Geocentrism isn't de fide. Pope Benedict XIV calls it into question in his (non-universal) encyclical on Dante, In Pracelara Summorum.
Geocentrism should be considered as certainly true since nothing of greater weight contradicts the Holy Office decree which we owe religious assent to.
This non
de fide argument is a Dimond Brothers argument. They conjured up this rejection of a papal decree defending an interpretation of all the Fathers, ruled by the Council of Trent as
de fide. The Dimond brothers are not the Church, they cannot overrule the teaching of all the Fathers as optional.
Pope Benedict XV's 1921 encyclical In
Praeclara Summorum.
Few today are even aware that Pope Benedict XV, on April 30th, 1921, just one year after his teaching encyclical on how the Scriptures reveal all truth, wrote a different kind of papal letter, this one praising the writings of the Catholic poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), famous for his The Divine Comedy, sometimes called ‘the Summa in verse,’ described earlier in our chapter seven, a poetry divided into a journey of three parts,
Inferno (Hell),
Purgatorio (Purgatory) and
Paradiso (Heaven). Dante’s writings reflect medieval Catholicism, when the Catholic faith had reached its peak of blessed understanding.This of course included the doctrine of geocentrism, revealed in Scripture and visible to all as the Creation that God chose so that man might have greater evidence of Him.
Having written in his Spiritus Paraclitus of the dangers ‘physical science’ can cause if it is not the truth, read now as the Pope himself addresses ‘the progress of science’ to Dante’s most famous work The Divine Comedy. Written after the acceptance of Galileo’s cosmology, and unwilling to downgrade the Catholicity of Dante’s description of a geocentric Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, Pope Benedict XV feels he has to rescue all this even ‘if science’ has failed to prove which order is certain. The apparent conflict between the Pope’s faith and ‘science’ in this encyclical does not endorse heliocentrism, nor does it dismiss the authority of the 1616 decision, as some apologists would have us believe, it merely discusses it in regard to what Einstein’s relativity suggested in 1921, in which geocentrism cannot be ruled out.
Encyclical on Dante, to Professors, Students of Literature and Learning in the Catholic World:
‘And first of all, inasmuch as the divine poet throughout his whole life professed in exemplary manner the Catholic religion, he would surely desire that this solemn commemoration should take place, as indeed will be the case, under the auspices of religion, and if it is carried out in San Francesco in Ravenna it should begin in San Giovanni in Florence to which his thoughts turned during the last years of his life with the desire of being crowned poet at the very font where he had received Baptism. Dante Alighieri lived in an age which inherited the most glorious fruits of philosophical and theological teaching and thought, and handed them on to the succeeding ages with the imprint of the strict scholastic method. Amid the various currents of thought diffused then too among learned men Dante ranged himself as disciple of that Prince of the school so distinguished for angelic temper of intellect, Saint Thomas Aquinas. From St Thomas he gained nearly all his philosophical and theological knowledge, and while he did not neglect any branch of human learning, at the same time he drank deeply at the founts of Sacred Scripture and the Fathers. Thus he learned almost all that could be known in his time, and nourished specially by Christian knowledge; it was on that field of religion he drew when he set himself to treat in verse of things so vast and deep. So that while we admire the greatness and keenness of his genius, we have to recognize, too, the measure in which he drew inspiration from the Divine Faith by means of which he could beautify his immortal poems with all the lights of revealed truths as well as with the splendours of art….. It is indeed marvellous how he was able to weave into all three poems these three dogmas with truly wrought design.
If the progress of science showed later that that conception of the world rested on no sure foundation [Einstein’s relativity], that the spheres imagined by our ancestors did not exist, that nature, the number and course of the planets and stars, are not indeed as they were then thought to be, still the fundamental principle remained that the universe, whatever be the order that sustains it in its parts, is the work of the creating and preserving sign of Omnipotent God, who moves and governs all, and whose glory shines in a part more or less elsewhere: and though this Earth on which we live may not be the centre of the universe as at one time was thought, it was the scene of the original happiness of our first ancestors, witness of their unhappy fall, as too of the Redemption of mankind through the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the divine poet depicted the triple life of souls as he imagined it in such a way as to illuminate with the light of the true doctrine of the faith the condemnation of the impious, the purgation of the good spirits and the eternal happiness of the blessed before the final judgment.’
It has been asserted by men, like the Diamond Brothers and David Palm, that the above encyclical shows the 1616/1633 edict was not an irreversible binding decree because Benedict XV did not confirm a geocentric universe. Note the most important sentence above is
‘If the progress of science showed later that that conception of the world rested on no sure foundation.’ This is true, for in science, Relativity now prevails, but that still accepts geocentrism and ‘
the course of the planets and stars’ of Scripture are still as viable as ever. Given the fact that in Benedict XV’s time geocentrism was still considered falsified by the Jesuits surrounding him, one surely would have expected the Pope to say the Earth
‘is not at the centre.’ But he did not, nor that the sun does not orbit the Earth, leaving the 1616 decree as defined and declared. One could also say this Pope; with his words ‘
may not be,’ did not accept the physical heliocentrism ‘of modern astronomers’ held in Church and State in his time.
Topic: Correcting Fr Paul Robinson's Catholic faith and science (Read 1965 times)