Other documents, such as those where Galileo was supposedly forced to abjure under threat of torture, use language which could be considered legal boilerplate of the day. He was not tortured nor was he in any real danger of being tortured. Galileo, old and frail, was put under house arrest and assigned a servant. As Alfred Whitehead put it, “In a generation which saw the Thirty Years’ War and remembered Alva in the Netherlands, the worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honourable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.”
Because history is a stage of many actors and many forces, it is also worth noting that Copernicus dedicated "De Revolutionibus" to Paul III, and that his theory was met with interest by Clement VII as well as several cardinals (e.g., Schoenberg). Luther, on the other hand, vehemently rejected heliocentrism. Tycho Brahe argued against it. The point here is that the story of Galileo is repeated ad nauseum by people all too eager to believe in the fairy tale of the big, bad Church and the narrative that the West has been progressively liberating itself from its grip, beginning with the Reformation and followed by the Enlightenment. The more one becomes acquainted with the story of Galileo, the more one sees that it is to a large degree a story of an ornery scientist who was scientifically irresponsible in his aggressive promotion of an unproved hypothesis and who lent fodder to his enemies and made enemies of his friends by engaging in harassment and personal attacks. That does not perhaps justify his condemnation and subsequent house arrest, but all things considered and during an age when brutal punishments were the norm, it seems a little more than ridiculous to hold this up as an example of great conflict between the Superheroes of Science and the Villainous Church. Indeed, it is no accident that science flourished in the West. I refer those interested to Duhem who traces the ideas of physicists such as Newton to scholastic thought.
Also of interest, Galileo's recantation: http://law2.umkc.edu/Faculty/projects/FTrials/galileo/recant...
We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo ... have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world; also, that an opinion can be held and supported as probable, after it has been declared and finally decreed contrary to the Holy Scripture