This is the title of Cardinal Vincenzo Montefalco’s latest book.

An unbeliever’s attempt to review a book.

I just didn’t have the patience, as usual, to read everything in this book, although detailed and full of interesting information and dates. And the book disappeared somewhere after “reading”. I suspect it was stolen by someone from the “readers”. But the thoughts related to the relationship between Bellermino and the then “heretics” like Digges in England and two Italians, Galileo and Foscarini, interested me. So it turned out NOT to be a REVIEW OF the BOOK, but a comment on a separate episode in it!

(An amusing curiosity on the subject: Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law, Bishop Wilkins, was an ardent supporter of the Copernican doctrine and it was he who gathered scientists for certain meetings and talks, which were later legitimized and officially named the Royal Society (British Academy of Sciences)!

Wilkins claimed that the FIRST flag on the moon would be British!

Johannes Kepler before him thought it would be Germanic.

A.I.Solzhenitsyn predicted it more accurately than anyone else in 1958, in the novel “In the First Circle”, where through the mouth of one of the episodic characters (isn’t it Valentin Pryanichkov?) he declared that this flag would be an American one!

Which happened in July 1969.)

The head of the Inquisition, Cardinal St. Roberto Francesco Bellarmino wrote to one of Galileo’s friends, Paolo Antonio Foscarini (circa 1615-1616). It was during the time of Pope Paul the Fifth, who met and had a warm conversation with Galileo in the same year:

“It seems to me that you and Segnior Galileo would have acted cautiously if you had been content with presumptive statements and rejected the absolute ones; Copernicus did the same, as I always thought…

Indeed, if it is said that the assumption of the motion of the Earth and the immobility of the Sun better explains the observed phenomena than the hypothesis of epicycles and eccentrics, then this is an excellent statement and it does not involve any danger!

It is quite enough for mathematics.

But when they begin to claim that the Sun is really at the center of the world and only rotates around itself, not moving from east to west, and that the Earth is in the third heaven and orbits the Sun at high speed, this is a very dangerous thing, not only because it irritates all philosophers and learned theologians, but also because it and because it harms the Holy Faith, because it implies the falsity of the Holy Scriptures.”

Bellarmino also met with Galileo and defended him in every possible way, even giving him a certain “indulgence” (“Safe Conduct”), which Galileo brought to trial in 1633, during the reign of another Pope, Urban the Eighth. (Galileo’s friend and defender Bellarmino died in 1621)

Bellarmino’s character seemed to be contradictory and seemingly inconsistent. On the one hand, his gentleness and friendly attitude towards Galileo and other “lawyers of Copernicus”, on the other, it was he who initiated the papal ban on the book and teachings of Copernicus in 1616.

Actually, it’s strange: Copernicus decided to publish his work when he was almost dying in 1543, and it turns out that the Catholic Church TOLERATED this teaching for 73 years?

Although in 1600, under Pope Clement the Eighth, Giordano Bruno was burned in Rome’s Flower Square…

For what?

The official “progressive” version, for his “pro-Copernican” views and, most importantly, the statement about the alleged multiplicity of inhabited worlds in the universe, which looks completely ridiculous.

Bruno had and could not have had ANY sound logical arguments, much less experimental data on a MULTITUDE of WORLDS INHABITED by INTELLIGENT BEINGS (Galileo built his telescope, an improved version of the Dutch one from 1608, in 1609). To this day, we have no evidence of even life in its most primitive (bacterial-viral) form in the universe. And, judging by the sanity of Bellarmino, people were able to reason quite clearly and logically even then. And, as far as I know, Bruno was burned as a “Warlock”, a propagandist of the Anglican Church and Queen Elizabeth, a desecrator and slanderer of the “true” Holy Scriptures.

Just a delusional visionary who could not provide at least one convincing proof of his rightness was not burned or persecuted in Rome at that time. At most, as in the bad Soviet times, he would be declared insane!

And yet, how to combine these seemingly inconsistencies in Cardinal Bellarmino’s behavior, and therefore in his way of thinking: Friendship with Galileo and the Papal bull banning the teachings of Copernicus?

In fact, there WAS no inconsistency.

Cardinal Bellarmino was a SINCERE believer, an unconditionally HONEST man, and he died as PAUPER, recipient of POVERTY BENEFITS, since he DISTRIBUTED all his fortune and belongings to the POOR, who quickly drank and squandered the money! This alone shows Bellarmino’s complete lack of the usual hypocrisy of “believers.”

He was a THINKING man, albeit strictly within the framework of the dogmas of the Holy Scriptures, but his way of thinking was NOT STUPID AND DOGMATIC, but FLEXIBLE. He was able to distinguish clearly and distinctly the essence and shades of various theories, and this is clearly evident from his writing: He welcomes the teachings of Copernicus as a purely mathematical, that is, a theoretical model of the universe, and separates certain “practical, IDEOLOGICAL” conclusions from this model, which clearly contradicted the Dogmas of Holy Scripture!

Besides, it shows his deep respect for a truly scientific way of thinking! He only seeks to conceptually separate two entities from each other: Science in its honest and impartial form and religious teaching as a form of the prevailing ideology.

A clear “dissident”!

In general, he is a very intelligent man, with a clear and flexible mindset and at the same time an honest and sincerely believing Catholic!

IT is RARE to find such people among the herd of cannibal descendants.

I agree with Cardinal Vincenzo Montefalco!

16 XII 2025