Post by Dr. Rob Campbell, FBBA

Giordano Bruno would not be able to escape this time, as he was hauled out in chains outside of Rome. Awaiting him was a wooded stake. The soldiers of the Roman Catholic Pope stripped Bruno naked, bound his tongue, tied him to the stake and threw a lit torch, and he cried out as the crowd cheered as he was burned alive. His original sin; caught reading books on magic at 15 and he fled Italy. In 1597, the Inquisitors censured Bruno’s claim that Earth moves. His theory of planetary star systems, called “innumerable worlds,” appears in trial records. Bruno said the universe has no center, and stars are suns, surrounded by planets and moons. It was heretical, according to the highest authority. In 1582 and 1591, Pope Gregory XIII’s official Corpus of Canon Law included this heresy: “having the opinion of innumerable worlds.” In 1593, Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges of denial of Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary. It was one of 10 propositions the inquisitors censured: “Again,” they wrote, “he posits many worlds, many suns, necessarily containing similar things in kind and in species as in this world, and even men.” Why did the Roman Catholic Church view this as heretical?