A brief historical comment

gkell1

Today many people are taught that the Church opposed the idea of planetary dynamics through the events surrounding Galileo which happened about 100 years after Copernicus first proposed that the Earth has a daily rotation and an orbital motion between Venus and Mars.Galileo himself provides one of the clearer descriptions of Church involvement even though his purpose at the time was to save his own skin after attempting to make the Pope look ridiculous.In his defence,Galileo sums up a more balanced history which shows that far from being opposed to the idea of planetary dynamics,the theology of the Church would have absorbed it as something which adds rather than takes away from Christian thinking -

"In order to facilitate their designs, they seek so far as possible (at least among the common people) to make this opinion seem new and to belong to me alone. They pretend not to know that its author, or rather its restorer and confirmer, was Nicholas Copernicus; and that he was not only a Catholic, but a priest and a canon. He was in fact so esteemed by the church that when the Lateran Council under Leo X took up the correction of the church calendar, Copernicus was called to Rome from the most remote parts of Germany to undertake its reform. At that time the calendar was defective because the true measures of the year and the lunar month were not exactly known. The Bishop of Culm, then superintendent of this matter, assigned Copernicus to seek more light and greater certainty concerning the celestial motions by means of constant study and labor. With Herculean toil he set his admirable mind to this task, and he made such great progress in this science and brought our knowledge of the heavenly motions to such precision that he became celebrated as an astronomer. Since that time not only has the calendar been regulated by his teachings, but tables of all the motions of the planets have been calculated as well. Having reduced his system into six books, he published these at the insistence of the Cardinal of Capua and the
Bishop of Culm. And since he had assumed his laborious enterprise by order of the supreme pontiff, he dedicated this book On the celestial revolutions to Pope Paul III. When printed, the book was accepted by the holy Church, and it has been read and studied by everyone without the faintest hint of any objection ever being conceived against its doctrines." Galileo

So, the next thing to do would be expand on the issue and demonstrate through appropriate texts how the productive ground existed within the Church for Copernicus to introduce the reasons for the Earth's motion.

One of the oldest observations is that the stars appear to rotate around the North star which is called Polaris -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V3rmDG5J8A

In the early Christian community this observation was obviously discussed as St Augustine notes -

"Some of the brethren raise a question concerning the motion of heaven, whether it is fixed or moved. If it is moved, they say, how is it a firmament? If it stands still, how do these stars which are held fixed in it go round from east to west, the more northerly performing shorter circuits near the pole, so that the heaven (if there is another pole unknown to us) may seem to revolve upon some axis, or (if there is no other pole) may be thought to move as a discus? To these men I reply that it would require many subtle and profound reasonings to find out which of these things is actually so;" St Augustine

The same argument appeared a number of decades before Copernicus worked through the reasons for the Earth's motions, however,Archbishop Cusa was speaking at a time when these arguments were highly developed in that the observation was creating a problem rather than providing a solution.Using the same time lapse footage above -

"And wherever anyone would be, he would believe himself to be at the
center.Therefore, merge these different imaginative pictures so that
the center is the zenith and vice versa. Thereupon you will see--
through the intellect..that the world and its motion and shape cannot
be apprehended. For [the Universe] will appear as a wheel in a wheel
and a sphere in a sphere-- having its center and circumference
nowhere. . . " Nicolas of Cusa

The theological argument of 'God in all things' found that the Earth at the center of the Universe is found to be a poor idea in theological context so despite the indoctrination which tends to show the Church in a poor light through the Galileo affair,Copernicus would not have expected any opposition from within the Church to his discovery from a theological standpoint.

This part is a bit tricky but it is important to understand when considering how we lost the main argument for the Earth's orbital motion through treating retrogrades as an illusion as the planets moved against the background stars and around the central Sun.