Four hundred years after it put Galileo on trial for heresy the Vatican is to complete its rehabilitation of the great scientist by erecting a statue of him inside the Vatican walls.

The planned statue is to stand in the Vatican gardens near the apartment in which Galileo was incarcerated while awaiting trial in 1633 for advocating heliocentrism, the Copernican doctrine that the Earth revolves around the Sun. (...)

(...) Professor Cabibbo said that the statue - paid for by private donations - was appropriate because Galileo had been one of the founders of the Lincei Academy, a forerunner of the papal body, in 1603. He had not been tortured or burned at the stake, as many believed, though he was forced to recant by the Inquisition. ...)

(...)The Vatican's repentance over its treatment of Galileo began in 1979, when John Paul II invited the Church to rethink the trial of Galileo. (...)

Galileo's abjuration

“Wishing to remove from the minds of your Eminences and all faithful Christians this vehement suspicion reasonably conceived against me, I abjure with sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally all and every error and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church. And I swear that for the future I will neither say nor assert in speaking or writing such things as may bring upon me similar suspicion; and if I know any heretic, or one suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor and Ordinary of the place in which I may be."

— Source: Solange Strong Hertz: Beyond Politics: A Meta-Political View of History.

In: TimesOnline