[DesertRhino]

For all the rhetorical sophistry, Rome still imprisoned Galileo.
A church, prosecuted a man, and took his freedom. This same bunch forbade people from reading the Bible too.
The goal of the papacy was not scientific truth, it was the suppression of something they saw as conflicting with their theology.

No sane person blames the Catholics of today for that outrage. Today’s RCC members are scientists, astronauts, astronomers and physicists. But pretending that the papacy 400 years ago was not a despotic ignorant entity makes people ignore the modern churches theology today.
The church loses, not advances, by defending them from that era. It would be like me as a protestant defending the murderers of Salem, or the religious murders of Calvin.

[palmer]

The goal of the papacy was not scientific truth, it was the suppression of something they saw as conflicting with their theology.

Not science, but metaphysics. The Church told Galileo to avoid taking his observations as literal truth. Galileo told the Church to stop taking the Bible as literal truth. Add the fact that Galileo was basically grandstanding, and it is easy to see why he lost the argument.