Did the Church Ever Teach that the Earth was Flat?

by Gunther Simmermacher · March 5, 2024

Question: At what point did the Catholic Church stop teaching that the Earth is flat?

Answer: The Catholic Church never believed nor ever taught that the Earth is flat. It always took it for granted that the planet is an orb.

The hoax that the Catholic Church once insisted that Earth is flat was put into circulation only in the 19th century by atheists whose agenda was to mock and discredit Christianity. It’s a piece of “fake news” that has stuck.

The knowledge that Earth is an orb dates back to at least the 3rd century BC — and probably much earlier, for ancient sailors would have noticed the curved shape of the planet long before academics set out to prove it.

In 240 BC, the African scholar Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculated the circumference of Earth to within 14% of its actual size — which means that then already, the accepted belief was that Earth is an orb.

In around 150 AD, another African scholar, Ptolemy, wrote his hugely influential Geographia, which was founded on long-established knowledge. In it, he devised the system of latitudes and longitudes as a way of locating points on Earth’s round surface. This system has remained in use ever since, with the Church and its mariners using it even in the medieval days, a time when the Church was supposedly advocating a flat-earth theory.

The Church might have argued about the precedence of the Earth in the protocols of astronomy — and even then, its prosecution of Galileo had more to do with personality clashes than it had with academic dispute — but it never questioned that the Earth is a sphere.

In 1828, the American author Washington Irving (who wrote the classic novel The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) invented a tale that Christopher Columbus set sail from Europe to prove, in opposition to the Catholic Church, that the Earth wasn’t flat.

Irving’s novel had a very loose relationship with reality — the real Columbus was motivated by commercial interests, and as a faithful Catholic, he had no interest in contesting the Church. Still, many people read the fanciful fiction as fact.

In 1834, the anti-Catholic French academic Antoine-Jean Letronne fabricated a Flat-Earth theory which he claimed was taught by the Catholic Church. His aim was simply to misrepresent the Church as being opposed to science, and even ignorant of it. Letronne’s deceit was perpetuated by other authors with an ideological axe to grind.

Their deception has stuck in the popular imagination and among anti-Catholic ideologues who still repeat it, even though all reputable academia in the 20th century has disavowed the myth.

Indeed, the whole idea that the Catholic Church has been anti-science is not supported by the facts. In many ways, the Church, and especially its priests, have been in the forefront of scientific discovery, including and especially in the field of astronomy. Consider that the 16th-century Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was a priest, or that in the 1920s, a Belgian cleric, Fr Georges Lemaître, developed the Big Bang theory to explain the beginning of the universe.

The Church set up its first facility for astronomic research in 1580, with the Gregorian Tower in Rome. Today, the Vatican Observatory at Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, is one of the premier astronomical institutes in the world.

Asked and answered in the January 2024 issue of The Southern Cross magazine