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Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

"Also worth mentioning: Galileo himself was "within the Catholic Church"."

Also worth mentioning: not being in the Catholic Church during that era was called "excommunication" and was banishment from public society all together

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No, excommunication simply means being outside the sacraments. It had nothing to do with public society.

Galileo was under house arrest at some point, but that had no canonical relation to any excommunication.

Your technical definition is correct, but you need to consider the practical implications. When you got excommunicated from the Church, people basically stopped taking you seriously, and no one wanted to associate themselves with you. As a consequence, you had no choice but to move elsewhere, i.e. self-banishment.

Interestingly, Galileo called his years in Padua (Padova) the happiest of his life. Florence was much more directly influenced by the church, whereas Padova was part of the Republic of Venice, which was not under the thumb of the church, despite of course being catholic.

If you ever get to visit Padova, there's a great tour of the university that shows a lectern that he used. To put it bluntly, it's a pile of junk, but the story behind that is pretty interesting: rather than hire actual skilled craftsmen to build it, his students - who were not "blue collar" types -wanted to build it themselves as a sign of devotion.

This is just not true in general. The implications were very dependent on where you lived.

You should look up Paolo Sarpi who was a leading figure in the Venetian Republic who Galileo corresponded with frequently. Pope Paul V tried to have him assassinated at one point. If anything he became a more influential leader in Venice after the assassination attempt.

The freedom to work without the more extreme elements of the church getting in the way that was possible in the Republic of Venice at that time is one of the many reasons the position that Galileo opposed the church is hard to defend. If he opposed the church then why did he return to Florence in 1611 instead of staying in the republic.

Excommunication is not the same thing as heresy.

As I understand it (lapsed Catholic), there are two senses to excommunication.

In one sense, it means that you are ineligible to receive the sacraments, and if you do receive them, they are invalid. This would be the case for someone with un-confessed sins, including heresy, or using birth control for that matter.

In another sense, it is the formal finding of excommunication by the church authorities. That's where a person is supposed to be banished from society.

I don't think that Galileo was ever excommunicated. Feyerabend claimed that the church fathers chose a wording in their finding that stopped one step short of accusing Galileo of heresy (for which they would have had to torture and murder him).

People who are formally excommunicated aren't banished from society; in fact, they're not even allowed to skip Mass.

The first type of excommunication you're talking about is the automatic kind. If you commit grave (not venial) sins and haven't been to confession yet, you cannot receive Communion without committing a sacrilege. No formal decree from the bishop is necessary for this. In fact, no one even needs to know you committed a sin, for you to be in this state.

A formal excommunication is a public announcement intended to shame a sinner into amending his life and re-entering a state of grace by repentance and confession. I believe in some cases it requires a public act by the sinner, to let the community know that the public charge of excommunication has been answered. So, to contradict your position, a public excommunication is not a shunning but rather is meant to bring the sinner back into the community.

It might be a useful practice for the Church to do more of...

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