I hate when that happens.
INFALLIBILITY. Freedom from error in teaching the universal Church in matters of faith or morals
So was Pope Urban XIII free from error when he condemned Galileo?
Was Pope Steven VI free from error when he prosecuted Formosus?
L
neither instance involved infallibility.
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Although three of the ten cardinals who judged Galileo refused to sign the verdict, his works were eventually condemned. Anti-Catholics often assert that his conviction and later rehabilitation somehow disproves the doctrine of papal infallibility, but this is not the case, for the pope never tried to make an infallible ruling concerning Galileo’s views.
The Church has never claimed ordinary tribunals, such as the one that judged Galileo, to be infallible. Church tribunals have disciplinary and juridical authority only; neither they nor their decisions are infallible.
No ecumenical council met concerning Galileo, and the pope was not at the center of the discussions, which were handled by the Holy Office. When the Holy Office finished its work, Urban VIII ratified its verdict, but did not attempt to engage infallibility.
Three conditions must be met for a pope to exercise the charism of infallibility: (1) he must speak in his official capacity as the successor of Peter; (2) he must speak on a matter of faith or morals; and (3) he must solemnly define the doctrine as one that must be held by all the faithful.
In Galileo’s case, the second and third conditions were not present, and possibly not even the first. Catholic theology has never claimed that a mere papal ratification of a tribunal decree is an exercise of infallibility. It is a straw man argument to represent the Catholic Church as having infallibly defined a scientific theory that turned out to be false. The strongest claim that can be made is that the Church of Galileo’s day issued a non-infallible disciplinary ruling concerning a scientist who was advocating a new and still-unproved theory and demanding that the Church change its understanding of Scripture to fit his.
It is a good thing that the Church did not rush to embrace Galileo’s views, because it turned out that his ideas were not entirely correct, either. Galileo believed that the sun was not just the fixed center of the solar system but the fixed center of the universe. We now know that the sun is not the center of the universe and that it does move—it simply orbits the center of the galaxy rather than the earth.
As more recent science has shown, both Galileo and his opponents were partly right and partly wrong. Galileo was right in asserting the mobility of the earth and wrong in asserting the immobility of the sun. His opponents were right in asserting the mobility of the sun and wrong in asserting the immobility of the earth.
Had the Catholic Church rushed to endorse Galileo’s views—and there were many in the Church who were quite favorable to them—the Church would have embraced what modern science has disproved.
Did you know that what Galileo was found guilty of suspicion of heresy not for his assertion that the earth moved but his humanistic deduction which he drew from it? That he was not forbidden from hypothesizing of heliocentrism (which was indeed wrong), but from asserting that it was fact? That Galileo neither invented the theory of Heliocentrism or the telescope, and was quite wrong about Keppler's work on gravity and eliptical orbits? That the church's formally stated position was not incorrect -- it denied that the sun was stationary, but, although the inference was quite understandable, never asserted the earth did not move -- but that Galileo's was?
Galileo defended his heliocentric notions by adopting Augustine's position that poetical passages of the bible should not be taken literally, a position the Catholic Church did not condemn, but which is commonly condemned among the Protestants who so love to gloat over Galileo. In fact, while condemned to death in Calvinist lands, Galileo himself remained Catholic.
Yet no less than St. Robert Bellarmine proffered that Galileo's assertions were valid (but he believed false) conjecture. The edict issued by Pope Urban VIII and delievered by Bellarmine did not use the word, "heresy," and admonished Galileo only to cease reporting his "hypothesis" as fact. Galileo was found guilty of disobeying Bellarmine's instructions, not to assert his hypothesis as fact, not of a heretic supposition. Had he obeyed the church, he not only would have been innocent of the charges brought against him, he would have been correct.