[sudo_rm]

>... for thousands of years the Church said we should interpret it literally.

This is completely false.

Source is the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s1...

In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm, and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words.

In order to discover the sacred authors' intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current. "For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression."

[nkkollaw]

Nice. When is this document from?

[Jtsummers]

The linked document is from 1992 (commissioned in 1986). However, I don't know when the ideas in this section became part of Catholic teaching. The Catechism assembled ideas rather than created them, they already existed in other sources (biblical or prior writings of the Church or scholars). Thomas Aquinas and others are cited in the footnotes so at least the core of the idea (that the Bible isn't meant to be entirely literally interpreted) within the Church dates back to their writings. However their acceptance (that is, whether the Church declared these ideas official canon or just valid non-heretical ideas), I can't say when that happened.