Mokantx,

Thank you for continuing.  I'm definitely not trying to get into semantics and win points.  I'll leave that to others here.  Galileo was under house arrest until his death and had to recant.  Both he and de Chardin were silenced by effectively having their works prohibited from publication.  I am saying (and was perhaps unclear, above) that it was not their science for which they ran afoul of the Church, but their non-science statements and opinions.  Galileo, in particular, had the Jesuits and pope on his side but was unable to come of with a cogent explanation that would be accepted as proof.  After his first meeting with authorities in the early 1600s, he was allowed to continue to teach the Copernican system with the stipulation that it was to be taught as hypothetical, not proven.  His book, Dialog (I think), seemed to poke fun at the pope and seemed to show that he treated heliocentrism as fact is what got him into his later trouble.