The Inquisition condemned Galileo for backing Copernicus
On this day · 22 June 1633
On June 22, 1633, Galileo was forced to kneel and renounce the idea that Earth moves around the Sun, then sentenced to house arrest.
In his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo Galilei defended the Copernican view that Earth orbits the Sun. The Church had warned him off the subject back in 1616, and the book reopened the fight. Summoned to Rome, the aging astronomer faced the Roman Inquisition.
On June 22, 1633, the verdict came: Galileo was found guilty of “vehement suspicion of heresy.” He was made to recite a public abjuration, kneeling to renounce his own conclusions about a moving Earth, and his book was banned.
The case turned less on whether Galileo was right than on whether he had defied a Church order.
The sentence was house arrest for the rest of his life, served at his villa in Arcetri near Florence, where he remained for nine years until his death in 1642. The episode became a lasting emblem of the friction between scientific inquiry and institutional authority.
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