What’s on your mind?

[DaveFromCampbelltown]

I seem to recall reading that it was as late as 1979 that the Vatican (very quietly) arrived at the conclusion that it was no longer deemed heretical to concur with Galileo's defence of Copernicus's revolutionary thesis re what body actually orbited what - in other words, where the centre of the solar system actually lay (whether the planets revolved around our Earth, or, whether they orbited the local star, our Sun, instead), in our solar system.

I suspect that may have just been tidying up some old rules that were no longer relevant. Pretty well all governments do that on occasions. Don't forget that the Doctrine of Discovery was only repudiated a couple of years ago by Pope Francis.

Especially since the Vatican has been running an official observatory since 1582. It's hard to have an observatory (and by all accounts, it's a pretty good one) and not know what goes around what.