Even Bellarmine had incurred Paul’s displeasure. He and the other leading dignitaries – Cardinals Barberini, Dini and del Monte, Piccolomini and Maraffi – knew how to treat him. They were anxious to avoid committing the Church to any official decision on the Copernican system, until the astronomers were able to shed more light on it, and to preserve the status quo as defined in Bellarmine’s letter, ignoring Galileo’s ‘incursion into the sacristy’. But they knew that if the Pope learnt about the scandal, a showdown would be inevitable. That was probably why Bellarmine had advised against
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