The church forced Galileo to recant his heresy, on this day in 1633. Galileo believed that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Whereas the church believed that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Galileo plays a major role in my second book, Fire and Earth. When I completed my first book, The Spy who Sank the Armada, I began flicking forwards through history searching for inspiration. The church burnt Giordano Bruno at the stake for a similar heresy, in 1600. The conflict between faith and reason became the theme for Fire and Earth. That’s the second book in the Sir Anthony Standen Adventures.
The bible verse responsible for the church’s doctrine is Joshua chapter ten, verses twelve to fourteen. ‘Then Joshua spoke to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel: “Sun, stand still over Gibeon; And Moon, in the Valley of Aijalon.” So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the people had revenge upon their enemies.’ The church finally accepted that it had been wrong in 1992.
The whole concept of papal infallibility strikes me as odd. Papal infallibility is a concept in Catholicism that asserts that the Pope is protected from error when he speaks ex cathedra. That is in his official capacity as the leader of the Church. This means that when the Pope speaks on matters of faith and morals, his teachings are considered to be infallible and therefore, cannot be wrong. Well we now know that all popes up until 1992 were wrong on at least one issue.
Everyone’s fallible. I am and Galileo was too. He made a study of the tides, but didn’t think that the moon had anything to do with tides. As a sailor I can tell you that it does. To be fair, he made his study in the Mediterranean which is less subject to tides that the English Channel.