Quoting Klas: '
lest anyone out there still have doubts about whether or not geocentrism is a matter of faith, the words of Cardinal St. Robert Bellarmine … should wake them up from their slumber. …
You ought to be ashamed of yourself for writing such rubbish. You either know or ought to know that the very next paragraph after your edited, deceptively highlighted, and cherry-picked one makes nonsense of your claim.
Bellarmine was writing a private letter to a priest, Father Paolo Foscarini, in response to the priest's letter asking for the cardinal's opinion of his book. Only a fool or a knave would claim that a saintly prelate would try to preempt the Holy See's reserved authority by making infallible declarations of universal applicability in such a profane context, especially one where the prelate author's repeated resort to hypotheticals and conscious use of contrary-to-fact constructions would give any prudent man pause.
The true bottom line is this: Holy Mother Church is rightfully jealous of its prerogative to speak infallibly on matters of faith and morals. It has ever taken great pains to ensure that that prerogative is not toyed with or otherwise abused by the enemies of the Faith or, a fortiori, its soi-disant friends. The saddest and truest mark of the crisis reified by the Council is the near-complete disappearance of orthodox catechesis, in whose presence the pontificating delusions and outright falsehoods propagated by cassini and enthusiastically seconded by you and others would have been definitively silenced.
My goodness, what a dreadful accusation Claudel makes above about Klas and I? I think he accuses Klas of stating Bellarmine’s letter was the same as a papal decree. Cardinal Bellarmine at the time was Master of Controversial Questions at the time he wrote his 1615 Letter to Foscarini. It was his job to clarify the status of questions directed to the Inquisition, called the Holy Office. It is PERFECTLY clear he ADVISED Foscarini it was heresy (‘it would be just as heretical’). If this is not clear Claudekl, I suggest you go back to English class and learn how to read. A year later, when Pope Paul V asken the Holy Office to examine the matter, Cardinal Bellarmine and other consultants agreed it was formal heresy. The Pope agreed and by way of the 1616 decree made it a papal decree of the Ordinary Magisterium. It is also Church history that in 1633 Pope Urban VIII declared in Galileo’s trial that the decree was absolute, irreformable, the word for infallible in those days. Recorded in the Secret Archives also is that the Holy Office in 1820 admitted the 1616 decree was papal and irreversible. But along came the Claudels of this world, under the illusion that the fixed-sun of 1616 was proven false taking it upon themselves to redefine the authority of a decree already clarified by the Church.‘More than 150 years still had to pass before the optical and mechanical proofs for the motion of the Earth were discovered.…Cardinal Poupard says the 1633 sentence was not irreformable. In 1741, in the face of optical proof of the fact that the Earth revolves round the sun, Pope Benedict XIV (1740-1758) had the Holy Office grant an imprimatur to the first edition of the Complete Works of Galileo.’ --- Pope John Paul II Commission report: L’Osservatore Romano, November 4th, 1992.
What Proofs, one could ask? Klas and I do nothing more but to defend the authority and teaching of our Church as decreed in 1616.‘If God reveals a thing or teaches a thing, He wants to be believed. Not to believe is an insult to God. Doubting His word, or believing with doubt and hesitation, is an insult to God, because it doubts His sacred Word. We must therefore believe without doubting, without hesitating…. On what does [the Protestant] believe? On what authority? On his own opinion and judgement. And what is that? A human opinion – human testimony, and, therefore, a human faith. He cannot say “I am sure, positively sure, as sure as there is a God in heaven, that this is the meaning of the text.” Therefore he has no other authority but his own opinion and judgement, and nothing else, and therefore, only human faith. What is human faith? Believing a thing upon the testimony of man. Divine faith is believing a thing on the testimony of God. [Catholicism] has divine faith, and why? Because it says “I believe in such and such a thing.” Why? “Because the Catholic Church teaches this.” And why do you believe the Catholic Church? “Because God has commanded me to believe the teaching of the Church; and God threatened me with damnation if I do not believe the Church, and we are taught by St Peter, in his epistle, that there is no private prophesy or interpretation of the Scriptures, for the unlearned and unstable wrest the very Scriptures, the Bible, to their own damnation.” That is strong language my dear people, but that is the language of St Peter, the head of the Apostles. But my dearly beloved Protestant friends do not be offended at me for saying that.”--- Fr Arnold Damen, S.J. (1815-1890): The One True Church, available Online
But now back to your reference to cherry-picking from Bellarmine’s letter to Foscarini: I know what you meant by ‘You either know or ought to know that the very next paragraph after your edited, deceptively highlighted, and cherry-picked one makes nonsense of your claim.’ You refer of course to third paragraph that says:
‘Third. I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun was in the centre of the universe and the Earth in the third sphere, and that the sun did not travel around the Earth but the Earth circled the sun, then it would be necessary to proceed with great caution in explaining the passages of Scripture which seemed contrary, and we would rather have to say that we did not understand them than to say that something was false which has been demonstrated.’
When most in the Church and State were convinced the 1616 decree was proven false, the Claudels of this world needed excuses to show the 1616 decree was only provisional. The Holy Office never tried this ploy because god wouldfn’t let them. But outsiders like the Claudels were allowed to make up any story they liked to get the Church off the ‘infallible hook.’ One of their ploys was to quote Bellarmine’s words above to make it look like it says ‘If ever there was proof for heliocentrism, then…’ Here is John Paul II’s Commission on Galileo using the ploy:‘Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, in a letter of 12 April 1615 [wrote]: If the orbiting of the Earth were ever demonstrated to be certain, then theologians, according to him, would have to review their interpretations of the biblical passages apparently opposed to the new Copernican theories, so as to avoid asserting the error of opinions which had proved to be true: In fact Galileo had not succeeded in proving irrefutably the double motion of the Earth…. More than 150 years still had to pass before the optical and mechanical proofs for the motion of the Earth were found.’
But it doesn’t say that in context. He was addressing the claim that Galileo had proof in the PRESENT TENSE, and never used the term in the future tense. How do I know, well as Claudel advised, stop cherry-picking and carry on with what Bellarmine said: ‘But as for myself, I do not believe that THERE IS any such demonstration; none has been shown to me. …. in a case of doubt, one may not depart from the Scriptures as explained by the holy Fathers. I add that the words “the sun also riseth and the sun goeth down, and hasteneth to the place where he ariseth, etc.” were those of Solomon, who not only spoke by divine inspiration but was a man wise above all others and most learned in human sciences and in the knowledge of all created things, and his wisdom was from God. Thus it is not too likely that he would affirm something which was contrary to a truth either already demonstrated, or likely to be demonstrated.’And no proof was ever found. But try telling that to the Claudels.
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