Today we celebrate the Memorial of St. Robert Bellarmine, bishop, pastor, doctor of the Church, and we’re reminded that when the Church is in crisis, the Lord raises up saints to help lead the way with compassion.
Robert Francis Romulus Bellarmine [1] was born in 1542 in Montepulciano Tuscany, Italy. As a child, he could recite Virgil’s Aeneid by heart; he was a gifted debater; and he could play the violin beautifully. More than any of that, however, he was a deeply devout young man so that he eventually expressed his desire to join the Jesuit order, which was still new at the time.
About those times, Martin Luther had decades before set off the Protestant Reformation so that by the time of young Robert’s birth, Zwingli had preached his disputations, Calvin had published his Institutes of the Christian Religion, and King Henry VIII was on wife number five after having martyred St. Thomas More. The Jesuits were founded in part to contend with Protestantism and the various minor heresies that seemingly popped up everywhere at this time. By 1560, when Robert left home to go to Rome to join the Jesuits, the Council of Trent was in its third and final period.
Bad health delayed Robert’s progress in the Jesuits for a time, so he was moved out of Rome and sent back to Tuscany to study and to teach, which he did to great acclaim. Eventually the general superior of the Jesuits, the future St. Francis Borgia, sent young Robert to Louvain in Belgium to counteract the heresies of the university’s chancellor, a Fr. Michael Baius. Robert’s preaching was “electric,” and in 1570, after being ordained a priest, he was invited to be a professor at the university, the first Jesuit to be so invited. Immediately, Fr. Robert started to teach on the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas and in doing so refuted the false teachings on grace, nature and sin being taught by Baius. But never did he attack Baius or anyone else personally. He was a model of Christian charity while also defending the true faith.
Fr. Robert’s health failed again, though, and he returned to Italy in 1576, now 34 years of age, and was assigned to the Roman College to be part of the department for controversial theology. Robert worked hard to publish a four volume tome called the Disputations on the Controversies of the Christian faith where he demonstrated a deep knowledge of not just the Bible and the Church Fathers but also of the arguments of his opponents. It became an instant best-seller as it was considered the definitive and devastating response to the best of Protestant arguments so that in Protestant England it was banned by Queen Elizabeth I.
The work of Robert Bellarmine would eventually include being an editor of the official translation of the Bible into Latin, the Vulgate, to becoming the spiritual director of the future St. Aloysius Gonzaga (see our post about him here), to writing two catechisms which were used for centuries, to teaching himself Hebrew and writing a commentary on the Psalms (see picture above) and eventually to being named a cardinal and then an archbishop of Capua where he started to implement the reforms of the Council of Trent.
In 1605, Pope Pius V (again a future saint) asked Cardinal Bellarmine to return to Rome and serve him, which he did. As a result, he was dragged into a number of controversies the most notable of which were (1) the controversies in England and elsewhere about the rights of kings vs. the rights and authority of the pope and (2) the Galileo Galilei matter, which will be discussed in a separate post.
Good Cardinal Bellarmine was allowed eventually to retire before he was born into eternal life at the ripe old age of 79 on this day, September 17, in the year 1621. He was canonized in 1930 by Pope Pius XI and declared a Doctor of the Church the next year. He is buried in the chapel of St. Ignatius at the Roman College next to St. Aloysius Gonzaga, as he had wished saying he considered the saintly Gonzaga to be like a son.
Oftentimes, Catholics will lament the various controversies in the Catholic Church in our own day. I don’t know that we always appreciate just how well we have it when compared previous centuries. But whether our time is “worse” than any previous time or "better," it is examples like St. Robert Bellarmine that ought to remind us that we ought to have confidence in the truth of our faith, in its reasonableness, in its consistency, and so we ought never to devolve into name-calling or crass condemnations of fellow Catholics or our non-Catholic, Christians brethren. Like St. Robert we should always be bold in defending our faith but always in charity. May St. Robert intercede for us in that regard and help bring about through his prayer and ours an eventual unity of all Christians.
[1] We in America actually mispronounce his name. We say BEL-ar-mehn, sometimes bel-ar-MEEN. But as an Italian, he would have said bel-AHR-mee-neh.
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