Online article here:

http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_60/iss_12/48_1.shtml

Perhaps one of the biggest myths about the Copernican concept is
that it displaced Earth and humanity from being the literal and social
center of existence.

In fact Copernicus helped to elevate his species out of what was
considered to be the literally and spiritually lowest point in the
Universe and place us among the clean and enlightened in the
heavens.

This disturbed those who ruled over the populace by constantly
telling them how unworthy they were of redemption and salvation -
unless of course they followed their strict guidelines sent down from
on high. Now with everybody being on a much higher and more level
playing field, why should they listen to a no longer so elite few?

To quote:

The squalid basement

Danielson, however, points out that in the early 16th century, the center of the universe was not considered a desirable place to be. "In most medieval interpretations of Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology, Earth's position at the center of the universe was taken as evidence not of its importance but . . . its grossness."

In fact, ancient and medieval Arabic, Jewish, and Christian scholars believed that the center was the worst part of the universe, a kind of squalid basement where all the muck collected. One medieval writer described Earth's location as "the excrementary and filthy parts of the lower world." We humans, another asserted, are "lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and rivetted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, and most remote from the heavenly arch." In 1615 Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, a prominent persecutor of Galileo, said that "the Earth is very far from heaven and sits motionless at the center of the world."2

In Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, hell itself is placed in Earth's innermost core. Dante also speaks of hell in ways consistent with Aristotelian dynamics—not full of flames, which would be displaced skyward by the heavier Earth, but as frozen and immobile.

By contrast, heaven was up, and the further up you went, away from the center, the better it was. So Copernicus, by putting the Sun at the center and Earth in orbit around it, was really giving its inhabitants a promotion by taking them closer to the heavens.

When and why did the history become distorted? Danielson doesn't pinpoint when the erroneous view gained supremacy, But he says that from 1650 onward one can find some writers making this revisionist claim. By the late 18th century it had taken hold completely.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), for example, wrote: "Perhaps no discovery or opinion ever produced a greater effect on the human spirit than did the teaching of Copernicus. No sooner was the Earth recognized as being round and self-contained, than it was obliged to relinquish the colossal privilege of being the center of the world."

Here Goethe managed to propagate another major distortion: the notion that before Copernicus (and Columbus) it was not known that Earth was a sphere.3,4