“It was this assertion which most angered the Church leaders of the time.”
When brain-dead leftards at Stanford issue a moronic pronouncement on, say, Obamacare, people here react with the appropriate level of scorn.
Why are their pronouncements on ecclesial matters regarded as credible?
There's a lot of regurgitated apologia for what happened with Galileo, but the only thing that kept him from being tortured by the Inquistion was his age. Copernican heliocentrism was heretical, so he had to denounce it. He got off light, Bruno was burned at the stake in part for embracing heliocentrism.