Scientists Executed by the Catholic Church

1. Hypatia
Hypatia was a pagan philosopher in late 4th century Alexandria. She appears to have been a lecturer in Platonic thought, a practicing scientist, and the author of several mathematical treatises. She was killed by a Christian mob in the year 415.

2. Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon (1220-1292) was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who is was a talented natural scientist and is considered one of the pioneers of the "scientific method" and was noted for his use of empirical observation. His greatest work was the Opus Major, which contains treatments of mathematics, optics, alchemy, and astronomy, including theories on the positions and sizes of the celestial bodies. Bacon appears to have been imprisoned by the ecclesiastical authorities sometime around 1279 and may have died in captivity.

3. Pietro d' Abano
Pietro d' Abano (1257-1316) was an Italian philosopher, astrologer, and professor of medicine. He was a noted author whose most famous work was Conciliator Differentiarum, quæ inter Philosophos et Medicos Versantur, an exploration on the relationship between contemporary medical theories and Aristotelian natural philosophy. He was arrested by the Inquisition and died in prison around 1316. He was condemned posthumously and his bones burned.

4. Cecco d' Ascoli
Cecco d' Ascoli (1257-1327) was an Italian encyclopaedist, physician, and scholar specializing in mathematics and astronomy. He was a professor of astronomy at the University of Bologna and was such a noted astronomer that there is a crater on the moon named after him. He is famous for his feud with the poet Dante. He was eventually tried for heresy and burned at the stake in Florence, the first university professor to be condemned to death by the Inquisition.

5. Michael Servetus
Michael Servetus (1509-1553), usually known simply as Servetus, was a Spanish doctor, theologian, mapmaker, and Humanist scholar. His expertise spanned many areas; he wrote treatises in mathematics, astronomy, meteorology, geography, human anatomy, medicine and pharmacology, as well as jurisprudence and poetry. In 1553 he was tried and sentenced to death in Vienna by the Inquisition, though it would ultimately be the Calvinists who put him to death in Geneva later that year.

6. Girolamo Cardano
Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) was a Renaissance polymath whose talents ranged from mathematics to medicine, biology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, philosophy, and linguistics. He was one of the most influential mathematicians of the Renaissance, and was one of the key figures in the foundation of probability and the earliest user of the binomial coefficients and the binomial theorem in the west. He wrote over 200 scientific treatises.He was arrested and condemned by the Inquisition and spent several years imprisoned, though he was eventually released and rehabilitated by Pope Gregory XIII. He is famous for his contributions to algebra and made the first systematic use of negative numbers.

7. Giordano Bruno
Bruno is among the most famous scientists ever to run afoul of the Inquisition. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was a Dominican friar, mathematician, astronomer and poet. He is most remembered for his cosmological theories. After seven years of trials in Rome, he was condemned and burned at the stake in 1600.

8. Lucilio Vanini
Philosopher and physician Lucilio Vanini (1585-1616) was a Carmelite and noted late Renaissance scholar. He was a libertine, political opponent of the popes, and known as an early proponent of some form of evolution from primates. He once left the Church for Anglicanism but later returned to the faith. He went through a period of itinerant wandering, where he seemed to always get in trouble with the authorities. He eventually adopted a false identity and died under circumstances that are still uncertain in 1619, executed for blasphemy and heresy by the authorities in Toulouse. He was strangled, had his tongue removed, and his body burned.

9. Tommaso Campanella
The Dominican friar Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) was an Italian astrologer, philosopher, and poet. Early in his clerical career he became disenchanted with Aristotelian thought and became a proponent of the new empiricism. He was briefly imprisoned by the Inquisition for engaging in wild astrological speculation. He was released but was apprehended in Calabria, tortured, and spent twenty-six years in prison. He was later released to be part of the court of Pope Urban VIII and had some remote involvement in the Galileo affair. Despite his age, he again got in trouble and had to go into exile to the court of Louis XIII of France, where he died in 1639.

10. Kazimierz Lyszczynsk
Kazimierz Lyszczynsk (1634-1689) is different than the rest of the people we have examined in that he did not have a reputation as a scientist. He was a Polish soldier and nobleman, but also an amateur scholar and philosopher. Lyszczynsk was educated by the Jesuits but later became an opponent of the Society, whom he later opposed as a judge in several cases against the Jesuits concerning ownership of estates. He was arrested and charged with atheism and blasphemy based on an allegedly atheist manuscript he had written entitled "On the Non-Existence of God." He was condemned and beheaded in 1689 after having his tongue tore out and hands burned.

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