The leaning tower of truth: round up the usual suspects.

Late last fall unexpected headlines appeared in newspapers across the country: the Catholic church was at long last admitting its error in convicting the seventeenth-century scientist Galileo of heresy for believing the earth revolved around the sun.

Since Galileo has been dead for 350 years, and since everyone else has long known who was right about the heliocentric theory of the solar system, the news arrived accompanied by some unintended humor.

The occasion was an address in Rome on October 31 by Pope John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Judging from the headlines, the pope's admission was, if not timely, at least straightforward. The New York Times headline said clearly, "Vatican Says It Was Wrong about Galileo." The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported, "Pope Ready to Admit Church's Error in Condemning Galileo." And a Catholic diocesan paper, the St. Cloud (Minnesota) Visitor was no less blunt: "Pope: Church Erred in the Case of Galileo."

Knowing that the Catholic church rarely admits error, I was intensely curious about what the pope actually said. Was he referring to the church's 1616 decision to declare the Copernican theory heretical? (The proposition that the sun was the center of the world and stationary was declared to be "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture .... ")

Or was John Paul talking about Galileo's trial in 1633? In that year the aging scientist was convicted by the Roman Inquisition of "vehement suspicion of heresy" for allegedly disobeying a papal command not to "hold or defend" Copernicanism, delivered after the declaration of 1616. If the latter, not only the question of an error in theology but that of a wrongful conviction and punishment would need to be addressed.

The newspaper stories purportedly supporting the headlines turned out not to be very helpful. They didn't quote much from the pope's speech, and the quotations that appeared were not entirely consistent with the headlines. Fortunately a journalist friend in Rome sent me the Vatican's English translation of the pope's address. And it was soon publicly available in the U.S., in the November 12 issue of Origins.

What is really contained in John Paul's address--and what isn't there--needs to be better known.

John Paul gave his thoughts on Galileo in the context of concluding the work of a Galileo study commission he had appointed in 1981. It is not widely known that this commission did little original research on Galileo, that evidently no attempt was made to reach a consensus, or that there really was no final report properly so called but only a short summary of the Galileo issue delivered by French Cardinal Paul Poupard, a member of the commission.

Back in 1979, when John Paul broke a long-running official silence on Galileo, the pope had in a sense settled the matter in advance. Speaking then as now to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, John Paul praised "the greatness of Galileo" and then made the unprecedented admission that Galileo "had much to suffer...from the men and agencies of the church." The pope sounded this theme again on several occasions during the 1980s.

Now, in 1992, the pope obviously wanted to bring closure to the new Galileo commission's work--which in fact never included a systematic review of the issues with an eye to some new conclusion, but rather produced several new scholarly publications on Galileo by some of the commission's members.

But headlines to the contrary notwithstanding, nowhere in the pope's words last fall will anyone find phrases such as "the church was wrong," "the Vatican erred," or the like. The most that can be said for the pope's "admission" is that he implies several times that Galileo was right about the motion of earth and sun, and somebody else--but not "the church"--was wrong. Stated in this way, such an "admission" is not exactly a startling finding.

John Paul first asks a question about the history of the Galileo case: "Has not this case long been shelved and have not the errors committed been recognized?" And he answers his own question: "That is certainly true." Now here may be a disguised and indirect admission that the church was wrong. But the pope doesn't say it.

Later in the address he alludes to the fact that Copernicanism was declared heretical in 1616 because it contradicted passages of Sacred Scripture. At that time, the pope says, "the majority of theologians" were led by their misunderstandings "unduly to transpose into the realm of the doctrine of the faith a question that in fact pertained to scientific investigation."

Now that sentence, tricky as it is, contains a clearer implication of admission of error. But who made the error? "Theologians." John Paul omits the fact that Pope Paul V approved the condemnation of Copernicanism in 1616, which was indeed recommended by "theologians." The current pope also leaves out the facts that the ten cardinals of the Inquisition who conducted Galileo's 1633 trial were closely guided by Pope Urban VIII and that their 7-3 decision to convict him and sentence him to life imprisonment was approved by the pope.

Still later in the speech, John Paul does admit something directly, namely, "Galileo...understood why only the sun could function as the center of the world as it was then known." But if Galileo was right, who was wrong? Again, the pope lays the error off on "the theologians of the time."

While John Paul clearly avoided pinning any error on "the church," he apparently could not stop himself from taking a few pot shots at Galileo. Galileo had rejected the suggestion of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the pope claims, "to present the Copernican system as a hypothesis, inasmuch as it had not been confirmed by irrefutable proof." This is a distortion of history. Bellarmine, Pope Paul V's leading theological adviser, had injected himself into the controversy over Copernicanism in his 1615 "Letter to Foscarini," in which he explicitly advised Galileo to restrict himself to "speaking suppositionally and not absolutely" about such matters. Galileo and Bellarmine had differing views on what a "supposition" or "hypothesis" meant in science. To Bellarmine, it meant setting down a proposition such as the earth's motion merely as a convenience for calculation, and hence not related to the truth. For Galileo, a hypothesis was a way to get at "the absolute truth of nature," as Galileo himself put it in an unpublished essay in 1615.

Moreover, to call Bellarmine's reference to "suppositions" a suggestion to Galileo misses the harsh judgments and ominous warnings contained in Bellarmine's "Letter to Foscarini." There, the cardinal, a powerful man, had said that "to want to affirm that in reality the sun is at the center of the world...is a very dangerous thing" by virtue of "rendering Holy Scripture false." Bellarmine had come within a breath of saying that Copernicanism was heretical.

John Paul, in the same sentence about Bellarmine's "suggestion," asserts that Copernicanism at that time "had not been confirmed by irrefutable proof." This is disingenuous. Surely the pope knows that "proof" was not the issue in Galileo's science but rather the accumulation of evidence supporting the Copernican theory. Galileo's discovery of the phases of the planet Venus, for example, "showed conclusively that Venus revolved not around the earth but around the sun," in the words of Galileo scholar Stillman Drake.

The closest John Paul comes to admitting that Galileo's trial reached the wrong conclusion is to say, "the sentence of 1633 was not irreformable." But to be "irreformable" is not the same as "being reformed" or actually corrected. John Paul simply does not face the question whether Galileo was indeed wrongfully convicted, though his circuitous implications have apparently convinced many that that's what he meant. The editors of Crisis magazine, in their January 1993 issue, have announced-without adequate basis--that Galileo's condemnation "is now officially void."

Who can say what John Paul really thinks about the 1616 condemnation of Copernicanism or about Galileo's trial? In his address last fall, evidently his final word on the matter, he implied much and directly asserted little. Can we expect no more candor from the current pope--not even on a subject three-anda-half centuries old? In 1874 Lord Acton, in a letter to John Henry Newman, summarized the papal tendency to defend past papal decisions: "It is the presumption in favor of papal acts, the tenderness for papal examples, that is the difficulty for Catholicism." We now see that this is still a difficulty for John Paul.

Owing to John Paul II's unwillingness to speak unambiguously about Galileo, the controversy will continue.

Robert L. Spaeth is professor of liberal studies and director of the Christian Humanism project at Saint John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota.