Galileo and the Church An International Conference

Ottavio Leoni (1578-1630), Galileo Galilei florentino

University of Notre Dame April 18-20, 2002

On April 18-20, the University of Notre Dame will host an international conference on “Galileo and the Church.” The University’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre plans a presentation of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Life of Galileo” in conjunction with the conference.  The play will be directed by Holger Teschke, a well-known interpreter of Brecht’s plays.
 

To what extent did these declarations achieve the goal that the Pope had expressed in embarking on the re-examination of the Galileo affair in the first place?  This has been the subject of lively discussion in the last few years.  It seems appropriate, then, to return to the issues once again, a decade after the 1992 Academy meeting, and to address questions left unresolved at that time.  What is involved here is not simply the recovery of historical truth, insofar as this is possible.  Galileo’s encounter with Church authority long ago became accepted as a (some would say “the”) defining episode in the centuries-long interaction between religion and the sciences.  Any degree of success in dispelling the myths that have accreted around it is surely to be welcomed, especially in the light of the active interest in the science-religion relationship of recent years.

The conference will bring together scholars who have contributed in one way or another to our understanding of Galileo and his day.  Two of the speakers served as members of the Galileo Commission, and a third acted as a consultant to the Commission.  Another has benefitted from the recent opening of the archives of the Holy Office to scholars.  It would be overly optimistic to suppose that the conference could bring closure to a debate that has raged for so long, and over so many fronts.  But the hope is that it could contribute substantially to the clarification of the Church’s historical reaction to Galileo’s defense of the sun-centered universe.

It will be almost forty years since the fourth centenary of Galileo’s birth was celebrated in 1964 by a very large-scale international conference at Notre Dame, which eventuated in an acclaimed set of essays, Galileo, Man of Science (New York: Basic Books, 1967), still regarded as a major source on Galileo’s science.  That earlier conference deliberately left aside the thorny question of Galileo’s relations with the Church; the intention was to return to that theme at a later time in a conference devoted specifically to that topic. It seems that the time has now come to carry out this promise.