That seems to be the best conclusion we can draw from the misunderstandings here (pointed out by previous comments) about Galileo and the Church.

The Galileo misunderstanding is widespread and dominant. (Does that excuse it?) Also widespread and dominant is the belief that if a theory of origins is open to extra-natural intervention, then it is not science. It ain't necessarily so. Since links don't seem to be enabled in this blog, I'll suggest you Google on "Stephen Meyer design descent" (without the quotes) and look at the first result.

James Joyner can't read ...either that or he's under the sad delusion that the religion of Evolution is somehow science....

Other Church astronomers had reached the same conclusion beforehand.

By continuing this lie, you only continue centuries' old bigotries and hatreds against Catholics and the Catholic Church.

All because Christopher Cardinal Schönborn clarfies the Catholic teaching that God, and not simply some materialistic or random, is ultimately responsible for creation, however evolutionary or radical its development.

How pathetic. How sadly predictable. How Reasonable.

First off it should be remembered that there was a Copernican revolution, not a Galilean revolution. Copernicus was the Catholic priest who was received with only the greatest esteem and approbation of other Catholic churchmen, and this was 75 years before Galileo.

As for your claim about the Church recognizing Galileo's "work" it was actually an apology issued by JPII for Galileo's treatment, not work - this treatment consisting mainly of house arrest in a Cardinal's palace (most of us would welcome such treatment).

Additionally, anyone who accepts uncritically the Heliocentric over the Geocentric model is still a bit behind the times because as Alfred North Whitehead puts it:

“Galileo said that the earth moves and that the sun is fixed; the Inquisition said that the earth is fixed and the sun moves; and Newtonian astronomers… said that both the sun and the earth move. But now we say that any one of these three statements is equally true, provided that you have fixed your sense of ‘rest’ and ‘motion’ in the way required by the statement adopted” (1967 [1925], Science and the Modern World, The Free Press: New York, pp. 183–184).

And finally, it was Kepler's model of the solar system, one with elliptical orbits of planets and which Galileo flatly rejected, that turned out to be the most accurate one of the time.

It's hard to blame anyone for repeating the mythology though. These oft repeated one-liners about Galileo are merely part of the journalese that substitutes itself for thoughtful discussion.

Thank you for providing this space.

Pierre LeJeune (geneticist who discovered the chromosomal abnormality in Down's Syndrome patients):

"For all the proteins analyzed, more than 99% of the amino-acids are identical in man and in the chimpanzee. These same authors have compared, by molecular hybridization methods, the constitution of nucleic acids of the two species...As King and Wilson remark, the genetic differences between man and the chimpanzee appear extremely tenuous. For example, the differences observed between neighboring species of squirrels are notably greater. Between two species of frogs, they are thirty times more significant. It is necessary therefore to abandon definitely the view that small mutations can alone explain the difference between man and the chimpanzee. In other words, between the two species, the genetic vocabulary is common except for less than 1% variations, whereas the structure of chromosomes is notably different...It all seems to happen as if the genetic instructions being almost identical, the order in which they are expressed makes all the difference" *

and

"The neo-Darwinist is now reaching the point of dignity in the history of science that the Ptolemaic system in astronomy, the epicycle system, reached long ago. We know that it does not work. And that is interesting. Because from the actual structure of the chromosome we can demonstrate that the human species did not come from a progressive humanisation of a pre-human."

*Jerome LeJeune, "On the Mechanisms of Speciation," Proceedings of the Sessions of the Biological Society, Paris, Abstract 9, Volume 169, No. 4 (1975), p 828.

Take for instance, Galileo's inquisition by the Catholic church; was it purely a case of a man of science persecuted by a backward thinking clergy? No. The Church of the time had no problem with what could be proven. After all, the Church had its own scientists; the Jesuit brother Steiner was as forward thinking a scientist as they came. But, Galileo was promoting ideas far beyond what he could prove and he had serious personality defects. He was loud, insulting and wouldn't listen to reason. He rejected, out of hand, Steiner's explanation for comets because he hadn't discovered the proof himself. Galileo thought that comets were optical illusions in the upper atmosphere. But, if Galileo had been able to share credit, Steiner's explanation would have proven his theories. Many of Galileo's ideas were later proven false, but he holds his reputation because he was lionized by the Anti-Catholic Protestant zealots of Northern Europe. Most of Galileo's reputation rests on age-old religious propaganda and ignorance.

If you look into the Cardinal's remarks, you see the same anti-Catholic bias. The Catholic Church is not denying that artificial selection can create new species, but it refuses to say that God has no hand in the matter. The question that a Catholic would have is "How much does God interfere?" An atheist would say that "God doesn't interfere, because God doesn't exist." No Catholic priest will say that; why would anyone think that he would? Why is it news that people of faith believe that God works his way in the world? Is there any reason for God not to have created the mechanism by which evolution works: trial and error-- DNA? Neither side can prove its case. So, why not leave this issue unresolved until we have proof?

The sensible RC position is "we don't pretend to know exactly how God created the universe or humankind, but we're confident he did so." By definition, we can't prove that what seems random to us wasn't part of a Divine Plan.

That's all the Church needs, and when it seems to want more, it's pretty apparent that other motives than religion are at work. As Nietzsche observed, when you see a peculiar metaphysical position, ask yourself "what morality does this position aim at?"

A perfect, all-powerful God should have no problem designing a Universe by which Man arose through processes that obeyed an entirely self-consistent set of laws.

That is entirely consistent with the Catholic dogma on a creator who made the endowment, though the scientific version of course does not mention who or what this endower might be, while the Catholic version does define him.

Cardinal Schoenborn incorrectly attributes an atheistic view to science and then argues against it. He should be admonished for the old debate trick of misstating your opponent's views.

Is it too much to ask you to actually read the stuff you link to?