The cardinal who silenced Galileo also handed him his best defence
In 1616 Cardinal Robert Bellarmine told Galileo to drop the idea of a moving Earth. Later he wrote Galileo a certificate saying he had only been informed of a decree, not forced to recant. Seventeen years on, facing the Inquisition again, Galileo pulled out that very document to defend himself.
Bellarmine was born in Montepulciano on 4 October 1542 to noble but hard-up parents; his mother was a sister of Pope Marcellus II. As a boy he memorised Virgil and wrote verse in Italian and Latin, and a hymn of his on Mary Magdalene made it into the Roman Breviary. He joined the Jesuits in Rome in 1560, picked up Greek in Piedmont, and studied Thomist theology at Padua.
At Leuven from 1569 he became the first Jesuit to teach at the university, lecturing on Aquinas, sparring with Michael Baius over grace and free will, and producing a Hebrew grammar. Ill health sent him back to Italy in 1576, where Gregory XIII set him to teach controversial theology at the new Roman College; the lectures filled four hefty volumes. He served as theologian on a papal mission to Paris and was inside the city while Henry of Navarre besieged it. Clement VIII declared he had no equal in learning and made him a cardinal in 1599; as an inquisitor he sat among the judges who condemned Giordano Bruno for heresy. A Spanish envoy warned that he would make a poor pope because he cared only for the Church and ignored princes, and his Jesuit membership cost him votes in several conclaves.
On heliocentrism he took a cautious line. Writing to Paolo Antonio Foscarini in 1615, he said that if a real proof ever appeared, Scripture would need careful reinterpretation, but he would not believe in one until shown it. Showing that a Sun-centred model reproduces what we observe, he argued, differs from showing it is physically true. Pierre Duhem and Karl Popper later judged that on this point he reasoned more like a scientist than Galileo did.
Thomas Hobbes, who sneered at cardinals generally, spared him alone, calling him a little lean old man living in retirement. Bellarmine died in Rome on 17 September 1621, aged 78, was canonised in 1930, and was named a Doctor of the Church.
Source: Robert Bellarmine
