Here's St. Robert Cardinal Bellarmine's 12 April 1615 letter to the Carmelite priest Fr. Foscarini, who wrote a theology book trying to reconcile heliocentrism with Scriptures (The Essential Galileo p. 146-148):

[171] To the Very Reverend Father Paolo Antonio Foscarini, Provincial of the Carmelites in the Province of Calabria:

  My Very Reverend Father,

  I have read with interest the letter in Italian and the essay in Latin which Your Paternity sent me; I thank you for the one and for the other and confess that they are all full of intelligence and erudition.  You ask for my opinion, and so I shall give it to you, but very briefly, since now you have little time for reading and I for writing.

  First, I say that it seems to me that Your Paternity and Mr. Galileo are proceeding prudently by limiting yourselves to speaking suppositionally and not absolutely, as I have always believed that Copernicus spoke. For there is no danger in saying that, by assuming the earth moves and the sun stands still, one saves all the appearances better than by postulating eccentrics and epicycles; and that is sufficient for the mathematician. However, it is different to want to affirm that in reality the sun is at the center of the world and only turns on itself without moving from east to west, and the earth is in the third heaven⁴ and revolves with great speed around the sun; this is a very dangerous thing, likely not only to irritate all scholastic philosophers and theologians, but also to harm the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture false. For Your Paternity has well shown many ways of interpreting Holy Scripture, but has not applied them to particular cases; without a doubt you would have encountered very great difficulties if you had wanted to interpret all those passages you yourself cited.

  [172] Second, I say that, as you know, the Council⁵ prohibits interpreting Scripture against the common consensus of the Holy Fathers; and if Your Paternity wants to read not only the Holy Fathers, but also the modern commentaries on Genesis, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Joshua, you will find all agreeing in the literal interpretation that the sun is in heaven and turns around the earth with great speed, and that the earth is very far from heaven and sits motionless at the center of the world. Consider now, with your sense of prudence, whether the Church can tolerate giving Scripture a meaning contrary to the Holy Fathers and to all the Greek and Latin commentators. Nor can one answer that this is not a matter of faith, since if it is not a matter of faith “as regards the topic,” it is a matter of faith “as regards the speaker”; and so it would be heretical to say that Abraham did not have two children and Jacob twelve, as well as to say that Christ was not born of a virgin, because both are said by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of the prophets and the apostles.

  Third, I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the center of the world and the earth in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false. But I will not believe that there is such a demonstration, until it is shown me. Nor is it the same to demonstrate that by assuming the sun to be at the center and the earth in heaven one can save the appearances, and to demonstrate that in truth the sun is at the center and the earth in heaven; for I believe the first demonstration may be available, but I have very great doubts about the second, and in case of doubt one must not abandon the Holy Scripture as interpreted by the Holy Fathers. I add that the one who wrote, “The sun riseth, and goeth down, and returneth to his place: and there rising again,”⁶ was Solomon, who not only spoke inspired by God, but was a man above all others wise and learned in the human sciences and in the knowledge of created things; he received all this wisdom from God; therefore it is not likely that he was affirming something that was contrary to truth already demonstrated or capable of being demonstrated. Now, suppose you say that Solomon speaks in accordance with appearances, since it seems to us that the sun moves (while the earth does so), just as to someone who moves away from the seashore on a ship it looks like the shore is moving. I shall answer that when someone moves away from the shore, although it appears to him that the shore is moving away from him, nevertheless he knows that this is an error and corrects it, seeing clearly that the ship moves and not the shore; but in regard to the sun and the earth, no scientist has any need to correct the error, since he clearly experiences that the earth stands still and that the eye is not in error when it judges that the sun moves, as it also is not in error when it judges that the moon and the stars move.  And this is enough for now.

  With this I greet dearly Your Paternity, and I pray to God to grant you all your wishes.

  At home, 12 April 1615.
  To Your Reverend Paternity.

As a Brother,
Cardinal Bellarmine.

Notes
⁴“In the third heaven” just means in the third orbit around the sun.
⁵The Council of Trent (1545–63). [Session the Fourth, Decree concerning the Canonical Scriptures; reiterated in Vatican I's Dei Filius]
⁶Ecclesiastes 1:5 [Douay-Rheims version]

:smoke-pot:

I can't believe how much he so concisely packed into such a short letter that it seems he didn't spend much time writing. :reading:

Thank U for link. J Broderick wrote an excellent Bio of the Saint. 2nd Edition is recommended.

Quote from: St. Bellarmine's 12 April 1615 letter to Fr. Foscarini

Third, I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the center of the world and the earth in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false.

Yet, he never thought such a demonstration would be possible since this would contradict the unanimous consent of the Fathers regarding the geocentrism question.

Related: Dei Filius:

…we are bound to yield to God, by faith in his revelation, the full obedience of our intelligence and will… [A]lthough faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason, since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind; and God can not deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth. The false appearance of such a contradiction is mainly due, either to the dogmas of faith not having been understood and expounded according to the mind of the Church, or to the inventions of opinion having been taken for the verdicts of reason. We define, therefore, that every assertion contrary to a truth of enlightened faith is utterly false.

Science( Bradley & Newton) has proven that S AND E are in motion. It is time to move on.  

I can't believe how much he so concisely packed into such a short letter that it seems he didn't spend much time writing.

It is difficult to credit that you would quote the entirety of this famous letter without taking the trouble to understand its background or even what it is saying. The evidence is overwhelming that Cardinal Bellarmine crafted the letter with great care and spent a considerable amount of time doing so. The other person mentioned in the letter, Padre Foscarini's friend and mentor Galileo Galilei, was as much a true addressee, albeit unnamed, as Foscarini was. Bellarmine knew infinitely better than either of the other men to whom he wrote that Rome was a viper's nest of treachery and malice—with there being no worse practitioners of those black arts than the Dominican and Jesuit "natural philosophers" (i.e., scientists, at least of a sort) whose bitter rivalry for precedence and preferment seldom gave place to anything as bourgeois as honesty or integrity. Because of his high regard for Foscarini and Galileo and for their groundbreaking work as well, he wished them to be on their guard.

You highlight text that you think proves something, but alas you demonstrate only that you are a far less careful reader than Bellarmine was a thinker and writer. He knew perfectly well, as also did Foscarini and Galileo,* that heliocentric theorizing was not heretical, nor was it even less formally condemned. For it to be held a suspect theory, let alone a heretical one, there would have to have been a papal docuмent beginning with a specific formula: "Sanctissimus confirmavit et publicare mandavit …" An actual declaration of heresy would have to have the usual wording associated, then as now, with ex cathedra pronouncements. No such docuмent exists, of course, because no pope could be persuaded to declare heretical something that had no proximate negative impact on the Faith or on the salvation of souls. Unlike CI commenters, the Church had enough real problems to deal with without looking to create new, unnecessary ones.

The very next year, 1616, when Galileo was called to Rome to appear before Paul V and be interviewed on his writings and views, Bellarmine wrote and gave to Galileo a letter—meant to be shown to anyone who wrongly thought Galileo might have been the subject of a formal Holy Office investigation, as his curial enemies had perjuriously declared he was—wherein he praised the latter for his piety and filial deference to the Church's concern lest the New Sciences inadvertently become an occasion of scandal to laymen.** Bellarmine stressed in the letter that Galileo had willingly consented to the request for an interview, which Bellarmine carefully differentiated from a juridical summons that the one summoned was bound to answer under pain of grave sin and secular criminal penalties.

I could go on, but the point won't change: you need (1) to better inform yourself of the circuмstances of the letter to Foscarini and then (2) to read the letter again, this time with eyes wide open.
______________________

*Say what you will about the defects of Galileo's character, but when, as a man soon to be seventy, he declared to the Holy Office tribunal in 1633 that, even were he to be subjected to torture, he would not sign the formula of renunciation presented to him unless it (1) declared him free of intentional deceit in obtaining the license to print the Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems and (2) stated unequivocally that he had submitted himself to the inquisition of the Holy Office as "a good Catholic," the tribunal backed down and reworded the docuмent to accord with his wishes. Even so, three of the ten judges—one of them being Cardinal Francesco Barberini, Pope Urban's nephew and personal representative among the judges—declined to sign the formula. They might well have regarded the entire trial as tainted through and through in its proceedings, even though it never actually declared Galileo guilty of heresy (how could it?) but rather only vehemently suspected of heresy.

Galileo's stubbornness, which might easily have brought him certain death on the rack (the Holy Office had already violated its own rules by showing him, a man then in his seventieth year, the instruments of torture), here appears in its best light. Ten years earlier, when he dismissed Kepler's decisive demonstrations that the various celestial orbits were elliptical rather than circular, it appeared in something like its worst.

** Of course, Galileo had a dossier in the Holy Office's files. Bellarmine either started it or contributed to it (I don't recall which at the moment). If you think that this is a big deal, look yourself up on the Internet; just be sure you're sitting down when you see how much sensitive private information is available to anyone who cares to do you mischief at no more than the cost of a high-speed connection.

To the OP and all other contributors to this thread:

Having only now realized which subforum (the Library) this thread is located in, I just wrote and sent to Matthew the following PM:

Dear Matthew,

The thread "St. Robert Bellarmine's letter to Fr. Foscarini" is now in the Library subforum. Unfortunately, everyone contributing to it—including me, I regret to say—has broken your rule banning discussion or argument in this subforum.

For this reason, I ask that you consider moving the entire thread elsewhere or simply deleting it in its entirety. Another solution might be to retain only Geremia's OP. Were you to do that, however, I request that you remove the boldfaced emphases he adds. They amount to an editorial insertion, an editorial that—as my own comment argues—falsifies Bellarmine's intent.

Thank you for your consideration of this matter.

I apologize for my part in violating the guidelines for commenting in the Library.

A down thumb for regretting that the rules were broken! Get over yourself, Geremia.

I didn't report it.