Cardinal Bellarmine’s letter to Paolo Antonio Foscarini concerning Galileo’s theories, written in April 1615, is an important document in the first phases of the conflict between the Catholic Church and the scientist Galileo Galilei. This conflict resulted in Galileo’s indictment and trial in 1633 for teaching a Copernican view of the universe. The debate between supporters of the new heliocentric Copernican model, in which the earth and humankind lose their central place in the universe, and those who continued to defend the traditional Ptolemaic and Aristotelian system reveals the obstacles for science and scientists in gaining independence from religion and theologians. Aristotelian cosmology had become an integral part of Christian theology during the Middle Ages. Therefore, new physical and astronomical theories could be accepted only if they did not contradict Aristotelian cosmology and sacred scripture. Although Galileo himself had tried to prove that scientific discoveries and scripture were compatible in his famous letter to the Benedictine abbot and mathematician Benedetto Castelli (December 21, 1613), such contradiction was apparent in the case of the Copernican model. The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, contains explicit references to the earth’s immobility and the sun’s movement around it, which are incompatible with the Copernican system.