To attempt to face all this,
added to the fact that Galileo was required to abjure "the heresy
of the movement of the earth" by written order of the Pope, was
soon seen to be impossible. Against the assertion that the Pope was
not responsible we have all this mass of testimony, and the bull of
Alexander VII in 1664.[164]
This contention, then, was at last utterly given up by honest
Catholics themselves. In 1870 a Roman Catholic clergy man in
England, the Rev. Mr. Roberts, evidently thinking that the time had
come to tell the truth, published a book entitled _The Pontifical
Decrees against the Earth's Movement_, and in this exhibited the
incontrovertible evidences that the papacy had committed itself and
its infallibility fully against the movement of the earth. This
Catholic clergyman showed from the original record that Pope Paul
V, in 1616, had presided over the tribunal condemning the doctrine
of the earth's movement, and ordering Galileo to give up the
opinion. He showed that Pope Urban VIII, in 1633, pressed on,
directed, and promulgated the final condemnation, making himself in
all these ways responsible for it.
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