While not without effect, it was generally ignored. John Henry Newman's letter to the Duke of Norfolk lists popes who were mistaken in certain policies: St. Victor, Liberius, Gregory XIII, Paul IV, Sixtus V, and St. Peter himself when St. Paul "withstood" him.
Pope Urban VIII and his advisers, in the misunderstood Galileo case, inadequately distinguished the duties of prophecy and politics, and of theological and physical science. St. John Paul II said that "this led them unduly to transpose into the realm of the doctrine of the faith, a question which in fact pertained to scientific investigation." Father Stanley Jaki, a physicist, cautioned me against using the "Big Bang" as theological evidence for creation. On a loftier level, the physicist Father Georges Lemaître likewise restrained Pope Pius XII from conflating the parallel accounts of the universe.
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