This is something I've heard too, and actually believe it to be true. To a point.
The Catholic Church was an asset for the brave scholars who worked for the preservation and dissemination of pre-collapse knowledge. ... Up until the rise of Islam, where their reverence for the learned and the literate quickly propels them to ascendancy.
The very rough, and unverified history I've been told basically has the catholic church's retainment of information past that point become incomplete, though they, through the monks, continue to make worthwhile contributions.
Of course, keeping this pre-collapse info does have some negative side-effects. See Aristotelian Physics. Which, incidentally is credited with a large amount of the reactionary bias of the church.
It's not so much that Galileo and Co. are denying the word of the Bible, which needn't be interpreted literally, they're denying the words of Aristotle who the Church had been peddling as universally correct. It'd be roughly like the world suddenly discovering that the current electron model is backwards.
Of course, it'd be naiive to say that denying the Bible didn't have some small part of it. But, for every children's crusade the catholic church undertakes, they do something of some worth. It's not just a collection of some of the most heinous, corrupt, villains that the world has even known.
