Vatican City - Plans to crown the Roman Catholic Church's rehabilitation of Galileo Galilei by placing a statue of the Italian astronomer in the Vatican, have been "indefinitely suspended" a top church official said Thursday.

But the head of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Culture, Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, confirmed the Holy See is organizing a series of conferences commemorating the 400th anniversary of Galileo's use of the telescope.

Ravasi was speaking at a news conference in which he outlined the Vatican's participation in the United Nations-designated International Year of Astronomy - for which
2009 was chosen honour of Galileo.

The Catholic Church's Inquisition tried Galileo as a heretic in 1633 and forced him to recant his then radical assertion - which he based on evidence gathered with his telescope - that the Earth revolved around the sun.

Initially sentenced to life imprisonment, Galileo was held under house arrest until his death. Some 350 years later, Pope John Paul II in 1992 declared that the Inquisition had erred with its ruling against him.

Ravasi on Wednesday said an artist had prepared a mould for a Galileo statue which at one stage seemed destined to occupy a "symbolic" place in the Vatican gardens in 2009.

However, the Vatican, for reasons which Ravasi did not elaborate, eventually decided to ask the sponsor, Italian aerospace giant Finmeccanica, to devolve the funds to other projects.

These included educational institutions - one based in Nigeria - that help foster a better understanding of the "relationship between science and religion," Ravasi said.

Highlighting the Vatican's commemorations for the Galileo anniversary is an international conference in Florence set for May 26 to 30.

Physicist Nicola Cabibbo, head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, is scheduled to deliver the event's inaugural lecture inside Florence's Basilica di Santa Croce where Galileo is buried. (dpa)