“The what?” Frank knew where Rudolstadt was, but—no, hold on, now he remembered something. “Wasn’t there some kind of big conference there last year?”
“Indeed there was. A big argument between one lot of Lutherans and another lot of Lutherans about what kind of—but I’m getting off the point, here. A good few of the speakers at that conference reckoned that they were the last word on what a Christian ought to believe as well, and don’t think for a minute that I’m taking advantage of Simon’s absence to make a few cheap cracks at the expense of the competition.” Mazzare smiled broadly.
The smile was infectious, and Frank found himself chuckling. “So where you’ve got one pope, they’ve got a whole bunch of ’em?”
“Oh, that’s good,” said Mazzare, “I’ll have to remember that the next time I get Simon going on this topic, I really will. And it’s sort of accurate, too, although they do deny it. It’s why you get lots and lots of little Protestant churches. I mean, there’s something to be said for it, they’re all Christians at heart and it must be easier knowing you can just head on down the road if you lose an argument.”
Frank got the feeling he was getting a look in on an old, old, argument.
Mazzare sighed. “I shouldn’t just sit here and slam the competition, should I? I was talking about heresy, and Galileo. Anyway, the formal definition of heresy goes something like this: ‘the obstinate denial, after baptism, of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith.’ There’s a bit in it about obstinate doubt, as well, but I’m not going to subject you to a lecture on formal theology. The thing is, there’s a difference between proposing a subject for debate and deliberately expressing denial, you see, and Galileo got himself on the wrong side of that difference.”
“But he was right . . .” Frank was wondering where this was leading.
“Yes, well, we knew that by the twentieth century. Actually, we knew it by the eighteenth as it happens, and Church teaching changed.”
“I thought dogma couldn’t—” Frank grinned. “You’re going to explain it to me, aren’t you?”
Mazzare’s smile was still on his face “I’m carefully not using words like dogma and doctrine and faith and so on, you know. They’re actually bits of theological jargon, with subtle shades of meaning. Let’s stick with teaching. You know that if you want to be a Catholic, you have to believe the same things that all the other Catholics believe? I think we established that.”
Frank nodded. He’d heard some of the things Christians believed, and figured they had some nerve calling his dad a weirdo for what he believed in. At least Tom Stone didn’t claim to be smoking the body of Christ when he lit up a joint.
“Well,” Mazzare continued, “in the time we came from, if you stop believing what all the other Catholics believe, you just stop being a Catholic. That’s sad but it happens. In theory, at least. There’re are some fairly out-there Catholics in the twentieth century. But I digress. Here and now, if you stop believing what other Catholics believe, it’s a crime. Heresy both ways, but different ways of dealing with it.”
Mazzare stopped to heave a big sigh. “That’s Galileo’s problem right there. He disagrees with the Church about what Catholics ought to believe about the shape of the world. Now, the pope told him—back when he was plain old Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, I think, although I could be wrong about that date—”
“What, he personally told him?” That sounded odd, to Frank. He’d picked up enough about how the seventeenth century worked to know that who you knew was very, very important indeed.
“Oh, yes. Galileo and the pope are actually old friends. Or they were, at least.”
“So how come the pope sicced the Inquisition on him?” This wasn’t following the script that Frank was expecting.
“Well, it was more a question of not being able to stop it, or not easily, anyway. I’ve only gotten this from a book we have back in Grantville, you understand, that was made up of translations of all the papers about Galileo’s trial that survived to the twentieth century, plus a book about Galileo’s daughter. And, I have to confess, I last read up on the whole thing a while before I went to Grantville because I did a stint as a university chaplain and I got into arguments with scientists about it.” Mazzare chuckled. “Actually, I used to really annoy them by pointing out that Galileo got caught by politics, and it was Protestants who suppressed the work of Copernicus and Kepler purely on the strength of it being contrary to Scripture.”