Some Historical Dates

Newton's Principia was first published in 1686, and an English translation was
first published in 1728.

It was in 1758 that the general rule placing books advocating helocentricism on
the Index Prohibitorum was removed, although neither De Revolutionibis or the
Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems was explicitly removed at that time,
they were absent when the next edition of the list came out in 1835.

I hold that the timing was not coincidental.

The Copernican hypothesis may have seemed to some people of a scientific spirit
to be more elegant, more simple, more symmetrical than the Ptolemaic system
which preceded it. However, a personal aesthetic preference... is something that
is open to debate, and could quite understandably be held to be insufficient to
contradict the apparent word of Scripture.

Newton, however, provided a mechanism for the movements of the bodies in the
Solar System. This mechanism gave a reason why the planets had to go around the
Sun instead of the Earth; the Sun was bigger than the Earth. Well, _that_ could
be considered to be merely hypothetical, but gravity and angular momentum could
explain motion in a Keplerian ellipse, but it had no way to explain epicycles.

It was in 1798 that the Cavendish experiment was reported... it is to its credit
that the Church did not need to wait until then to relent on heliocentricism.

John Savard