It only took them until 1993 to admit they were wrong to try Galielo for heresy (for such modern concepts as the idea that celestial bodies are not perfect spheres attached to the vault of heaven), so people who say the Catholic church has a long tradition of being anti-science definitely have a leg to stand on.
Interesting. Did you look at your linked article? If you believe the Church did not accept the ideas of Galileo until the pope apologized in 1993
No, I don't. Strawman argument? ;-) But they never admitted of being wrong to try for heresy one of the founders of modern science until 1993.
When did the Church accept heliocentrism? In 1758, they dropped the general ban on books arguing the truth of heliocentrism. They finally lifted the ban on Galileo's books in the 1820s.
Interestingly, from a history of science standpoint, the mid-1700s was when the first proof of the Earth's motion was actually empirically measured, in James Bradley's observations of the aberration of light. Bradley first measured this in the late 1720s, but at first didn't understand the results (he was looking for parallax -- the real thing to prove the Earth's motion, as people had been looking for since the 1500s). Later, in the 1740s, he successfully measured and interpreted another aspect of the Earth's motion, the nutation of the Earth's axis.
So, basically in the decades immediately following the first actual empirical proof of heliocentrism, the Church lifted its ban on books asserting it to be true. (Note that the Church always allowed books which treated heliocentrism as a hypothesis or as a mathematical model, which is what it actually was... until sometime in the mid 1700s.)
It's not just helioncentrism. Galileo pointed a telescope at the sky and discovered the moons of Jupiter, craters on the face of the moon, etc, and basically proved that the church's entire view of the cosmos was a childish fanasy that did not pass basic rational scrutiny.
We can argue about Galileo's prosecution as a free-speech issue, but frankly he was wrong about the science (he argued for circular orbits against the elliptical ones Kepler had observed, and his only supposed proof of the Earth's motion was a discredited theory of the tides that required there to be only one high tide at noon every day, for example of a few big holes), and he was called out for being a jerk about things he couldn't prove.
There's nothing to argue frankly, the free-speech issue is clear as glass. I don't know what point you are trying to make. Galileo was wrong about some things, so what? The scientific debate was not between Galielo and the church, but between him and other scientists of his time (and the centuries thereafter). The church's only role in this discussion and other scientific and philosophical discussion of that time was to censor, bully, and burn at the stake (not galileo, but Giordano Bruno was burned in 1600) based on arbitrary interpretations of a bunch of old books.
