Has the Catholic Church ever retracted any long-held theories/positions/doctrines on anything, besides certain Copernican thought?
Used to be they were not allowed to eat meat on any Friday. Now I think they just must refrain during lent.
Depends on what you mean by “retracted.” Back in the 19th Century, the church, while not officially opposed to evolution, tended to believe that Darwinian theory attempted to cut God out of the creation equation. It took Rome the better part of the century to formulate an “official” balance between the role of God and evolution.
Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum didn’t repudiate traditional Catholic viewpoint regarding capitalism, but did strongly emphasize the responsibilities of employers and the dignity of workers. It was quite the revolutionary teaching in its day.
And on a more mundane, administrative level, there was an admission a few decades ago that a lot of saints might never in fact, have actually existed. While the saints weren’t “decanonized” they were removed from the official calendar of observances.
What about the Church’s position on Limbo? I’m not really educated on this- but I seem to recall retracting the idea of Limbo.
Am I misremembering?
Let me steal something from the Christian Forums’ Catholic forum FAQs as a useful guide.
There’s also a large difference between “what everybody knows Catholics believe” and what’s been formally propounded as Dogma or Doctrine. Limbo is one excellent example; no matter what the nuns told you, Limbo was never a Catholic doctrine, but a theory as to what had happened to the virtuous Pagans of old and to unbaptized babies. And quite recently, the Pope made clear it was not Catholic doctrine. Some other things are simply “Laws of the Church” – Discipline – and may be changed, well, not at the whim, but at the studied-but-arbitrary decision of the Pope – and some of them are big deals. As I understand it, the Pope just restored Epiphany and Ascension Day as Holy Days of Obligation, which had been transferred to the neighboring Sunday after Vatican II. Even priestly celibacy is a rule of the Church, as are days of abatinence and fasting.
So “what the Church” teaches" may not be what you think it does. A good example is evolution – Catholicism has no problem with evolution, so long as the individual human soul is a direct creation of God (which evolution doesn’t even pretend to address).
Thanks Poly! Not being Catholic (or any type of Christian) I working with very vague memory based on little actual knowledge. 
Very interesting!
It should also be mentioned that “Laws of the Church” don’t necessarily extend across the whole hierarchy, and are often handled at the level of individual bishops and dioceses. For instance, a bishop might give an exemption in his diocese for the rule against eating meat on a Friday of Lent (as often happens, for instance, when St. Patrick’s Day falls on a Friday).
Where does birth control lie? I seem to remember being told it was a lesser sin than abortion, so does that mean it’s on a different tier?
My Catholic former roommate and I never got around to discussing this for some reason…
It should be noted, also, that the Catholic Church did not actually take any official position on the structure of the solar system until Galileo pretty much insisted that they give him a ruling on the matter. (Of course, the ruling did go the way he had hoped, but it should also be noted that the events in question here came some 16 years before his actual arrest and trial. In more senses than one, he was asking for it!) I am not sure how long it took, after Galileo’s death, for the anti-heliocentric doctrine to be overturned, but it certainly only stood for a small fraction of the Church’s history (and I do not think it was ever enforced against anyone but Galileo and his ally Foscarini).
Copernicus himself was a quite senior Catholic priest, and neither he nor his astronomical writings received any sort of censure from the Church authorities (indeed, he even got some unofficial encouragement) until Galileo started stirring things up.
The Second Vatican Council resulted in a number of sweeping changes, among them the Church’s official position that Jews cannot collectively be held responsible for killing Christ, that masses can be held (and Missals published) in the vernacular, that laity can have an expanded role in the liturgy, and that a spirit of Ecumenism should form outreach to other denominations. These were all seen as substantial reversals of policy at the time.
That, at least, was nothing new. That was why masses were said in Latin to begin with. It’s just that it took a while for the Church hierarchy to realize that hey, Latin isn’t the vulgate language any more.
There was a bit more of a human element to it than that, though. In a sense, Galileo was the recipient of a moderator smackdown for crossing from GD into Pit territory.
The “preferred” position of the Catholic Church at the time was not Heliocentrism (that the Earth revolved around the Sun) but a “Tychonian system” thought up by the mathematician Tycho “No-Nose” Brahe to reconcile ideas between the two (with better Scriptural support). As the Wikipedia entry on Galileo’s heretical work that got him into such hot water notes,
What got Galileo into such hot water? Well, he had earlier had a friendly relationship with the sitting Pope, Urban VIII, who had some discussion with Galileo on matters of Earth and Sun… And by some accounts, personally asked Galileo to write a pro-and-con analysis of the two systems, including his (Pope Urban’s) own arguments and not advocating either side, a “just the facts” kind of presentation.
What he came out with was a work entitled "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems", a one-sided dialogue with Pope Urban’s arguments put into the mouth of a character named “Simplicio”.
The Pope got kinda mad, threw his weight around, yadda yadda yadda.
If only Galileo had been more respectful or circumspect he may well not have ended up on the Inquisition’s blacklist.
And, in fact, one that was not in force for the majority of church history. It’s only been around for the last 1/3 of church history. And certain rare exceptions are allowed, even now.