It was only in 1820 that the Church allowed another astronomer, Joseph Settle, to declare the motion of the Earth, as proposed by Copernicus over 200 years ago, as fact. Three hundred and fifty years after Galileo's death, Pope John Paul II said in 1992 “that Galileo suffered unjustly at the hands of the Church and praised Galileo's religiousness and his views and behaviors regarding the relationship between science and religion.”27.)