If you knew the particulars of the Galileo affair, you would know that the Church was far more measured and justified in its response to him than is usually acknowledged. The Church wanted time to figure out how to incorporate his findings into its theology, Galileo said fine, I'll wait, and then went ahead and published anyway. It wanted an answer to their concern about Stellar Parallax. Galileo didn't have one.
Ever notice how nobody talks of the Copernicus Affair? Thats because Copernicus wasn't a jackass like Galileo was. When you consider how many friends and admirers Galileo had in the Church to begin with, its truly tragic that he was able to alienate them all so easily.
That happens in pretty much every whistleblower situation. People who used to be your friend find a reason, often a "moral" reason, to do something other than to stand by your side. And even when a person is fired for entirely normal reasons, other people tend to distance themselves to avoid guilt by association. This is one of the not so flattering traits of us human beings as social animals.
Okay, so Galileo was hard to work with. So be it. People who are very creative and/or intense often are. Heck, just people in general.
I would be interested in the issue of whether Protestants re-started after Catholics had largely stopped persecutions of women suspected of being witches. And I'm sure most of us have heard that many of the woman so accused were different in some regard, maybe herbalists, or bipolar, or holders of property, or outspoken. During the Salem witch trials, I've heard that one woman was a barkeep with the gift of banter (isn't that true of most barkeeps?). Another was a woman in her late thirties married to a guy in his early twenties who I think used to be her servant. May have been a love match, or may not have been, but sad that it came to an unnecessary end either way. And I don't recommend we push the different hypothesis too much, for I'm sure there's all kind of random flux not explained by this or any other generalization. I bet in some cases the accused was a thoroughly average woman. In fact, that's kind of a scary narrative, too, played at various times by either the authorities or citizens, of the good woman no one would ever, ever suspect.