Madam, – The priest Giordano Bruno was indeed tied to a stake in the Campo de' Fiori and burned for heresy in 1600 (Editorial Comment, November 14th). But you are wrong to say that the reason was his belief in the possibility that life exists elsewhere in the universe. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Bruno was executed only for his theological errors, among them that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skilful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil can be saved, that all souls are one, so there is the possibility of the transmigration of the spirit, and so on.
He wasn’t executed because he preached “a plurality of worlds”.
And just so you get the legal procedures right, it is not true that “the Inquisition tied Giordano Bruno to the stake and burned him”. The men who did the tying and burning were agents of the Roman secular authorities. – Yours, etc,