[36]  Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino (1542-1622) was an Italian Bishop, Confessor and Doctor of the Church. Among his notable writings is the sentence: “..to affirm that the sun really is fixed in the centre of the heavens and only revolves around itself without travelling from east to west, and that the earth is situated in the third sphere and revolves with great speed around the sun, is a very dangerous thing, not only by irritating all the philosophers and scholastic theologians, but also by injuring our holy faith and rendering the Holy Scriptures false.”

 

      In 1600 these words represented eternal wisdom. Still, it took the church 400 years to acknowledge the Cardinal’s genius. It’s a mark of great Faith that the Vatican canonized Roberto Bellarmino in 1930, when convincing evidence to the sun’s habits were already known to children in (secular) kindergartens.