Saint Robert Bellarmine

That extraordinary man was Robert Bellarmine (Roberto Bellarmino), cardinal and Doctor of the Church, called “the strong watchtower of the Church”.

After studying philosophy and theology in Rome, Florence, Mondovì and Padua, in 1569 he was sent by his superiors to the University of Louvain (in present-day Belgium), then regarded as the front line of the theological struggle with the Protestants spreading across the Low Countries. On March 25, 1570, he was ordained a priest in Ghent. At Louvain, Father Bellarmine quickly became an outstanding professor of theology. He taught himself Hebrew so that he could study Scripture in the original rather than relying only on translations, and tirelessly read all the works of the Fathers of both East and West. The young priest’s lectures were so compelling that not only Catholic students, but even Protestant scholars and ministers from Holland and England secretly crossed the border to hear him.

It was the most comprehensive and scholarly work of apologetics the Catholic Church had yet produced. He set out the arguments of the Protestants objectively and fairly, with complete respect, in clear contrast with the emotional polemics of the day, and then used Scripture and Church history to demonstrate the foundational truths: the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, the holy nature of the Church, the seven Sacraments, Purgatory, and the veneration of the saints. The book had such force that Protestant universities in Germany and England had to set up special chairs just to try to refute Bellarmine’s work. Queen Elizabeth I of England, perhaps worried about the book’s influence on her subjects, angrily issued a decree banning it, even laying down the death penalty for anyone who kept the work on English soil. And yet even Protestant scholars of the time had to admit that Bellarmine was a gracious, courteous opponent who never used the vulgar abuse so common in the polemics of the day.

Though he now wore a cardinal’s red robes, Bellarmine kept the whole poor way of life of a Jesuit. He refused every rich benefice and ate only plain food, as the poor did. He gave all his income as cardinal to the hungry poor, to families of war victims, and to the sick. One freezing winter, he had all the expensive velvet and silk curtains hanging in his rooms taken down and sewn into warm clothes for the poor. When his steward complained about ruining such precious curtains, he only smiled and replied:

“The stone walls do not feel the cold; but the poor out there are freezing to death!”

He also went himself to the pawnshops of Rome to redeem things the poor had had to pawn in their need.

From 1602 to 1605, he was sent to be Archbishop of Capua. In those three short years, he lived out the model of the good shepherd set by the Council of Trent: preaching the Word of God to the faithful every day, visiting the sick in the hospitals himself, reforming the diocesan seminary, and standing up for the rights of the poor against oppression by local officials.

As the leading theological consultor of the Holy Office (forerunner of today’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith), Cardinal Bellarmine addressed this question in a famous letter of April 1615 to Father Paolo Antonio Foscarini, a Carmelite in Naples who had written a book defending heliocentrism. In that letter he set out a theological and scientific principle astonishingly wise for its time:

“If there were a true demonstration that the Sun stands still at the center and the Earth goes around it, then we would have to proceed with great care in explaining the passages of Scripture that seem to say the opposite; and we would have to say that we do not understand them, rather than hastily declare that the scientific claim is false!”

However, because Galileo could not yet produce conclusive proof of his theory (it would gain a firmer mechanical foundation only with Isaac Newton, nearly a century later), Cardinal Bellarmine advised Galileo in a friendly way to present heliocentrism as a useful mathematical hypothesis for calculation, rather than rushing to use it as a basis for reinterpreting Scripture. On February 25, 1616, he personally met Galileo and advised him along those lines. After the meeting, he even gave Galileo a handwritten certificate stating that the scientist had not been condemned or made to abjure, a document Galileo himself later kept as evidence in his own defense. Bellarmine’s attitude throughout the affair reflected the caution of both a genuine scientist and a serious theologian, quite unlike the rigid image later generations have often attached to the whole Galileo affair.

Cardinal Bellarmine was also the spiritual father of young Aloysius Gonzaga in Rome, and was at his side when he died a holy death. He loved Aloysius like his own son, and asked to be buried at the foot of the young saint’s tomb when his own time came.