It was a dark period, but the darkness had nothing to do with the Catholic Church establishing a process of defining and defending true Catholic beliefs.
If that or any church wished to define and defend their beliefs, that's one thing. It was the killing , imprisoning, torturing, and beating in order to do it that made that a dark period. Not to mention the climate of fear such things engendered among others.
Take Galileo, for example. Galileo was one of those the Catholic church felt it had to defend its "true Catholic beliefs" from:
phyun5.ucr.edu
In 1633 Galileo was formally interrogated for 18 days and on April 30 Galileo confesses that he may have made the Copernican case in the Dialogue too strong and offers to refute it in his next book. Unmoved, the Pope decides that Galileo should be imprisoned indefinitely. Soon after, with a formal threat of torture, Galileo is examined by the Inquisition and sentenced to prison and religious penances, the sentence is signed by 6 of the 10 inquisitors. In a formal ceremony at a the church of Santa Maria Sofia Minerva, Galileo abjures his errors. He is then put in house arrest in Sienna. After these tribulations he begins writing his Discourse on Two New Sciences.
Galileo remained under house arrest, despite many medical problems and a deteriorating state of health, until his death in 1642. The Church finally accepted that Galileo might be right in 1983.
Galileo was widely recognized as a great scientist in his own time. And he was a well-connected man, a personal friend of the Pope. But that wasn't enough to protect him.
On 22 June 1633 Galileo was forced to kneel in front of the Inquisition and recant his belief in the Copernican planetary system and the motion of the Earth. He was condemned to life imprisonment, ostensibly for having disobeyed a 1616 injunction by Cardinal Bellarmino "...not to defend or teach the Copernican doctrine...". The very next day the sentence was commuted to perpetual house arrest, which was rigidly upheld to the end of Galileo's life. Galileo's Dialogue was also put on the Index of Prohibited Books, together with the books by Copernicus and Kepler treating of the heliocentric system, where they all remained until 1835.
hao.ucar.edu
This process of defining and defending true Catholic beliefs is something the West became great in spite of, not because of. And "propaganda" about the "myth of the Inquisition" is part of what led to this kind of thing being stopped for good. Thank God with all my heart as well as my narrow simple and shallow mind. :>) |
