The Corruption Of The Catholic Church In The Seventeenth Century

During the sixteenth century, Europe was heavily dependent on the Church for just about everything. The Catholic Church had a firm hold on any religious beliefs people held. Therefore, science only existed for the few people that dared to go against the normal religious teachings. Slowly, people began to break away from the uniform idea of religion and started to question many of the teachings of the Church. Also, Enlightenment thinkers got the ball rolling, calling out the corruptness of the Catholic Church in Europe. This new style of thinking drove the seventeenth century into the period known as the Scientific Revolution. Ideas held by the Church for centuries were challenged with more advanced experiments by scientists. People began to realize that what they were told by the Church might not be completely true. In addition, Revolutionary thinkers questioned the Church’s one way of thinking. Furthermore, they
Scientists during the seventeenth century stated many contradictory theories and ideas that directly attacked the Catholic Church’s teachings. Nicholas Copernicus’s idea of a heliocentric world contradicted the Biblical stated idea of the Earth being the center of the universe. Copernicus was an astronomer during the scientific revolution who, along with many others, toyed with the idea of the planets revolving around the sun (Science and the Catholic Church…). Up until the seventeenth century, the Church taught everyone the Earth was the center of the universe because the universe revolves around humans. After multiple years of observation, he published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies. This work described his ideas of a heliocentric universe. The books also discuss the movement of the planets, especially the Earth. One of the biggest discoveries about the Earth’s position in the universe is that is rotates on an axis (Nicholas