Further on the anti-Copernican decrees

The documents you're looking for exist, and they aren't locked away in some inaccessible vault. Stop pointing your friends to a DVD and point them to the primary sources themselves, which have been published and translated for centuries. Here is what exists and where to look. First, the two central decrees. The 1616 decree of the Congregation of the Index condemned the Copernican doctrine, and the 1633 Sentence against Galileo declared heliocentrism "an absurd proposition and false in philosophy, and formally heretical" (propositione assurda e falsa in filosofia, e formalmente heretica). That 1633 text is in the Vatican's own archival record, cited in Favaro's Galileo e l'Inquisizione, p. 143. These are not disputed reconstructions. They are official acts of the Holy Office carrying the approbation of the reigning pontiffs. Second, tell your friends how large the record is. The official Inquisition documents on the Galileo affair in the Vatican archives number over 7,900 separate documents, and that is what remains after many were destroyed or confiscated. The best scholarly guide to that record is Francesco Beretta's essay "The Documents of Galileo's Trial: Recent Hypothesis and Historical Criticism" in The Church and Galileo, edited by Ernan McMullin. That is a peer-reviewed academic source your skeptics cannot dismiss as apologetics. Third, and this is the key point for people who deny the condemnations ever happened: even hostile, pro-Galileo scholars admit the decrees exist and were definitive. Fr. George Coyne (a Jesuit, a Vatican astronomer, no friend of geocentrism) admits the 1616 and 1633 decisions were treated as irreformable and were never reformed. Ernan McMullin, who personally endorses Galileo, states plainly that "the language of the decree supported by it were couched in definitive terms" and described the Copernican theses as "contrary to Scripture, period." Cardinal Poupard's own final report to John Paul II presupposes the decisions and only tries to argue they were "not irreformable," which is itself an admission that they were never reformed. Hand your friends those concessions from the very men on the other side of the argument. So, practically: send them to (1) the 1616 Index decree and the 1633 Sentence in standard published collections and in Favaro's edition; (2) Beretta's essay and the McMullin volume for the archival documentation; and (3) my treatment in Galileo Was Wrong, where I reproduce and footnote these texts with their original Latin and Italian. If someone still insists no condemnation exists after being handed the 1633 Sentence and the concessions of Coyne, McMullin, and Poupard, the problem is no longer a lack of documents. It is a lack of willingness to look at them. Works cited: - Scientific Heresies PDF - GWW 3 12th (Galileo Was Wrong) - Geocentrism 102 secured - Galileo e l'Inquisizione, Favaro, p. 143 (1633 Sentence) - The Church and Galileo, ed. Ernan McMullin (essays by Francesco Beretta and George Coyne; McMullin, "The Church's Ban on Copernicanism") - 1616 Decree of the Congregation of the Index