I remember through my years in public school I was taught a narrative to the effect of “the church held back science and religion and science are fundamentally opposed”, however, being raised catholic i was taught something completely different as a child in some weekend classes organized by the church - that the church was the main promoter of knowledge in the Middle Ages and that without monks painstakingly copying texts large amounts of knowledge would have been lost.
In public school I was also taught that the Galileo affair was a straightforward case of the church trying to quash science, but in my weekend classes I was taught that it was more of a personal feud and that at the end of the day Galileo was pushing a model that was less accurate than one of the competing models. I’m aware that what I was taught in those weekend classes was explicitly church focused education and will obviously try to paint the church in a better light, but our teacher had some sort of degree in history so I assumed it was legit, along with the fact that he taught us some ways the church was bad in the past.
How did the narrative that the church was “anti science” gain traction and what were the circumstances behind it? And can someone give a breakdown of the Galileo affair?
The Catholic Church's reputation as being "anti-science" can be traced back to the Enlightenment. Deist, atheist and even "anti-church" Catholic philosophes (Voltaire could be any one of these depending on whom you read) criticized the Church's adherence to religious dogma as fanaticism, as opposed to their own method, which they purported was solely based on reason. There are writers and advocates that predate the Enlightenment who criticize the Church for being backward or oppressive, but for the most part the pop-history secondary school brand of this argument uses the rhetoric espoused during the Enlightenment.
Did the Catholic Church earn this reputation? Yes and no. Yes, because several institutions within the Church (the Congregation of Rites, the Congregation of the Index, the Inquisition) were created to strictly define orthodoxy (what ideas were good) and heterodoxy (what ideas would lead one into committing error or sin), and enforce the proper observance of both through punishment and censorship. Especially after the Reformation, where even central claims about the nature of salvation and divinity were being challenged by Protestants in certain regions, it can easily be argued that the Church focused its institutional power to quash and quarantine the promulgation of any erroneous ideas.
No, because members of the Catholic Church were some of the people most responsible for doing science in the early modern period. Catholic missionaries wrote books and distributed datasets about foreign flora and fauna; Catholic universities were some of the best at the time in producing good mathematicians and astronomers; Catholic princes and bishops were among the most productive patrons of scientific works, instruments and institutions. Moreover, the Catholic Church was not, and is not, a monolithic entity that followed directives from any singular person. The Popes wish they had that much power on Earth. One of the outcomes of the Catholic side of the Reformation is a growing diversity of ways to worship within the embrace of the Church. New religious orders followed new rules, created differing institutions, and formed different, often oppositional opinions. This diversity intensifies exponentially when you account for Catholic missionary work in Asia, Africa and the Americas, and the sheer number of different groups of people who became incorporated. As such, while people like Galileo or Rene Descartes were tried or put on the Index for their innovative ideas, there really isn't one singular Catholic reaction to either. Jesuits in French university science departments between 1620 and 1640 could not form a unified response to Descartes; there's no way a global institution could.
As for Galileo in particular, I'll yield to Thomas F. Mayer's The Roman Inquisition: Trying Galileo, because the Galileo Trial is an immensely complicated, legal dispute that can't be broken down that easily. I'll just say that based on Mayer and a few other authors, the main thing that led to Galileo's conviction was not that he simply espoused an innovative idea that the Church didn't like. Several people within the Church, including Robert Bellarmine, the head of the Inquisition, were amenable to Galileo's questioning of geocentrism. Had Galileo been more competent in how he handled his case (i.e., hired a lawyer, not insulted the Pope) he would have likely avoided any punishment.
More can be said, but you might be interested in this response about the conflict thesis by u/restricteddata.