Papal Bulls and EncyclicalsAnswered

Where can I read the Church's anti-Copernican decrees of 1616 and 1633?

A seminarian friend asked me for them; he said he couldn't find any document condemning heliocentrism as heresy.

Answer

There are four principal documents: the Holy Office decree of March 5, 1616, Cardinal Bellarmine's certificate of May 26, 1616, the sentence and abjuration of June 22, 1633, and Pope Alexander VII's 1664 bull Speculatores domus Israel with its attached Index. I have reproduced and analyzed all of them in Galileo Was Wrong, The Church Was Right, volume 3, chapter 16, and in Geocentrism 102. Your seminarian friend is not alone. Most people are told there is no document, because the people telling them have never gone and looked. There are several, and they are not hard to find once you know their names. The first is the decree of the Sacred Congregation of the Index, March 5, 1616. Its own heading says it was issued by the cardinals "specially delegated by Our Most Holy Lord Pope Paul V and the Holy Apostolic See to publish everywhere throughout the whole of Christendom." It states that "the Pythagorean doctrine, which is false and altogether opposed to Holy Scripture, of the motion of the Earth and the immobility of the Sun," as taught by Copernicus in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and by Diego de Zuniga on Job, was spreading. It then decrees that Copernicus and Zuniga be suspended until corrected, that Foscarini's Letter be "altogether prohibited and condemned," and that "all other works likewise, in which the same is taught, be prohibited, as by this present decree, it prohibits, condemns, and suspends them all respectively." Note the scope. It is not only Copernicus. It covers the doctrine. The second is Cardinal Bellarmine's certificate to Galileo of May 26, 1616, which records "the declaration made by the Holy Father" that the opinion of a moving earth and an immobile sun "is contrary to Holy Scripture, and therefore cannot be defended nor held." That wording matters: the decision was not a committee product rubber stamped by the pope, it came from the pope himself. Third, the sentence of the Holy Office of June 22, 1633. It convicted Galileo of being "vehemently suspected" of "formal heresy," and it comes with the text of Galileo's abjuration. Those two texts were later required to be printed alongside the Dialogue itself, which tells you how firmly the Church regarded them. The fourth, and the one almost nobody cites, is Pope Alexander VII's bull Speculatores domus Israel of March 5, 1664. The pope signed it personally and declared that the Index of Forbidden Books was part of the bull and therefore carried his direct papal authority. Inside that Index there are separate pages of condemnation for Copernicus (page 30), Galileo (page 52) and Kepler (page 73), and the 1616 language is reproduced in it. So the condemnation of heliocentrism as formally heretical and erroneous in faith was personally and canonically confirmed by a pope in a papal bull thirty-one years after the trial. People will tell you the decrees were later rescinded. They were not. Under Benedict XIV in 1741 and 1758, the Holy Office permitted a heavily censored edition of Galileo's works, but only on conditions: the Letter to Christina and the Letter to Castelli had to be excluded, the Dialogue had to be printed with the 1633 sentence and the abjuration attached, and a preface had to emphasize that the contents were hypothetical. That is not a reversal, that is enforcement. At no time after 1616 did the Church ever rescind the requirement that Copernicanism be treated as hypothesis only. As for the 1820 imprimatur for Canon Settele and the 1835 removal of Galileo's name from the Index, both came about through falsehoods told to Pius VII by Cardinal Olivieri, who claimed the 1616 and 1633 Church had condemned Galileo only for a non-elliptical version of heliocentrism. That is simply untrue; the seventeenth-century proceedings never discussed the shape of planetary orbits at all. And John Paul II's 1992 speech was not a doctrinal declaration and rescinded nothing. So here is what I would give your friend. Read Galileo Was Wrong, The Church Was Right, volume 3, chapter 16, "The Catholic Church's Teaching on Geocentrism," where I reproduce the Latin and English of these documents and show the photographs of Alexander VII's Index pages. Geocentrism 102 covers the same ground in a shorter, more accessible form, especially chapter 3 on the Church's case against Galileo and chapter 5 on subsequent popes. We also have the Anti-Copernican Decrees of the Catholic Church presentation in our store at robertsungenis.com, and I have a livestream titled "Status of the Anti-Copernican Decrees" that walks through them one by one.

Dr. Robert Sungenis

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