POLL: Meme of the Week – April 27th

[deucemagnet]

5. #4, St. Bellarmine

Same bullshit, different century.

Some interesting facts from his wiki page:

<snip>
The next pope, Clement VIII, set great store by him. He was made rector of the Roman College in 1592, examiner of bishops in 1598, and cardinal in 1599. Immediately after his appointment as Cardinal, Pope Clement made him a Cardinal Inquisitor, in which capacity he served as one of the judges at the trial of Giordano Bruno, and concurred in the decision which condemned Bruno to be burned at the stake as a heretic.[5]
<snip>
The Galileo case

In 1616, on the orders of Paul V, Bellarmine summoned Galileo, notified him of a forthcoming decree of the Congregation of the Index condemning the Copernican doctrine of the mobility of the Earth and the immobility of the Sun, and ordered him to abandon it.[6] Galileo agreed to do so.[7]

When Galileo later complained of rumors to the effect that he had been forced to abjure and do penance, Bellarmine wrote out a certificate denying the rumors, stating that Galileo had merely been notified of the decree and informed that, as a consequence of it, the Copernican doctrine could not be "defended or held".[8] Cardinal Bellarmine believed such a demonstration could not be found because it would contradict the unanimous consent of the Fathers' scriptural exegesis, to which the Council of Trent, in 1546,[9] defined all Catholics must adhere. Moreover there wasn't a scientific certainty in the Copernicanism and, in very truth, the reality showed the opposite: our own eyes can observe the sun moves, while there's no evident trace of the movement of the earth and of the immobility of the sun, except for some hypothetical "results" of these phenomenons (as the tidal movement, studied by Galileo), which don't represent any logical necessity of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bellarmine
[10]

So that's what gets you canonized in the Catholic church. But surely, you might suggest, we can't hold today's Catholics responsible for others who canonized him in a time when such things were more widely accepted? Well, only if repressing science and burning heretics at the stake were acceptable in 1930.