Galileo Galilee was born in 1564 into a Europe wracked
by cultural ferment and religious strife. The popes of the
Roman Catholic Church, powerful in their roles as both
religious and secular leaders, had proven vulnerable to
the worldly and decadent spirit of the age, and their
personal immorality brought the reputation of the papacy
to historic lows. In 1517, Martin Luther, a former monk,
attacked Catholicism for having become too worldly and
politically corrupt and for obscuring the fundamentals
of Christianity with pagan elements. His reforming zeal,
which appealed to a notion of an original, “purified”
Christianity, set in motion the Protestant Reformation
and split European Christianity in two.