Reclaiming Galileo

Carolyn Moynihan writes that "it is salutary to distinguish the Catholic believer that Galileo was from the secular saint made of him by the Enlightenment tradition" — The faith of Galileo.

The Galileo Affair by George Sim Johnson is required reading on this "one stock argument used to show that science and Catholic dogma are antagonistic." The author notes, "Until Galileo forced the issue into the realm of theology, the Church had been a willing ombudsman for the new astronomy," having "encouraged the work of both Copernicus and sheltered Kepler against the persecutions of Calvinists."

In The Galileo Myth, Robert Spencer quotes Thomas Woods as suggesting that "even if the Galileo incident had been every bit as bad as people think it was, John Henry Cardinal Newman, the celebrated nineteenth-century convert from Anglicanism, found it revealing that this is practically the only example that ever comes to mind."