I don't think this is entirely true. First, because there is no "dogmatic stake", as it were, in either geocentrism or heliocentrism. That is, the Church does not hold a position on this matter and a moment's thought will make it obvious that the Church isn't in the business of making scientific pronouncements anymore than a lawyer makes pronouncements affirming or denying what his mechanic says is wrong with his car (bad metaphysics and ideology masquerading as science, on the other hand...). True, the Church has been an energizing force behind the development of science, but this is a reflection of the Christian spirit and worldview, one which embraces Creation as good, beautiful, rational, and intelligible and thus capable and worthy of study. There never was a need to reinterpret the Bible because there's nothing in the Bible that depends on one or the other model being true. The Bible is not a scientific textbook. It doesn't matter which orb revolves around which.
The whole Galileo affair is routinely misrepresented because the fable we're given is the result of Enlightenment propaganda desired to create the false narrative that there is some grand battle between SCIENCE(tm) on one hand, and faith (Christianity) on the other. The historical accounts of the affair say otherwise. Mostly, Galileo was kind of an ass and it took years of making enemies before things turned for the worse.
Yes, the discoveries Galileo announced from his telescope also touched off an interesting set of debates about whether or not his observation of sunspots and craters on the Moon were actually real features on those bodies, or just artifacts of the telescope itself. Those debates are still with us today in a more general form. Anytime we use instruments to observe something, we have to be careful to make sure that we are observing something in the outside universe rather than an artifact of the instrument itself.
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.
I would be careful here to distinguish between Aristotelian philosophy from Aristotelian natural science. Scholasticism, especially Thomism, is still the preferred intellectual tradition and point of reference, and rightly so, but there is no refusal to entertain whatever valid insights may be found elsewhere. It is rather that many of Aristotle's scientific explanations have fallen out of favor and been superseded.
But you're entirely correct that even in those days, Aristotle wasn't some sort of incontrovertible source of truth for natural philosophy, but someone who should not be cast aside lightly.
As for the other poster's remark on Thomism, Carrier writes[2]: "Thomism [...] the Medieval Dumbity that consists of purely armchair, and often pseudological, theorizing about natural reality, which ignores the entirety of the sciences and pretends facts and evidence don’t matter—and even don’t exist, contradicting its every conclusion", so not sure how viable that school of thinking is.
To be clear, I totally sympathize with the skeptical cause when it comes to rooting out prejudices based on shallow religiosity. I just don't believe there is a place in rational discourse for this type of argumentation that skews towards "bierstube" mockery.
What's left is a mishmash of unrelated notions: metaphysics, ethics, axiology, and (for some reason) logic. Or whatever other slicing you want to apply; the whole point is that what's left as "philosophy" is specifically the stuff that's not locked down. Except logic, which philosophy clings to, rather than letting it live in the math department, even though geometry and arithmetic (also formerly the domain of philosophy) live there.
I agree that we ought to just call it all "philosophy" again, since we all love wisdom. Even the "scientific method" is really just a thing we all do every day, even when we're not practicing "science".
Basically the church got upset he was preaching religious stuff against the church, it had nothing to do with his science.
The text of Bellarmine's letter to Galileo is worth reading.
Note that I'm not defending the Church with my comments, but only documenting what I think was the technical difference between the Galileo and Bruno cases.
While that's a headline and not the text of the article (hence possibly added by an editor), it is worth clarifying the history. When Galileo reported his telescopic observations, the Vatican astronomers went so far as to buy a telescope from him, and after some initial difficulty with it, confirmed his observations.
The idea of refusing to look through the telescope was raised as a rhetorical point in debate over the subject matter, but contradicts what actually happened.
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.
An odd issue that we face with extraterrestrials, or non-earthly beings in general, is that they can be introduced as an explanation for anything, and have been for 5000+ years. We don't have a good way of scientifically investigating extraterrestrial hypotheses.