The Pope Becomes Heliocentric
In 1992 Pope John Paull II granted some absolution to Galileo Galilei, the scientist convicted of heresy by the Church only 359 years earlier: "Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the center of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture...."
