When did the Catholic Church renounce geocentricism?

Answer 1

Actually, the Church never renounced geocentricism, as it never officially endorsed geocentricism. The Church is the Body of Christ, and is commissioned by Him to preach His Kingdom to all people, to baptize people, and to extend the sacraments to them. It has never been in the business of decided scientific theories. The only thing that it has ever said about scientific theories is that they cannot conflict with Divine Revelation, which is a pretty safe thing since the God who gave them Divine Revelation also created the world, so a good rule to follow is that nothing in science can contradict Divine Revelation. If the two appear to be in conflict, you can never go wrong with sticking with Divine Revelation. As it is, Divine Revelation appears to say that the world is the center of the universe, and modern science appears to think that the Sun is the center of the universe. We know that neither is strictly true, it really depends on how you define "center" and how you define "universe". For instance, it would probably be pretty safe to say that the sun is the center of our solar system, not the universe. Some posit that a big black hole is the center of our galaxy. As there are uncountable galaxies beyond anything we can see, we really have no idea what is at the center of it. But we do know, according to Divine Revelation, that man is at the apex of the created world, that the entire world was created for man. So, in a very real sense, we are at the center of it all, no matter what the "all" that you are looking at is. To try and define anything else as the center is pretty ludicrous as we are unable to see "everything." So it is safe to stick with the Biblical view of things and not to worry about various scientific theories, either one: geocentricism or heliocentrism - will work as well for most of the things we need to worry about.

Answer

There has never been a teaching regarding Geocentrism, rather only a concern as to how literally certain Scripture texts were to be taken in the absence of established facts to the contrary (of the day). What the Church laments is letting Galileo drag it into a fight that was not theirs to fight at all. It needed only to have defended the separate nature of the two spheres of knowledge and comment on and reconcile that which was established fact. It fell to Galileo's own scientific colleagues to challenge his theories, not the Church.

So when did the Church accept heliocentrism? The short answer: from the moment it moved from being a mere scientific hypothesis to an accepted established fact in the scientific community itself. It never fell to the Church to prove or disprove it. The Church then was merely working within the scientific community of the day when most scientists doing astronomy found heliocentrism an unacceptable scientific theory. At the time it was proposed and promoted by Galileo, he had failed to prove it by the methods of the day, and gain any peer acceptance. Unlike Fr. Copernicus who held the same hypothesis earlier, Galileo began to promote it as fact. This seemed wreckless given Scriptural concerns and premature claims of certitude. His provocative style did not help either as he provided his own theological defense which was not the domain of science. See link below for a discussion of the Galileo controversy.