Nearly five hundred years ago Nicolaus Copernicus died an obscure figure and was buried in the Frombork Cathedral where in life he served as a canon. Saturday he was buried with honors in his home Cathedral in Frombork, Poland.
Today he is world-renown, heralded as one of our greatest thinkers because of his publication De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) which first laid out the evidence and mathematics for the Earth orbiting the Sun (heliocentrism). Prior to this, it was commonly held – and held as religious dogma – that the Earth was stationary and all the objects in the sky circled us (geocentrism).
A life-long Catholic and member of the clergy it is perhaps fitting that his remains (identified through painstaking archeological research and genetic testing) be reburied in Catholic ritual, but one can not help point out the subtle irony here.
See, for hundreds of years the Catholic church spent an inordinate amount of time decrying this brilliant man's work as "contrary to the Holy Scripture". In 1616, 73 years after it was published Revolutions was added to the churches Index of Prohibited Books "until corrected", where it remained until 1758. The "corrected" version of the book was made available to read but only after sentences "by which the heliocentric system was represented as certain" were removed.
After all, considering that Church doctrine held that the Earth was fixed point, with all the universe orbiting our planet, heliocentrism was a scientific breakthrough that put quite a lot of egg on the Christianities face. While true that it took Galileo Galilee to truly anger the Catholic hierarchy enough to start blacklisting sound science, Copernicus managed to avoid similar condemnation through sheer happenstance.