth in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false. But this is not a thing to be done in haste, and as for myself I shall not believe that there are such proofs until they are shown to me."
In conclusion, the Galileo affair was a complex series of events that involved a lot more than just science and religion. It occurred during the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation when the Church needed to re-assert its authority, between a brilliant but at times arrogant and abrasive man and his jealous fellow scientists, and last but not least, his unnecessary snub and humiliation of a personal and political ally, the "infallible" but all-so-human Pope of the day!
No comments:
Post a Comment