> As I understand it, the Church was willing to let go of the Ptolemaic model in favor of a model of Tycho Brahe, which supposed that the sun revolved around the earth, and the planets around the sun, which preserved the apparent lack of motion experienced on earth. They also told Galileo that if he could furnish empirical evidence to support his model, they would have to re-think their interpretation of the Bible. The letter from Bellarmine to Galileo is preserved.
This is close, but a little off. First, the (Catholic) Church had little problem with heliocentrism, provided that it was phrased as a hypothesis. Copernicus was even a Catholic priest when he published his heliocentric ideas, and the Church allowed full publication as long as he called it a hypothesis. The religious authorities that had theological problems with heliocentrism were almost all Protestants. Martin Luther was extremely critical of Copernicus and apparently applied one of his many insults toward the Pole. Calvin and other reformers were also quite critical.
The Catholic Church wasn't (and even today isn't) too concerned with literal interpretation of scriptures, but the Church of the time was very into Scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas' fusion of Classical Greek philosophy (principally Aristotle's ideas) with the theological, moral and even epistemic and metaphysical teachings from the Bible. When the Catholic Church got upset at Galileo, they were upset that he was contradicting Aristotle, not the Old Testament.
And Galileo was wrong. First, the Copernican model of heliocentrism held that orbits were perfectly circular, and even preserved epicycles to correct for the observational deviations from the model. Occam's razor would seem to say this made it a worse theory than Ptolemy's. Additionally, Galileo made a pretty serious mistake when calculating the distance to stars based on his telescope observations, underestimating the distance to the nearest stars by around 1000x. The Church correctly noted that if the stars were as close as Galileo proposed, then measurable deviations in their positions and/or sizes should have been observed from earth at parallax positions; however, the star field remained fixed. To the Church, extraordinary claims necessary to overturn Aristotle required extraordinary evidence, and Galileo failed. Not only that, but he was fairly arrogant about it, insisting he was correct when his theory was clearly contradictory. I strongly disagree with the Church's decision to punish Galileo, but the Church was in fact defending science, both consensus and the scientific method, albeit overzealously.
When Kepler published his heliocentric model that incorporated elliptical orbits tuned using Tycho Brahe's observational data, the reception was quite a bit better across Europe. However, Kepler himself ended up excommunicated from his own Lutheran Church because he believed the moon was solid, which allegedly contradicted the Old Testament, though Kepler appears to have been devout and dedicated much of his life toward reconciling Biblical and scientific truth.