This paper provides an overview of work, published since the opening of the archives of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the end of the twentieth century, regarding the Vatican confronting evolution in the nineteenth century. It argues that this work, considered in light of recent studies of scientific writings by Jesuit astronomers who in the seventeenth century were opposed to the ideas of Copernicus, points to interesting things yet to be learned regarding the Vatican's actions on heliocentrism. Concern for Scripture and for the fallible and consequential nature of science, together with the processes used by the Vatican in these confrontations, inevitably led to messy results in these well-known \'religion and science\' confrontations. Nevertheless, these confrontations suggest that what the Vatican was attempting to do in confronting evolution or heliocentrism is something that is needed in science, and something that will be done in the future, probably not by the Vatican, and probably in a fashion not less messy.
Page 13 of 27 than they do after dusk in March, despite the Earth being in very different places on its orbit in those two months). The consequence now is that the stars are far larger than the Earths orbit; they all utterly dwarf the sun. This was first pointed out around the turn of the seventeenth century by Tycho Brahe, who also produced a new geocentric model for the universe that, some years later, turned out to be fully compatible with new telescopic discoveries (Figure 2). Some Copernicans, including Johannes Kepler, simply accepted the enormous stars implied by heliocentrism (Figure 3), but Brahe saw the enormous heliocentric star sizes as absurd, and as a strong scientific argument against heliocentrism. Brahes model generally retained Ptolemys stellar distances and sizes, and therefore did not suffer from the star size problem.46 In the early to mid seventeenth century, following the advent of the telescope, Jesuit
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Christoph Scheiner, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, and Andr Tacquet developed the star size argument further. Scheiner and Tacquet produced brief, elegant versions of this argument (the discussion two paragraphs above, regarding how Earths orbit in heliocentrism becomes the basis of observation as opposed to the Earth itself, comes from Tacquet).47 Riccioli set brevity aside. He published large tables containing precise telescopic stellar measurements and the results of calculations made from those measurements, along with pages of discussionand reached similar conclusions about star sizes.48
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Thus Brahes star size argument, and his model, seemed to grow stronger over time, at least until the latter half of the seventeenth century. Robert Hooke in 1674 called the star size argument a grand objection alledged by divers of the great Anti-copernicans with great vehemency and insulting; amonst which we may reckon Ricciolus and Tacquet hoping to make it [the Copernican universe] seem so improbable, as to be rejected by all parties.49 But by that time astronomers including Hooke himself had begun to publish data suggesting problems with measurements of the apparent sizes of starsproblems indicating that such measurements wildly inflated star sizes, even when done carefully and telescopically. Nevertheless, the sizes of stars remained a difficulty for heliocentrism well into the eighteenth century.50 The star size argument was known to some of those involved with the Vaticans actions against heliocentrism, both in 1616 and in 1632-33 (following publication of Galileos Dialogue).
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46 Dennis Danielson and C. M. Graney, The Case Against Copernicus, Scientific American (January 2014), 72-77; C. M. Graney, Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science Against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 32-37; C. M. Graney, The Starry Universe of Johannes Kepler, Journal for the History of Astronomy, 50:2 (2019), 155-173. 47 C. M. Graney, Mathematical Disquisitions: The Booklet of Theses Immortalized by Galileo (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), xviii-xxiii, 30. C. M. Graney, Galileo Between Jesuits: The Fault is in the Stars, Catholic Historical Review, 107 (2021), 197-202. 48 Setting Aside, 129-139. 49 Robert Hooke, An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth from Observations (London, 1674), 26. 50 Setting Aside, 148-157; Galileo Between Jesuits, 220-224; C. M. Graney, The Starry Universe of Jacques Cassini: Century-Old Echoes of Kepler, Journal for the History of Astronomy
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