Gallileo vs. The Holly Office

Scholars tend to forget the reason why Galileo was condemned by the Catholic Church. His book on heliocentricism wasn’t a purely scientific one but touched matters of religion too. This is precisely why his “Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo” entered the list of the banned books of the Catholic Church; the harrowing –for scientists up until the 1960s (!) – “Index Librorum Prohibitorum”.

Only books that linked scientific discoveries with the Bible were banned.

And this is exactly why other books that could be indicated as even more subversive (like “On the origin of species” or Newton’s “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica”) were never banned…

Yes. Believe it or not, Darwin himself -although his ideas were disliked by individual priests- was never accused by the Roman Inquisition!