Tag Archives: Catholic Church

Vatican Museum to hold exhibition on Galileo

Posted on by Brad Heap

The TVNZ midday news just reported that the Vatican Museum is to open an exhibition on Galileo and 400 years since his observations showing the earth is round and we orbit around the sun. This has to be one of the most ironic news storys I have heard in a long time. It is the equivalent of the US Army Museum holding an exhibition on why the Viet Cong won the Vietnam War.

The Associated Press reports: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gVhVS3vYYvAwfSrJIEVG0lZK7mLAD9BAAQA80

VATICAN CITY — Rudimentary telescopes, celestial globes and original manuscripts by Galileo are going on view at the Vatican Museums as part of an exhibit marking the 400th anniversary of the astronomer’s first celestial observations.

“Astrum 2009: Astronomy and Instruments” traces the history of astronomy through its tools, from a 3rd century A.D. globe of the zodiac to the increasingly complicated telescopes used in more recent times to gaze at the stars.

At a briefing to launch the exhibit Tuesday, Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s top culture official, declined to revisit the Church’s 17th century condemnation of Galileo for his discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun.

Church teaching at the time placed the Earth at the center of the universe.

Rather, Ravasi said that, while it was necessary to have the courage to admit errors when they were made, “I continue to believe that it’s necessary to look more to the future.”

The church denounced Galileo’s theory as dangerous to the faith. Tried as a heretic in 1633 and forced to recant, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, later changed to house arrest.

The ruling helped fuel accusations that the church was hostile to science — a reputation the Vatican has been trying to shed ever since.

In 1992, Pope John Paul II declared that the ruling against Galileo was an error resulting from “tragic mutual incomprehension.”

The exhibit, and other Vatican initiatives to mark the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s telescope and the U.N.-designated International Year of Astronomy, is part of the Vatican’s continuing rehabilitation effort.

One of the highlights of the show is Galileo’s original manuscript of “Sidereus Nuncius,” the 1610 document in which he excitedly recorded his first discoveries after using his telescope.

Tommaso Maccacaro, president of Italy’s national institute of astrophysics, said it was important to look at the instruments not just from a scientific view but from a cultural one as well, since astronomy has had such an impact on the way we perceive ourselves.

“It was astronomical observations that let us understand that Earth (and man) don’t have a privileged position or role in the universe,” he said in his prepared comments to the briefing. “I ask myself what tools will we use in the next 400 years, and I ask what revolutions of understanding they’ll bring about, like resolving the mystery of our apparent cosmic solitude.”

The exhibit opens Friday and runs through Jan. 16.

It is very funny that the Vatican wishes to hold an exhibition on Galileo in order to shred the image that is hostile to science. However at the same time it is not prepared to discuss the treatment of Galileo and would prefer instead to focus on the future.

NZ Herald Speaks out against Vandalising Priest

Posted on by Brad Heap

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10550878

Editorial: Desecration does nothing to help Gaza
The actions of an extremist Catholic priest in desecrating the Wellington memorial to Nobel Prize winner Yitzhak Rabin undo any good that a thousand others protesting against Israel might have hoped
to achieve.

Father Gerard Burns daubed a drop of his own blood mixed with red paint across the Rabin memorial, inspired perhaps by an equally misguided Auckland cleric who poured his own blood on the carpet of the US consulate at the beginning of the Iraq war. At least in that repulsive act the first priest was, in the twisted logic of his protest, at the right place.

For Father Burns to desecrate the Rabin memorial is not only in breach of any civilised standard of protest but utterly wrongheaded in terms of his target. Rabin, a former Israeli general-turned-two-time-Prime-Minister, was perhaps the greatest hope for peace between Jews and Palestinians in a generation. He was assassinated by an ultra-conservative Jew because he was too accommodating to the Palestinians in seeking a lasting peace. He died after a rally for peace, with the words of Shir LaShalom, or Song for Peace, found bloodied in his pocket. He had been honoured, with Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres, by the Nobel judges. The memorial in central Wellington marks that commitment to peace.

The sins (as Father Burns might see them) of his successors in the Israeli Government cannot be visited upon Rabin. The Friends of Israel group rightly calls for the Catholic Church to discipline the priest and apologise to Jews in New Zealand, for whom desecration of their monument causes deep offence. The vandalism has received worldwide attention, the kind of attention that shames Catholics of goodwill and undermines their own public stands for justice and peace. The organisers of the Wellington march opposing Israel’s heavy-handed military action in the Gaza strip should also demand an apology from Father Burns. They must know that their message against the killings of civilians, including children, is diverted and made hollow by a calculated insult to Jews everywhere.

Father Burns no doubt views the hurt and harm caused by his desecration as out of proportion with the tragedy in Gaza. In lives lost, that is correct. No one died, as the saying goes, because of his stunt with paint. Yet something dies when whole communities are insulted, deliberately, by an act so heavy with the symbolism and fear of their past. Should Catholic monuments, for example a memorial to the revered Bishop Pompallier who brought the Church to New Zealand, be attacked because of some stance taken by the Vatican, similar outrage would ensue.

…

Extreme responses seldom get things in proportion. And, sadly, Father Burns’ drop of blood mocks the deaths of those for whom he claims to speak.