Galileo Revisited

EARTHKEEPING NEWS
A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY

Volume Two, Number Six
July/August 1993

Galileo Revisited

CATHOLIC DIALOGUE ON THE GLOBAL POPULATION EXPLOSION

The Second Vatican council urged attention to the "signs of the times," to discern the will and the action of God today. Nothing occurs with greater emphasis among those signs than global environmental distress. Prominent among the several aspects of that distress are dangerously accelerating populations. Such populations overwhelm resources, imperil political stability, perpetuate poverty, place huge burdens on personal and family dignity, contribute to atmospheric pollution and devastate the diminishing productivity of land.

Ominous signs of population peril present themselves on the one hand. On the other hand, we have the Catholic prohibition of artificial means of contraception. The present Pontiff urges the issue more and more as a veritable test of Catholic orthodoxy. Meanwhile the issue remains seriously disputed by many theologians and by much of the Catholic laity.

A peculiarly Catholic question arises here: Have we been down this road before, this road of assessing scientific data by theological criteria? Does the "official Catholic position" today, vis a vis contraception and global population concerns, carry some echo of the historic blunder of 1633 by which Galileo (and his forerunner Copernicus) were adjudged heretics?

The church in its magisterium appears once again to challenge or minimize massive evidence from multiple sources, scientific and otherwise, this time concerning global population levels with their implications for global well-being.

The inescapable question: Are population levels a topic to which the church brings special competence? Surely, population constraints must be subject to moral limits and moral assessments, as are all responsible human choices. But the prohibition against artificial contraception is not ironclad, in the opinion of many reputable Catholic scholars, to say nothing of unnumbered dissenting Catholic laity.

To ignore or condemn these crucial realities of contemporary Catholic life seems to resurrect in our time the historic specter of a great and well-intentioned scientist, Galileo Galilei, loyal Catholic, wronged — to the unending detriment of the church itself. The first astronomer to study the heavens by telescope, he discovered evidence supporting the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, developed almost a century earlier. But because the biblical exegisis of the time portrayed the earth as the immobile center of the universe, Galileo was tried, declared heretical and sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life.

Equally on trial: his refusal to place ecclesiastical authority — and its biblical / doctrinal assertions about the physical universe — over his own scientific observations and interpretations.

Do factors remain in place today resembling that historic confrontation: protection of the Tradition first, regardless of contemporary data and contrary recommendations?

A leading moral theologian of our time, Bernard Haring, CSSR, who was a member of Pope Paul VI's commission on the contraception issue, has continued to voice serious dissatisfaction with the church's stand — on artificial contraception itself and on the raising of this issue to a major point of Catholic orthodoxy. He writes : "I hope our beloved Pontiff understands that we are dealing with a question of maintaining a responsible and deliberate Christian ethics that will allow the church to be a prophetic, believable voice in the effort toward peace, justice and the safeguarding of creation ... My most pressing concerns are not disputes of sexual morality ... but about the survival of the human race and life on our planet."