All 87, 362 versions of the bible in different peoples' heads are apparently correct. hee

First it's important to distinguish between infallibility and inerrancy, something which a lot of people are understandably confused by. Infallibility refers to doctrine, while inerrancy refers to everything else. For instance, the Catholic Church considers itself sometimes to be infallible, but not inerrant.

While the entirety of the Bible is considered infallible, the inerrancy is filtered through the author's contemporary standards, writing style and intentions, all of which would have been more or less made obvious at the time. If the human author intends to get the details right, as with Luke, then the details should be correct. Mark, for instance, is written to be short and to the point, something that's easy to read and recopy. So in Mark, innerrancy bends to those needs.

In addition, inerrancy only applies to the Bible as it was originally written. Infallibility, with the Catholic Church, carries forward to St. Jerome's Vulgate translation in Latin, something which was decreed in an effort to resolve the issue of typos and translation errors. By all accounts St. Jerome did his due diligence with the Vulgate and had access to manuscripts which have long been lost. And Latin is a simpler and more straightforward language than Greek, which gives the Church a better platform for translating both the Bible and the appropriate commentaries into languages which don't have the support of strong scholarship.

When you take all of this into account, and add to it the challenge of understanding the context of the time period, the modern Bible is rife with issues like the one in this article which appear to conflict with a layperson's understanding of infallibility and innerancy, but obviously do not on further examination.

Only to those inclined to see abuse in everything.

I agree that the church should not at any time be involved in such matters. The issue is at the time the church was governing the land. I do support the separation between church and state, but that does not change the fact that the church was acting as the governing body at the time. Governments can and do sensor what can and cannot be published (although they might not be democratic governments).

Setting aside for a moment the 1616 determination by the Holy Office that Galileo's assertion is formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture......

I'll assume you are correct that the dispute between Galileo and the Church was an issue of scientific proof, not theology.

That changes the controversy but does not make it go away.

The "Galileo question" as rephrased becomes this:

Is it an appropriate role for the Church to evaluate scientific theories as published, and to enforce legal punishments upon the advocates of those theories the Church deems unproven??

Both. I understand infallible to be never wrong. Certainly this cannot be said of the Catholic church. (I understand that infallibility is rarely used.) I am also interested in what exactly is meant by the church, is it the Catholic organization, how does it see the eastern churches, protestant churches.

I'm not sure what you're asking. Are you wondering what infallibility is? Or are you asking what the Church is? Both?

Let's hear more about the infallibility of the church. Including what the church is.