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On this date in 1889, the iconic, anti-Catholic statue of the heretic Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake in 1600, was unveiled in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome.
Many times a day you will hear tour guides deliver to gullible tourists all manner of dopiness about what a great guy Bruno was and how narrow and cruel the Church is, and against science.
The transcripts of Giordano Bruno’s trial at the Holy Office were destroyed sometime after Napoleon demanded files from the Vatican Archives be sent to Paris in 1810, and 1815 when the files were being returned to Rome. We have only a summary of the trial written in 1598, two years before Bruno’s execution. It was rediscovered in 1940 by Cardinal Angelo Mercati, Prefect of the Vatican Archives.
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Along the top of the plinth are eight medallions with bust reliefs; they depict the Venetian Paolo Sarpi, the Calabrian Tommaso Campanella, the French Petrus Ramus, the Roman Lucilio Vanini, the Italian Aonio Paleario; the Spaniard Michele Serveto, the English John Wycliffe, and the Bohemian Jan Hus. In 1991, it was rediscovered that the medallion with a bust of Vanini, also had a small portrait of Martin Luther.
At the unveiling, a radical politician Giovanni Bovio gave a speech surrounded dozens of Masonic flags. The Vatican, in anticipation of the thousands of anti-Catholics and Masons coming to Rome for the event, closed the museum and told local churches and parishes to lock the doors. Pope Leo XIII commented on the statue in an 1890 encyclical against Freemasonry:
that eminently sectarian work, the erection of the monument to the renowned apostate of Nola, which, with the aid and favour of the government, was promoted, determined, and carried out by means of Freemasonry, whose most authorised spokesmen were not ashamed to acknowledge its purpose and to declare its meaning. Its purpose was to insult the Papacy; its meaning that, instead of the Catholic Faith, must now be substituted the most absolute freedom of examination, of criticism, of thought, and of conscience: and what is meant by such language in the mouth of the sects is well known.
We read of insults to the papacy now on a daily basis.
There was once an app which showed the statue. Hit a button and it started on fire. It doesn’t work any more.
Meanwhile, white to move and mate in 2.
NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.
Since roasting seems to be a theme of today’s post, try some coffee and support Carmelites in Wyoming.
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Giordano Bruno represents the same level of scientific enquiry you can find in the horoscope section of the local newspaper.
That fire tap functionality needs to come back. I need it for the “artwork” at my home parish.
It looks like a statue of emperor Palpatine.
At first glance, I thought it said Cardinal Bugnini.
Has anyone read the series of murder mysteries that feature Bruno as the detective by S J Parris? I am working my way through them at the moment, holiday reading. I wonder if anyone reads them not knowing he was a real person and he came to a sticky end?
The buildings surrounding the Campo de’ Fiori look to be in much better repair now than 135 years ago. But the place would look much better without Emperor Palpatine, er… Giordano Bruno.
TheCavalierHatherly,
Not quite. His cosmological ideas were ahead of their time, though it probably cannot be said they were much of a contribution to science so much as later proved prescient. He is one the first to propose an infinite universe, one of the first to propose the idea that celestial objects don’t encounter wind resistance, one of the first to imagine planets circling stars other than the sun, etc. He’s partially vindicated by Newtonian physics.
@PostCatholic
“He is one the first to propose an infinite universe,”
And the way in which he did it set science backwards, not forwards. He fails to make the distinction between actual and potential infinity, and so confuses the universe with God, just like Spinoza does (Thus the pantheism). This error, the rejection of the scholastic distinction between types of infinity, isn’t rectified until it is reproposed by Georg Cantor (with the introduction of set theory and trans-finite sets). Cantor’s work is now more or less the standard, but in his own time he was rejected and ridiculed by his colleagues and actively persecuted by them in his career. Pretty much only Catholic theologians were interested in reading and promoting his work.
Just as you say, TheCavalierHatherly. Though I’ll point out all forms of theism are error.