Generally, people today argue this issue as stuff of children books: brilliant man-hero opposing obscurantism. In fact the same conflicts of personalities and institutional inertia permeate modern science just as much.
Our intellectuals have been under the spell of Voltaire and his ilk for 259 years. Looking back, I found it interesting that the real collision between Church and the “enlightenment” came about during a time when the national monarchs were pushing the Church, the papacy in particular for control. Benedict XIV, one of the most popular of the popes, and a brilliant scholar, did his best to settle church state issues through a series of concordats, and by protecting clerics with enlightened views, but all this came to nought after he died in 1758. From that time thereof fell in. The Jesuits were suppressed, and the intellectual[s hared of the Church came out into the open. The Church was tarred as anti-scientific at the very time it was ceasing its opposition to the new science and cosmology but trying to battle the scientism of shallow thinkers like Voltaire and the atheism of d’Holbach. Within thirty years the disciples of these men would be cutting off the heads of anyone who opposed their ideas, and all in the name of free thought.