--- Luke -Jr luke@dashjr.org wrote:
On Saturday 22 March 2008, Leo Mauler wrote:
The Pope's official apology to Galileo didn't come till the 1990s.
There is nothing to apologize for. (nor was the man you're referring to a pope)
The man who apologized about the Catholic Church's error in its complete and unqualified condemnation of Galileo's heliocentrism, *Pope John Paul II*, wasn't a Pope? This may come as a surprise to the Roman Catholic Church, since they generally keep very good track of who is or is not the Pope.
"If contemporary culture is marked by a tendency to scientism, the cultural horizon of Galileo's age was uniform and carried the imprint of a particular philosophical formation.... The majority of theologians did not recognize the formal distinction between Sacred Scripture and its interpretation, and this led them unduly to transpose into the realm of the doctrine of the faith a question which in fact pertained to scientific investigation..."
"Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture...."
Pope John Paul II, L'Osservatore Romano N. 44 (1264) - 4th November, 1992
(whole address here: http://tinyurl.com/3r94b)
So since Vatican II is an official part of the Roman Catholic Church, we can assume you didn't like the way Catholicism was going with Vatican II so you forked the doctrine and didn't apply any of the Vatican II updates?
No. Your premise is incorrect, since Vatican II is not part of the Church, but is a fork of it. If you want it in terms of technology, Wireshark (Vat2) is a fork of Ethereal (Catholicism), but took most of the developers and users with it.
But a doctrine as old as geocentrism is the doctrine that the Pope is the head of the Roman Catholic Church, and the official Roman Catholic Church Pope at the time of Vatican II chose the Vatican II version of Catholicism. Your version decided not to go with Vatican II, which means your fork was the one which left the official Church and took some of the developers and users with it.
If we spoke in terms of the Linux Kernel, then what happened was that there was a kernel fork, you went with one version, and Linus Torvalds (the keeper of the official kernel) went with the other version. Linus' version is the only official version, so all others aren't the official version.
I realize that you feel strongly about your own theology, but in the end the version of Roman Catholicism that has the Pope at the helm really is the official version of Roman Catholicism. This means that no matter how much you consider Vatican II to be a falsehood, it is still the official policy of the official Roman Catholic Church.
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