‘Giordano Bruno & Fr Tony Flannery’ by Joe McVeigh

More than four centuries ago, on February 16, 1600, the Catholic Church executed (by burning at the stake), a man called Giordano Bruno, for the crime of heresy. He was taken from his cell in the early hours of the morning to the Piazza dei Fiori in Rome and burnt alive at the stake. The Church authorities were fearful of the ideas of this man who was known throughout Europe as a bold and brilliant thinker. In a peculiar twist to the gruesome affair, the executioners were ordered to tie his tongue so that he would be unable to address those gathered. Bruno had been ordained a priest in the Dominican order but left the priesthood after five years.

“Throughout his life Bruno championed the Copernican system of astronomy which placed the sun, not the Earth, at the centre of the solar system. He opposed the stultifying authority of the Church and refused to recant his philosophical beliefs throughout his eight years of imprisonment by the Venetian and Roman Inquisitions. His life stands as a testimony to the drive for knowledge and truth that marked the astonishing period of history known as the Renaissance—from which so much in modern art, thought and science derives.”

In 1992, after 12 years of deliberations, the Vatican admitted that Galileo Galilei had been right in supporting the theories of Copernicus. The Holy Inquisition had forced an aged Galileo to recant his ideas under threat of torture in 1633. But no such admission has been made in the case of Bruno. His writings are, I believe,  still on the Vatican’s list of forbidden texts.

“The current attitude of the Catholic Church to Bruno is defined by a two-page entry in the latest edition of the Catholic Encyclopaedia. It describes Bruno’s “intolerance” and berates him, declaring “his attitude of mind towards religious truth was that of a rationalist”.  The article describes in detail Bruno’s theological errors and his lengthy detention at the hands of the Inquisition, but fails to mention the best-known fact —that the church authorities burnt him alive at the stake.”

Bruno has long been revered as a martyr to scientific truth. In 1889 a monument to him was erected at the location of his execution. Such was the feeling for Bruno that scientists and poets paid tribute to him and a book was written detailing his life’s work. In a dedication for a meeting held at the Contemporary Club in Philadelphia in 1890, American poet Walt Whitman wrote: “As America’s mental courage (the thought comes to me today) is so indebted, above all current lands and peoples, to the noble army of old-world martyrs past, how incumbent on us that we clear those martyrs’ lives and names, and hold them up for reverent admiration as well as beacons. And typical of this, and standing for it and all perhaps, Giordano Bruno may well be put, today and to come, in our New World’s thankfulest heart and memory.”

Fr Tony Flannery, a Redemptorist priest, was ‘silenced’ in by the Vatican’s Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) in 2012 for expressing views about celibacy, women priests that are contrary to the official teaching of the Curia. Being silenced means he is forbidden to say public masses and minister as a priest. He was admonished by his Religious superiors to remain silent –but he refuses to do so and travels around Ireland and the world talking about the need for Church reform. Tony celebrated his 70th birthday recently by saying a public Mass in his home parish in county Galway. Mass was celebrated in a local community centre and was attended by large crowd of friends and well-wishers. Tony was on RTE one night recently and he explained his thinking to a dumbo called Darcy who has his own programme on RTE. He was well received by the studio audience because he talked a lot of sense.

Tony Flannery (born 1947) is a native of Attymon, near Athenry in County Galway. Tony joined the Redemptorists at the age of seventeen in 1964, and was ordained a priest ten years later, in 1974. He spent his priestly life as a preacher of missions, novenas and retreats, mostly around Ireland. He has written a number of books, and numerous articles in a variety of publications, both religious and secular. For about fourteen years he contributed a regular column for the Redemptorist magazine, Reality. Tony was part of the group that founded the Association of Catholic Priests. Tony is a man of faith and courage, a committed Christian and a man devoted to the priesthood of Christ. He only wants a better Church that is more inclusive and more representative of the baptised faithful. For wanting this he has been silenced by the CDF in Rome!  As Tony himself says, he is lucky that he has not been burned at the stake. Not yet anyway.

(Another man with a variation of Bruno’s name is a regular correspondent on this site. He has nothing very radical or balanced to contribute.)