Pope Benedict faces a specific complaint, that when he was a mere cardinal, he said the trial of Galileo by the inquisition in 1633 was “Reasonable and just.” The result of the trial was that, for the crime of confirming that the Earth orbits the Sun, he was sentenced to execution, although this was later reduced to permanent house arrest. This may seem harsh, so a typical modern defender of the sentence, the writer Vittorio Messori, justified it by saying: “Galileo was not condemned for what he said but the way he said it.” So that was the problem – the Vatican didn’t mind Galileo’s theories about the Universe, but he said them with his mouth full.

…

But maybe the most interesting side to Benedict’s defence of his 17th-century predecessors is imagining the furore if a similar attitude happened within Islam. If the leader of the Muslim world declared it was reasonable and just to have sentenced one of history’s greatest minds to execution, piles of commentators would be telling us this proved Islam was a medieval, ignorant creed incompatible with Western values.

It does raise questions about the Catholic church’s sincerity when they expressed regret. You can read the whole thing at the Independent.