The New York Times

Friday, February 18, 2000

Honoring a Heretic Whom Vatican 'Regrets' Burning

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

ROME, Feb. 17 -- In 1992, 359 years after condemning Galileo as a heretic, the Vatican apologized and admitted the astronomer had a point. So far, however, the Roman Catholic Church is holding the line on Giordano Bruno, a rationalist philosopher who was burned at the stake for heresy 400 years ago today.

The pope has marked this Holy Year as a time for the church to apologize for past errors and excesses, from the Inquisition to the persecution of Jews. Today, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state, said the church "regretted" that it had resorted to violence in Bruno's case, but pointed out that Bruno's writing was "incompatible" with Christian thinking, and that he therefore remains a heretic.

And that was a great relief to hundreds of Italian atheists, anticlerics and freethinkers who gathered today at the Giordano Bruno statue on Campo dei Fiori, the small piazza in central Rome where he was burned alive, to protest against the papacy and commemorate the man many Italians revere as a martyr of free thought.

"We couldn't have this kind of demonstration if he were not a heretic," said Giuseppe Martelli, a teacher and labor union organizer who wore a black robe and hood to impersonate a "confortatore," the church-assigned comforters who accompanied the condemned man to execution, seeking to extract a last-minute repentance.

"But there was no way the church could lift the heretic label," Mr. Martelli explained gleefully. "Bruno contested the Virgin Mary and said Jesus was a wizard."

Campo dei Fiori, which is normally an expensive outdoor food market, today turned into an Italian version of Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park. The base of Bruno's statue was piled with wreaths and pamphlets.

Organizers had strung up huge banners across the piazza declaring it a "Zona Dewoytilizzata," using John Paul II's Polish surname to mark a Pope-Free Zone. Among those in attendance were groups such as the newspaper Wobbly Union, the World Pantheist Association, the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics and a cell of "Anarchocyclists."

Giordano Bruno, a Dominican priest whose scientific inquiries led him to argue that the universe was infinite and that Catholic teaching was irrational, is a symbol of stubborn defiance in a society better known for its conformity. Even Galileo, threatened with excommunication and death, eventually caved and recanted. Savonarola, another Dominican who was also burned at the stake in 1498, was a religious zealot who believed the church was too materialistic and lax.

Savonarola is now under consideration for sainthood. Bruno, on the other hand, went out of his way to insult and defy church authorities, and refused to recant to save his life.

"I think Bruno mainly appeals to a small minority, Italians who are at the margins of society," said Paolo Fabbri, a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. "Ours is such a transigent culture, we are known for 'transformismo,' going along to get along."

Yet the anniversary of Bruno's death in 1600, which was also a Holy Year, has unleashed a flurry of interest in him, with newspaper special sections, conferences, and film festivals all over Italy. In Naples this week, the Thomas Aquinas Theological Faculty of Southern Italy organized a conference on Bruno. In Rome, there was a four-day international conference on "Giordano Bruno and the New Science."

In La Repubblica today, the paid death notices column included three tributes to Bruno, including one that paid homage to Bruno alongside Joan of Arc, Galileo, the film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, "and all freethinkers, not forgiving their persecutors."

Bruno, who lectured throughout Europe and briefly embraced Calvinism and Lutheranism (both Protestant denominations later expelled him for disrespect and insolence), also enjoyed the favor of the court of Queen Elizabeth I, but alienated Oxford dons.

However thorny his personality, he was, in many ways, a Renaissance man, equally comfortable in the worlds of theater, philosophy and science.

He became a more modern symbol of rebellion during the 19th century, when Italy was unified, anticlericalism flared and the papacy was stripped of much of its worldly powers. His statue was erected in Campo dei Fiori in 1887, a gesture that so infuriated the Vatican that in the late 1920's it lobbied Mussolini for its removal. Mussolini declined, which may help explain why Roberto Bellarmino, the Jesuit cardinal who conducted the trials of Bruno and Galileo, was canonized in 1930.

Many Italians, however, have only a sketchy idea of what Bruno stood for. Il Messaggero, a Rome daily, conducted a survey of Campo dei Fiori, and found mostly confusion. Sandro Corsetti, who grew up near the piazza, told the newspaper, "I just know that Bruno was a serious thing, so serious they burned him."