When the church was all powerfull it did a lot of damage to good science. I'm not thrilled with the mixing of the two. There was a time when openly saying that the earth and planets revolved around the sun was seen as blaspheme and could be deadly.
There was more fun, when a pope [say, Julius II] would not stir without consulting his astrologers, even in the matters of military urgency. [That's where Nancy Reagan got her ideas about arranging WH schedule]. Sometimes it was in minor matters so it could be winked at, and sometimes in major decisions. That's the proper genesis, function and the job title of Guy Consolmagno's position.
"When the church was all powerfull it did a lot of damage to good science. "
That's not a 'church' thing, that's a 'power corrupts' thing. Now that the EPA is all powerful, it too does a log of damage to good science (viz. ALAR scam, second-hand smoke lies, etc)
Few people know that the whooe Galileo episode was due to politics, specifically the politics of an anti-clerical agitator who was using astronomy to make his points ...
On the flip side of this, all Western Colleges and Universities evolved out of the church-and-monastic-order tradition, and literacy and learning itself were kept alive by Christian monastaries and churches. There would be no "Western civilization" without those institutions.