“The Lord Cardinal Bellarmine having reported that Galileo Galilei, mathematician, had in terms of the order of the Holy Congregation been admonished to abandon (deserendam) [disserendam (discuss) was the word originally written] the opinion he has hitherto held, that the sun is the centre of the spheres and immovable, and that the earth moves, and had acquiesced therein; and the decree of the Congregation of the Index having been presented, prohibiting and suspending respectively the writings of Nicholas Copernicus (De Revolutionibus orbium cœlestium....) of Diego di Zuñiga on Job, and of Paolo Antonio Foscarini, Carmelite Friar—His Holiness ordered this edict of prohibition and suspension respectively, to be published by the Master of the Palace.”[143]
This document, as Gherardi justly perceived, is of far greater importance than merely for the evidence it affords that Galileo at once submitted to the Cardinal’s admonition; it permits the conclusion, almost to a certainty, that a proceeding like that described in the note of 26th February never took place. It is clear from the above that Cardinal Bellarmine was giving a report of the proceedings of 26th February at a private sitting of the Congregation of the Holy Office under the personal presidency of the Pope. His report agrees precisely with the papal ordinance of 25th February: he had admonished Galileo to give up the Copernican doctrines, and he had consented. This was to all appearance the end of the business. The cardinal does not say a word about the stringent proceedings said to have taken place in his presence before notary and witnesses. And yet this part of it would have been of far greater importance than the first. It may perhaps be said that it was not the cardinal’s business to report the doings of the Commissary of the Inquisition. But the objection is not valid; for in the first place the conditions did not exist which would have justified the interference of the Commissary, and in the second, his report would certainly also have been given at the sitting where the proceedings of 26th February were reported. But in the note of 3rd March there is not a trace of the report of Brother Michael Angelo Segnitius de Lauda. It is, however, so incredible that no communication should be made to the Congregation about the most important part of the proceedings of 26th February, and that Cardinal Bellarmine should not have made the slightest reference to it in his report, that this document of 3rd March, 1616, discovered by Professor Gherardi, would be sufficient of itself to justify the suspicion that the course of the proceedings on 26th February, 1616, was not at all that reported in the note relating to it in the Vatican MS., but was in accordance with the papal ordinance of 25th February, and ended with the cardinal’s admonition.