‍It’s Okay to Believe the Earth Moves

‍Neither the Bible nor the Church requires you to believe in geocentrism

  Gary Hoge  ·  October 8, 2026

‍“Geocentrism is not ultimately about astronomy; it is about theology.”

‍
— Robert Sungenis

‍Is it, though?

‍Since we were little children, we’ve been taught that the Sun is the center of the solar system and that the Earth, like the other planets, rotates on its axis and orbits the Sun. This model is called Copernicanism, after the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. We take this planetary arrangement for granted, but if you think about it, a Sun-centered solar system isn’t obvious. From our perspective, the Earth appears to be stationary and the heavens appear to revolve around it. If we didn’t know any better, we’d probably think that’s how the universe really works.

‍In fact, for centuries that’s how people really did think the universe worked. The belief that the Earth doesn’t move and that the universe revolves around it once a day is called geocentrism. It’s easy to understand why this remained the prevailing view before it was supplanted by Copernicanism. It was common sense.

‍Today, however, after centuries of scientific discoveries demonstrating otherwise, most people put geocentrism in the same category as flat-Earth theory and alchemy. To keep believing that the Earth stands still takes a considerable leap of faith.

‍There are some, though, who do still believe in geocentrism. Robert Sungenis, president and founder of Catholic Apologetics International, is an outspoken defender of it. Although he offers scientific arguments in its favor, Sungenis regards geocentrism as much more than a scientific theory. “Geocentrism is not ultimately about astronomy,” he writes; “it is about theology.”¹ He maintains that Scripture deliberately teaches geocentrism and that Catholics are bound by the Church’s historical judgments against Copernicanism.

‍But neither of those claims is true, and by presenting geocentrism as something Scripture and the Church require Catholics to believe, Sungenis creates an entirely unnecessary obstacle to faith. Someone considering Catholicism may reasonably wonder why he should embrace a religion that supposedly requires him to reject what he understands to be well-established science. And a Catholic struggling with his faith may be given one more reason to leave it. And for what? Whether the Earth goes around the Sun or the Sun goes around the Earth makes no practical difference to living the Christian life.

‍St. Augustine warned about the danger of attributing mistaken scientific beliefs to Scripture more than sixteen centuries ago. He observed that non-Christians may know a great deal about such things as “the earth, the heavens,” and “the motion and orbit of the stars.” If Christians insist that Scripture teaches something those people know from experience to be false, Augustine warned, they risk making those people doubt whether Scripture can be trusted about anything else:

‍If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?²

‍And that’s why I’m writing this article. Whatever Sungenis may believe about the motion of the Earth, he shouldn’t be telling people that the Bible and the Church require them to believe it, too. They don’t. And no one should be driven away from the Catholic faith over something the Catholic faith doesn’t require.

‍Does Scripture intend to teach geocentrism?

‍Sungenis maintains that Scripture explicitly teaches geocentrism. On his current website he writes:

‍Sacred Scripture teaches a stationary Earth and moving heavens in direct and repeated terms. The biblical cosmology is not poetic metaphor but an inspired description of physical reality as perceived and affirmed by divine revelation.³

‍Sungenis means this quite literally. He maintains that the Earth is physically stationary while the heavens actually move around it each day. In discussing Ecclesiastes, for example, he says that the passage describes genuine solar motion and “fits naturally within a geocentric system where the sun traverses the heavens around an immovable Earth.”⁴

‍Sungenis cites passages such as Psalm 104:5, Joshua 10:12–13, Ecclesiastes 1:5, Matthew 5:45, and others as evidence for this claim. And he is certainly right that Scripture describes the Earth as stationary and the Sun and heavens as moving. The real question is whether those descriptions are intended, as Sungenis claims, to affirm the physical structure of the universe as a truth revealed by God.

‍If you look at passages like these, there is no reason to assume that they are. They read quite naturally as descriptions of the Earth, Sun, Moon, and stars as they appear to the naked eye of an Earth-bound observer. In other words, they describe them the same way we still do today.

‍For example, in his novel The Simple Truth, David Baldacci wrote that his protagonist “had stood on the rear deck for a while and watched the sun slowly rise over him.”⁵ Compare that with Genesis: “The sun rose upon [Jacob] as he passed Penuel” (Genesis 32:31). The descriptions are remarkably similar: Baldacci’s protagonist watches the Sun rise over him; Genesis describes the Sun rising upon Jacob. We have no reason to suppose that Baldacci was asserting the physical motion of the Sun around a stationary Earth, and there is no reason simply to assume that Genesis was doing so either. Both can quite naturally be understood as describing a sunrise as it appeared to an Earth-bound observer.

‍Sungenis, however, insists that we must understand such passages as descriptions of physical reality. In support of that position, he has appealed to Pope Leo XIII’s 1893 encyclical Providentissimus Deus, in which the pope says, essentially, that Scripture must ordinarily be interpreted according to its literal sense unless there is a compelling reason to do otherwise.⁶

‍It’s worth clarifying what Catholics mean by the “literal sense” of Scripture. It does not mean taking every expression at face value—it means what the biblical author intended to assert. Often that assertion is made through a figure of speech that would be nonsensical if taken literally. For example, Matthew tells us that the disciples had trouble staying awake because “their eyes were heavy” (Matthew 26:43). That doesn’t mean their eyes literally weighed more than they had earlier in the day. The literal sense of that verse—what the author intended to assert—is that the disciples were sleepy.⁷

‍We’ve already seen that the Bible uses such phrases as “the sun rose upon him.” The question, then, is: what did the author intend to assert by that phrase? Did he intend to teach us about the mechanics of the solar system, or did he just mean that morning had come?

‍And that’s an important question. As Pope Pius XII reminds us, “the supreme rule of interpretation is to discover and define what the writer intended to express.”⁸ In this case, if he intended to express merely that morning had come, then that is the literal sense of the verse, even though he expressed it figuratively.

‍In light of that, it’s good that Sungenis brought up Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Providentissimus Deus. Just a few paragraphs after explaining that Scripture must ordinarily be interpreted according to its literal sense, the pope discusses how that principle applies when Scripture describes the physical world. And his explanation directly contradicts Sungenis’s assertion that the sacred writers intended to teach us about the physical structure of the visible universe. Leo XIII wrote:

‍We must remember, first, that the sacred writers, or to speak more accurately, the Holy Ghost Who spoke by them, did not intend to teach men these things (that is to say, the essential nature of the things of the visible universe), things in no way profitable unto salvation. Hence they did not seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, but rather described and dealt with things in more or less figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time, and which in many instances are in daily use at this day, even by the most eminent men of science. Ordinary speech primarily and properly describes what comes under the senses; and somewhat in the same way the sacred writers—as the Angelic Doctor also reminds us—“went by what sensibly appeared,” or put down what God, speaking to men, signified, in the way men could understand and were accustomed to.⁹

‍The pope was quite clear that Scripture does not intend to teach us about astronomy or the other physical sciences. Pope Pius XII, referring specifically to this teaching of Leo XIII, endorsed it with his own authority nearly fifty years later. He stated that “there is no error whatsoever if the sacred writer, speaking of things of the physical order ‘went by what sensibly appeared.’” He concluded that “This teaching, which Our Predecessor Leo XIII set forth with such solemnity, We also proclaim with Our authority and We urge all to adhere to it religiously.”¹⁰

‍That makes the answer to our first question obvious. The Church has explicitly taught that God did not intend to reveal the physical structure of the universe through the biblical authors. They described the world as it sensibly appeared, whether that corresponded to physical reality or not. Therefore, Sungenis is wrong when he says that geocentrism is “revealed by God.” Scripture neither requires geocentrism nor rules it out. It simply wasn’t written to answer that kind of question. As Cardinal Caesar Baronius famously observed, the Bible was written to show us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.¹¹

‍Does the Church require belief in geocentrism?

‍That brings us to the second question. Sungenis describes geocentrism not merely as something compatible with Catholicism, but as “literal cosmological truth, revealed by God and safeguarded by the Magisterium.”¹² That is a remarkable claim, and it raises an obvious question: if geocentrism is a teaching of the Church, where does the Church teach it? Which catechism teaches that the Earth is stationary? Which council or papal teaching document presents geocentrism as part of the deposit of faith? The Church is certainly capable of telling us what it teaches. If geocentrism is among those teachings, we ought to be able to identify where it is taught.

‍Sungenis points to one obvious candidate: the Church’s actions against Copernicanism in the seventeenth century. And there is some logic to Sungenis’s argument. If Church authorities condemned the proposition that the Earth moves, the only alternative is that it does not move—and that necessarily entails some form of geocentrism.

‍It’s true that there were ecclesiastical rulings against Copernicanism that permitted Catholics to discuss and use it as a mathematical convenience, but forbade them from teaching it as a physical reality. Those rulings were real and serious. Sungenis has described them as “just a tad below an irreformable teaching.”¹³

‍He has also argued that Popes Paul V and Urban VIII “condemned Copernicanism in formal and official statements, the same kind of formal and official statements the Church makes on many issues, short of an infallible statement,” adding that “An encyclical is just as authoritative as what was decreed by these two popes on Copernicanism.”¹⁴

‍So Sungenis has a legitimate historical point: Church authorities really did act against Copernicanism. They prohibited Catholics from affirming that the Earth moves and treated its immobility as the position consistent with Scripture.

‍Church authorities condemn the Copernican theory

‍The controversy had begun nearly a century earlier, when Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a model in which the Earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the Sun. By the early seventeenth century, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei had become one of the most prominent advocates of the Copernican system. His telescopic observations provided powerful evidence against the traditional Ptolemaic model, but they did not yet demonstrate the crucial point at issue: that the Earth itself actually moved.

‍That distinction would become important. Galileo was not merely proposing Copernicanism as a useful mathematical model; he believed it described physical reality. And because passages of Scripture appeared to describe the Earth as stationary and the Sun as moving, the controversy eventually became a question not only of astronomy but of biblical interpretation.

‍On February 24, 1616, a group of theological consultants to the Holy Office was asked to evaluate two propositions associated with Copernicanism: that the Sun is stationary at the center of the world, and that the Earth moves. They judged the first proposition “foolish and absurd in philosophy” and “formally heretical” because they believed it contradicted Scripture; they judged the second proposition similarly erroneous in faith.

‍Those conclusions, however, were the opinions of the theological consultants. They were not themselves promulgated by Pope Paul V as a definition of Catholic doctrine.

‍On March 1, the Congregation of the Index decided to prohibit works defending Copernicanism. Its decision was presented to Pope Paul V on March 3, and he ordered the decree to be published. The decree, issued on March 5, described the doctrine of the Earth’s motion and the Sun’s immobility as “false” and “altogether contrary to Holy Scripture,” suspended Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres until it could be “corrected,” and prohibited other works that defended the same position.¹⁵

‍So there is no question that Roman ecclesiastical authorities officially acted against Copernicanism. Sungenis is on solid historical ground when he points out that Church authorities once prohibited Catholics from affirming the Earth’s motion as physical reality and treated the Earth as stationary.

‍The road to confrontation

‍To understand what happened next, it’s worth considering the scientific situation in Galileo’s time. The evidence for the Earth’s motion was considerably less clear in 1616 than it would later become. Galileo’s observations of the phases of Venus, for example, could also be explained by Tycho Brahe’s system, in which the planets orbited the Sun while the Sun orbited a stationary Earth. And the evidence Galileo put forward specifically to demonstrate the Earth’s motion—that its motion caused the tides—was unpersuasive and turned out to be wrong.

‍Astronomers of the time also understood that if the Earth orbited the Sun, its changing position over the course of the year should cause nearby stars to appear to shift slightly against the more distant stars—a phenomenon known as stellar parallax. Yet despite looking for such a shift, they could not detect one. They therefore had what seemed to be observational evidence that the Earth did not move. Copernican astronomers suggested that the stars might be much farther away than was generally thought, making the resulting parallax too small for their instruments to detect. They turned out to be right, but it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that astronomers had instruments sensitive enough to prove it.¹⁶

‍Seen from our vantage point, knowing that Galileo was right, reluctance to accept Copernicanism can easily look like resistance to scientific progress. But he was essentially asking his contemporaries to abandon everything they thought they knew about the universe just because he was confident—but couldn’t prove—that he was right. Had Galileo ultimately proved to be wrong, they would have looked foolish for overturning their whole conception of the universe simply because one Italian astronomer said it was wrong.

‍Nor were all Church authorities unwilling to consider the possibility that Galileo might eventually prove his case. A year before the 1616 action against Copernicanism, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine had urged a more cautious approach. In a 1615 letter, Bellarmine said it was prudent to discuss Copernicanism as a mathematical hypothesis, but not to assert it as physical fact. At the same time, he made clear that he did not rule out the possibility that it might eventually be proved. If a genuine demonstration of the Earth’s motion were produced, he wrote, “it would be necessary to proceed with great caution in explaining the passages of Scripture which seemed contrary” and to admit that “we did not understand them” rather than deny what had been demonstrated.¹⁷

‍Bellarmine’s position is significant because it challenges the stereotype that Church authorities simply refused to consider evidence against the traditional view. He explicitly acknowledged that if Copernicanism were demonstrated to be true, it would have to be accepted and the traditional interpretation of Scripture reconsidered accordingly. Galileo, however, was so convinced that Copernicanism described physical reality that he was unwilling to limit himself to treating it merely as a hypothesis, thus setting the stage for an eventual confrontation.

‍But if Galileo was overconfident in his position, so were his opponents. The biblical objection to Copernicanism was not as decisive as they seemed to think. Scripture does describe the Earth as fixed and the Sun as moving, but it also speaks of the Earth as having “pillars” and “foundations,” and elsewhere refers to the “four corners of the earth”—language that Christians did not generally take as a technical description of the Earth’s physical structure. That should at least have left open the possibility that biblical descriptions of a stationary Earth and a moving Sun likewise described the world as it appeared to an ordinary observer, rather than being physics lessons. Imagine how long the Bible would be if it couldn’t use a word like “sunrise” without stopping to explain the mechanics behind the Sun’s apparent motion.

‍In retrospect, then, Bellarmine and Galileo each had part of the eventual answer. Bellarmine was right that Galileo had not demonstrated the Earth’s motion and that caution was warranted; Galileo was right that Copernicanism described physical reality and that Scripture should not necessarily be interpreted as settling such scientific questions. Greater caution was warranted on both sides: Galileo was too certain of his scientific conclusions, while his opponents were too certain Scripture contradicted them.

‍Personalities also played a role. Galileo was a formidable and sometimes combative controversialist who became involved in a number of bitter scientific disputes and managed to alienate people who had previously been friendly toward him. And because the controversy had come to involve the interpretation of Scripture, Church authorities did not regard it as a purely scientific dispute in which they had no role to play. Astronomy, biblical interpretation, personalities, and ecclesiastical authority had become entangled with one another. What looks straightforward in hindsight was considerably less so at the time.¹⁸

‍Galileo before the Inquisition

‍Seventeen years after Church authorities prohibited the defense of Copernicanism, the controversy came to a head again when Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Galileo was brought before the Roman Inquisition in 1633 to answer charges that he had held and defended the proposition that the Earth moves and the Sun is stationary.

‍On June 16, after hearing the opinions of the cardinals of the Holy Office, Pope Urban VIII determined that Galileo was to be interrogated regarding his beliefs, required to abjure if he persisted, forbidden to treat further of the Earth’s motion or the Sun’s stability, and imprisoned for a period to be determined by the Holy Office. He also ordered Galileo’s Dialogue prohibited and the resulting sentence circulated.

‍Six days later, the Holy Office formally found Galileo “vehemently suspected of heresy,” required him to abjure, and sentenced him to imprisonment for an indefinite period at its discretion. The sentence sounds harsher than it was in practice. Galileo was never confined to an ordinary prison as a result of the sentence; instead, he was permitted to live first at the Tuscan ambassador’s residence, then as a guest of the Archbishop of Siena, and finally at his own villa near Florence, where he spent the last eight years of his life. However, Galileo’s comfortable accommodations did not mean that his sentence was merely symbolic. His movements and activities remained restricted.¹⁹

‍Pope Urban VIII and the Holy Office clearly did act against Galileo and Copernicanism. Whatever theological weight one assigns to those actions, at the time Catholics were not free to affirm the Earth’s motion as physical reality.

‍The Church changes course

‍By the early nineteenth century, the scientific evidence for the Earth’s motion had become overwhelming, and the Church’s treatment of Copernicanism changed accordingly, much as Bellarmine had recommended two centuries earlier.

‍In 1820, the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Settele sought permission to publish a textbook that presented the Earth’s motion as an established fact rather than merely as a mathematical convenience. When the Master of the Sacred Palace refused permission, Settele appealed to Pope Pius VII, who referred the matter to the Holy Office.

‍After considering the matter, Pius VII decreed that there were “no obstacles” to affirming Copernicus’s position concerning the motion of the Earth, as Catholic authors were already doing at the time. Settele was subsequently permitted to publish his book.²⁰

‍The significance of that decree is hard to miss. In 1616, Church authorities had prohibited Catholics from affirming the Earth’s motion as physical reality; in 1820, Pope Pius VII expressly permitted them to do exactly that. Catholics were now free to affirm that the Earth moves—and if they were free to affirm that it moves, they obviously could not be required to believe that it doesn’t.

‍And yet Sungenis continues to argue that the Church has “never officially reversed”²¹ its earlier judgments against Copernicanism. Whether one chooses to call what happened in 1820 a “reversal” or something else, the practical result is undeniable: what was once prohibited is now permitted.

‍How the Church sees it now

‍Pope John Paul II made that even clearer when he reflected on the Galileo controversy in 1992. He explicitly described Galileo’s 1633 sentence as “not irreformable” and noted that the controversy was ultimately closed in 1820 with the imprimatur granted to Settele’s work.

‍More importantly, John Paul II identified exactly where the Church authorities of Galileo’s time had gone wrong. “The error of the theologians of the time,” he said, was to think that our understanding of the structure of the physical world was somehow “imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture.” The Bible, he explained, “does not concern itself with the details of the physical world,” which belong instead to “the competence of human experience and reasoning.”

‍He also explained that most of Galileo’s theological opponents had failed to distinguish between Scripture itself and their interpretation of Scripture. As a result, they had “unduly” transferred “into the realm of the doctrine of the faith a question which in fact pertained to scientific investigation.”²²

‍When Sungenis calls geocentrism “literal cosmological truth, revealed by God and safeguarded by the Magisterium,” he’s doing the same thing they did: he’s saying that geocentrism is “imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture,” and wrongly taking a scientific question and placing it within the realm of revealed doctrine. 

‍So whatever authority the seventeenth-century judgments once possessed, they do not require Catholics to believe in geocentrism today. Catholics are free to affirm the Earth’s motion if they believe the scientific evidence supports it. That alone answers the second question.

‍Conclusion

‍So where does that leave us? Contrary to Sungenis, neither Scripture nor the Church requires Catholics to believe in geocentrism. The Church has explicitly taught that Scripture does not intend to reveal the physical structure of the universe. It has also expressly permitted Catholics to affirm the Earth’s motion. The Church recognizes that questions about the physical structure of the universe belong to “the competence of human experience and reasoning,” rather than being settled by revelation or magisterial authority.

‍Sungenis has every right to affirm the reality of geocentrism if he thinks the evidence supports it. But he cannot legitimately claim that Scripture reveals geocentrism as a truth Catholics are obliged to believe. Pope Leo XIII explicitly taught otherwise. Pope Pius XII reaffirmed that teaching and urged Catholics to “adhere to it religiously.”

‍Nor can Sungenis legitimately claim that the Church’s historical condemnations of Copernicanism still bind Catholics today. Whatever restrictions those judgments once imposed, Pope Pius VII expressly permitted Catholics to affirm the Earth’s motion in 1820. Catholics have been free ever since to believe either that the Earth moves or that it doesn’t—whichever they believe the scientific evidence supports.

‍Geocentrism is perfectly compatible with the Catholic faith, but so is Copernicanism. So the scientific case for geocentrism will have to stand or fall on its own merits. It can’t be propped up by claiming that Catholics have to believe it, like it or not, because the Bible and the Church require them to.

‍__________

^‍1 Robert A. Sungenis, “What Is the Ultimate Lesson Geocentrism Teaches Us About Creation and Redemption?” Catholic Apologetics International, https://www.robertsungenis.com/qa/ultimate-lesson-geocentrism-creation-redemption. Sungenis writes: “Geocentrism is not ultimately about astronomy; it is about theology.”

^‍2 St. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, I.19.39, trans. John Hammond Taylor, S.J., Ancient Christian Writers, nos. 41–42 (New York: Newman Press, 1982), 42–43. https://aquinas101.thomisticinstitute.org/articles/selection-from-st-augustine-on-the-literal-meaning-of-genesis-bk-1-c-19.

^‍3 Robert A. Sungenis, “How Does Scripture Support Geocentrism?” Catholic Apologetics International, accessed October 6, 2026, https://www.robertsungenis.com/qa/scripture-support-geocentrism. Sungenis writes, “Sacred Scripture teaches a stationary Earth and moving heavens in direct and repeated terms. The biblical cosmology is not poetic metaphor but an inspired description of physical reality as perceived and affirmed by divine revelation.”

^‍4 Sungenis, “How Does Scripture Support Geocentrism?” https://www.robertsungenis.com/qa/scripture-support-geocentrism. In discussing Ecclesiastes 1:5, Sungenis writes that the passage “fits naturally within a geocentric system where the sun traverses the heavens around an immovable Earth.”

^‍5 David Baldacci, The Simple Truth (New York: Warner Books, 1998), 372.

^‍6 Robert A. Sungenis, “Catholic Answers, Answered,” Catholic Apologetics International, https://www.robertsungenis.com/answering-catholic-answers. Responding to Karl Keating’s interpretation of Pope Leo XIII’s Providentissimus Deus, Sungenis appeals to the encyclical’s earlier sections concerning the literal sense of Scripture, arguing that this sense must be maintained unless reason or necessity requires otherwise.

^‍7 Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 116, https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__PGE.HTM. The Catechism explains: “The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation.” The literal sense is not necessarily a literalistic reading of every expression.

^‍8 Pope Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu, 30 September 1943, no. 34, https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_30091943_divino-afflante-spiritu.html. Pius XII states that “the supreme rule of interpretation is to discover and define what the writer intended to express.”

^‍9 Pope Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus, 18 November 1893, no. 18, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_18111893_providentissimus-deus.html. “The Angelic Doctor” is St. Thomas Aquinas. See Summa Theologiae, I, q. 70, a. 1, ad 3, where Aquinas explains that Moses, “condescending to an uneducated people, followed what appears to the senses.” https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1070.htm#article1.

^‍10 Pope Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu, 30 September 1943, nos. 3–4, https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_30091943_divino-afflante-spiritu.html. Pius XII explicitly reaffirms Leo XIII’s teaching concerning the sacred writers’ use of descriptions based on sensible appearances.

^‍11 Pope John Paul II, Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 31 October 1992, no. 12, https://www.pas.va/en/magisterium/saint-john-paul-ii/1992-31-october.html. John Paul II repeats the saying attributed to Cardinal Caesar Baronius: “The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.”

^‍12 Robert A. Sungenis, “How Do Scripture and Church Tradition Support Geocentrism?” Catholic Apologetics International, accessed October 6, 2026, https://www.robertsungenis.com/qa/scripture-and-tradition-support-geocentrism. Sungenis describes geocentrism as “literal cosmological truth, revealed by God and safeguarded by the Magisterium.”

^‍13 Robert A. Sungenis, “Challenge” debate on geocentrism, preserved at https://www.ldolphin.org/geocentricity/Aspects.pdf. Discussing Urban VIII’s condemnation of Copernicanism, Sungenis writes, “Pope Urban’s condemnation of Copernicanism was just a tad below an irreformable teaching.”

^‍14 Robert A. Sungenis, “Posting #3.3—Star Wars—Satellites Again,” 25 May 2002, reproduced in Aspects of Geocentricity, 50, https://www.ldolphin.org/geocentricity/Aspects.pdf. Sungenis argues that Popes Paul V and Urban VIII condemned Copernicanism in formal and official statements comparable in authority to an encyclical.

^‍15 Annibale Fantoli, Galileo: For Copernicanism and for the Church, trans. George V. Coyne, S.J. (Vatican Observatory Publications, 1996); Sacred Congregation of the Index, Decree of 5 March 1616, English translation in Maurice A. Finocchiaro, ed., The Essential Galileo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008), 176–78. On February 24, the consultants to the Holy Office judged the proposition that the Sun is stationary at the center of the world “foolish and absurd in philosophy” and “formally heretical,” and the proposition that the Earth moves “at least erroneous in faith.” The March 5 decree subsequently described the doctrine of the Earth’s motion and the Sun’s immobility as “false” and “altogether contrary to Holy Scripture,” suspended Copernicus’s De revolutionibus until corrected, and prohibited works defending the same doctrine. The text of the March 5 decree is also available at https://inters.org/decree-against-copernicanism-1616.

^‍16 On Galileo’s tidal argument, see Ron Naylor, “Galileo’s Tidal Theory,” Isis 98, no. 1 (March 2007): 1–22. Naylor explains that Galileo intended his tidal theory to demonstrate the physical truth of Copernicanism. On the phases of Venus, see “Galileo’s Most Decisive Telescopic Observation: The Phases of Venus, 1610–23,” History of Science Museum, University of Oxford: Galileo’s observations were incompatible with the traditional Ptolemaic system but did not disprove the Tychonic system, in which the planets orbit the Sun while the Sun orbits the Earth. On stellar parallax, see Arnab Rai Choudhuri, Astrophysics for Physicists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5: Copernicus recognized that an orbiting Earth should produce stellar parallax and correctly proposed that the stars might simply be too distant for it to be detected. The first successful stellar-parallax measurements were reported in 1838.

^‍17 Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, Letter to Paolo Antonio Foscarini, 12 April 1615, English translation in Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); text also available at https://inters.org/Bellarmino-Letter-Foscarini. Bellarmine wrote that Foscarini and Galileo proceeded “prudently” by treating Copernicanism suppositionally rather than absolutely, and stated that if a true demonstration of the Earth’s motion were produced, interpreters would have to proceed cautiously with apparently contrary passages of Scripture and “say that we do not understand them, rather than affirm that what has been demonstrated is false.”

^‍18 Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). See also Guy Consolmagno, S.J., “Jesuits and Galileo,” Vatican Observatory, 6 May 2021, https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/sacred-space-astronomy/jesuits-and-galileo/; and George V. Coyne, S.J., “The Jesuits and Galileo: Fidelity to Tradition and the Adventure of Discovery,” https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Jesuits-and-Galileo.pdf. Galileo became involved in increasingly bitter scientific disputes with figures such as Christoph Scheiner and Orazio Grassi; his wit and sarcasm in The Assayer embarrassed Grassi and angered a number of Jesuits.

^‍19 Roman Inquisition, Sentence of Galileo, 22 June 1633; Museo Galileo, “Sentence of Condemnation of Galileo,” https://catalogue.museogalileo.it/indepth/SentenceCondemnationGalileo.html. The sentence declared Galileo “vehemently suspected of heresy” and condemned him to the “formal prison” of the Holy Office “during our pleasure,” while expressly reserving to the tribunal the authority to moderate, commute, or remove the penalties. For the subsequent implementation of the sentence, see Museo Galileo, “Galileo Galilei,” https://catalogue.museogalileo.it/biography/GalileoGalilei.html. After his condemnation, Galileo was confined in Siena and, in December 1633, permitted to return to his villa at Arcetri, where he spent approximately the last eight years of his life.

^‍20 Holy Office, Decree concerning Giuseppe Settele’s Elements of Astronomy, 16 August 1820, reproduced in W. Brandmüller and E. J. Greipl, eds., Copernico, Galilei e la Chiesa: fine della controversia (1820): gli atti del Sant’Uffizio (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1992), 300–301; English translation reproduced by the Vatican Observatory, https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/resources/galileo/decree-approval-work-elements-astronomy-giuseppe-settele-support-heliocentric-system-1820/. The decree records Pius VII’s determination that “no obstacles exist for those who sustain Copernicus’ affirmation regarding the earth’s movement in the manner in which it is affirmed today, even by Catholic authors.”

^‍21 Robert A. Sungenis, “Why Do Critics Misunderstand Geocentrism?” Catholic Apologetics International, accessed October 6, 2026, https://www.robertsungenis.com/qa/critics-misunderstand-geocentrism. Sungenis argues that the Church has “never officially reversed” its earlier judgments against heliocentrism.

^‍22 Pope John Paul II, Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 31 October 1992, nos. 5, 9–12, https://www.pas.va/en/magisterium/saint-john-paul-ii/1992-31-october.html. John Paul II states that Galileo’s 1633 sentence “was not irreformable”; identifies “the error of the theologians of the time” as believing that the physical structure of the world was “imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture”; says that the Bible “does not concern itself with the details of the physical world,” which belong to “the competence of human experience and reasoning”; and explains that Galileo’s theological opponents had “unduly” transferred “into the realm of the doctrine of the faith a question which in fact pertained to scientific investigation.”