SOURCE: "The Refusal to Accommodate: Jesuit Exegetes and the Copernican System" in Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. XXVI, No. 2, 1995, pp. 273-83.

In the following essay, Kelter traces the early response of the Catholic exegetical community to Copernican theory.

On March 5, 1616, the Roman Catholic Church's Sacred Congregation of the Index issued a decree concerning the new Copernican cosmology and current works defending it. The edict prohibited, until corrected, both Nicholas Copernicus' classic work, the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543), and the commentary on Job (1584) by the Spanish theologian Didacus à Stunica (Diego de Zúñiga). The Carmelite Paolo Foscarini's Letter … on the Opinion of the Pythagoreans and of Copernicus on the Mobility of the Earth and the Stability of the Sun (1615) was prohibited absolutely for attempting to reconcile Copernicanism with the Bible and for attempting to prove Copernicanism to be consonant with the truth. All other books of this nature were...