Better late than never.

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This month's date tie-in goes back many years, but also goes back only a bit more than a decade. It was on this day (so the press reports, though most reports seem to return to one ur-report from the Los Angeles Times), in 1992, that the conclusions of a commission set up by the Vatican formally cleared Galileo Galilei of harboring anti-scriptural heresy. It took 359 years from Galileo's forced recantation until the investigations of the commission decided that .... Well, they didn't exactly decide that the earth actually did revolve around the sun. It seems that even the Vatican accepted that long before 1992. But at least now they were able to publicly state that Galileo wasn't wrong.

In a lengthy discussion of the commission a professor at the University of Washington who is apparently also a Jesuit cleric, concludes that the Vatican was far from upfront about clearing Galileo. He suggests that although Galileo was "cleared", meaning that after all these years the earth actually does revolve around the sun, the commission doesn't exactly say that the Vatican was wrong. The wording itself is quite equivocating. I'm not sure that it makes much of a difference. We don't really know if Galileo muttered "but it does move" under his breath when he recanted, but we certainly like to believe that he did. He was, after all, right all along.

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