Why was Galileo held for heresy?
Galileo stated that the Earth revolves around the sun, rather than the sun revolving around the Earth (he wasn’t the first to say so, that observation was originally made by Copernicus) and the church did not agree, and ordered him to retract the assertion. When Galileo refused to do so he was therefore found guilty of disobedience to the authority of the church, and was placed under house arrest – a very lenient sentence, given that another astronomer, Giordano Bruno, was burned at the stake for the same offense. It should be noted that 400 years later, the church reversed its ruling on Galileo.
