Note 324 — Front matter (continued 7)

Modern research has easily settled that Galilei was not physically ill-treated, and that there was probably no intention to carry out the formal threat of torture. But this refutation of the excesses of the older anti-Papal historians leaves the serious part of the indictment intact. Galilei was forbidden by the Holy Office in 1616 to advance as a positive discovery his view of the earth's position. In 1632, to the great indignation of Urban VIII., he disregarded this prohibition, which he thought a dead letter, and was condemned by the Inquisition as "vehemently suspected of heresy." The crime against culture is not materially lessened by the fact that the Inquisition lodged the astronomer in its most comfortable rooms.