Galileo, and the Institution's Long Continuation

The Roman Inquisition's most consequential case began in 1616, when Galileo Galilei was warned against holding or defending the Copernican view that the earth moves around the sun, and reached its conclusion in 1633, when he was tried, found suspect of heresy for publishing a defense of Copernicanism after that warning, and forced to recant under threat of further proceedings; he spent the remainder of his life under house arrest. The condemnation of heliocentrism as contrary to scripture was not formally reversed by the church until the twentieth century, and the case remains the standard reference point for the historical tension between the institution and scientific inquiry.

The Congregation's activity and visibility declined sharply after the seventeenth century as its powers were curtailed across much of Catholic Europe by increasingly independent states. Pope Pius X renamed it the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in 1908, and the Second Vatican Council's reforms led Pope Paul VI to rename it again, in 1965, as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, stripped of its judicial and punitive functions and refocused on doctrinal oversight, under which name a much changed successor institution continues within the Roman Curia.