In his Assayer of 1623, Galileo explained his notion of the difference between the qualities, mostly found by touch, that are inherent in bodies (weight, roughness, smoothness, etc.) and those that are in the mind of the observer (taste, color, etc.)–in other words, the difference between what we call primary and secondary qualities. In this discussion he referred to bodies that “continually dissolve into minute particles”, and stated his opinion that “for exciting in us tastes, odors, and sounds there are required in external bodies anything but sizes, shapes, numbers, and slow or fast movements.” An anonymous cleric filed a report with the Inquisition in which he claimed the first citation to show that Galileo was an atomist and the second to be in conflict with the Council of Trent’s pronunciations on the Eucharist. The report did not lead to any action against Galileo.  (from Greenblatt’s The Swerve)

The proposition is that the Inquisition needed to squelch the idea that objects that can be smelt or tasted are merely atoms, because this would give the faithful the idea that the Host was not, after all,  the body and blood of Jesus but a rather ordinary arrangements of atoms.   It was safer, in the campaign against Galileo, to focus on his views about the Earth circling the Sun, for the man in the street could see with his own eyes that that was a preposterous idea – couldn’t you see the Sum going round the Earth every day of your life?

I am about the read Redondi’s “Galileo: Heretic”.   This book, very controversial, explores the above idea, that is, that Galileo’s enemies deliberately focused on the one thing that ordinary people could understand and would sympathize with the church.