There was a papal decree removing the condemnation and one can find information about this from a variety of sources. There is no reason to doubt that it happened.
I have read a few theories to explain the apparent discrepancy and gave one of my own in the thread I linked to a few posts up. But there was never any question of a condemnation by the Holy Office being infallible (it never has that authority), so it's not as if an infallible teaching were changed.
It is not an option to pretend that the removal of the condemnation did not happen. It is too well attested for that. This is just as much Church teaching as the condemnation was.
People are free to believe geocentrism if they wish, but they may not claim that it is the sole acceptable Catholic position. (Ladislaus is an example of someone believes in geocentrism while acknowledging other positions are allowed.)
Its not possible to remove condemnations. There is no precedence. The Church cannot make a mistake like that. What you're saying is that for 200 years the Church flat out lied. Just because the condemnation was issued out of the Holy Office doesn't mean the condemnations weren't infallible. The backstory of what the Pope was saying in the background and the interaction with St. Robert Bellarmine regarding all the details prove otherwise. Besides, all teachings, even of those of the ordinary magisterium, are to be believed. Fr. William Roberts explains why the condemnations are Catholic teaching and before you go down the road you're going, you ought to read his book. The Pontifical Decrees of the Doctrine of Earth's Movement and the Ultramontane Defense of Them
An Excerpt...
From generation to generation this tale is told, much to the delight of anti-Catholics and much to the inconvenience of Catholics. The tale is told not, mind you, because anyone within the Church now actually denies that the earth does move, nor do they deny that Galileo was right all along or that the Church of 1616/1633 couldn’t tell faith from science, but because Catholics want their infallibility and their fixed sun and moving earth. As one can see, the only way to have this cake and at the same time eat it is to deny that the anti-Copernican decrees of 1616-1633 had any real authority at all, that they were like a bad joke gone wrong. 2 Perhaps the most honest history ever written of the Galileo case – and the casuistry that followed the alleged ‘proofs’ that earth moves and was not placed by God at the centre of the world, and that the sun stood still – was A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 1896, a book by Andrew Dickson White. He records that the history of the denial of infallibility of the 1616-1633 antiCopernican decree began even before Galileo died. At first they resorted to a denial that the Copernican theory was declared formal heresy and conjured up a load of excuses that sufficed for the world who had no other facts to judge the matter on, but who simply trusted Churchmen to feed them the truth as expected. But as the archives were opened up and the records themselves were made public, it was soon seen the faithful had been led astray. And as each objection to infallibility was shown to be a contradiction of the facts, the apologists became even more desperate. Andrew White tells us what happens next: …This contention, then, was at last utterly given up by honest Catholics themselves. In I870 a Roman Catholic clergyman in England, the Rev. Mr Roberts, evidently thinking that the time had come to tell the truth, published a book entitled The Pontifical Decrees against the Earth’s Movement, and in this exhibited the incontrovertible evidences that the papacy had committed itself and its infallibility fully against the movement of the earth--Introductory commentary by a Catholic layman in 2002
Topic: May Catholics believe science that comes from pagans? (Read 10695 times)