In an article for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Christoph Lüthy commemorates the 400th anniversary of the election of Pope Urban VIII in 1623. Interestingly enough, this pope engaged in a private and public cult of the sun, but had Galileo Galilei condemned for his sun-centred cosmology. A look at the iconography of the Palazzo Barberini (Urban's name was Maffeo Barberini) suggests that Galileo's condemnation was probably less the result of an inevitable conflict between faith and science than of a character clash.
Read the article here.