The hour passed, and no priest appeared; none could be induced to appear.

Copernicus, gentle, charitable, pious, one of the noblest gifts of God to religion as well as to science, was evidently still under the ban.

Five years after that, his book was still standing on the Index of books prohibited to Christians.
The edition of the Index published in 1819 was as inexorable toward the works of Copernicus and Galileo as its predecessors had been; but in the year 1820 came a crisis.

Canon Settele, Professor of Astronomy at Rome, had written an elementary book in which the Copernican system was taken for granted.

The Master of the Sacred Palace, Anfossi, as censor of the press, refused to allow the book to be printed unless Settele revised his work and treated the Copernican theory as merely a hypothesis.