St. Robert Bellarmine

St. Robert Bellarmine was an Italian Jesuit theologian and cardinal, born at Montepulciano in Tuscany on 4 October 1542 and dead in Rome on 17 September 1621. His Disputations on the Controversies of the Christian Faith, published between 1586 and 1593, was the most complete Catholic answer to the Protestant Reformers written in that century, and Protestant universities founded chairs to reply to it. He was canonized in 1930 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1931.

He is also the cardinal who handled the first phase of the Galileo case, in 1616, and the man who delivered the Church's admonition to him. Since that is what most readers arrive looking for, this page sets out what he actually wrote about the motion of the earth, in his own terms, alongside the rest of a long career.

The Hammer of Heretics

St. Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) was an Italian Jesuit and a cardinal, and one of the most important theologians of the Counter-Reformation. His Disputations on the Controversies of the Christian Faith was a systematic defence of Catholic doctrine against the Reformers, so comprehensive that his opponents studied it to learn what the Catholic Church actually taught.

The method is what made the book last. Bellarmine states each Protestant position from the writings of the men who held it, quoting Luther, Calvin and their followers at length and accurately, before answering. That was unusual in an age of polemic conducted mostly by caricature, and it is why the work circulated among Protestants. Chairs of controversy were established at Protestant universities in Germany and England specifically to answer him.

The three volumes cover the word of God and the Church, the sacraments, and grace and justification. On the Church he produced the definition most quoted for the next three centuries, that the Church is the assembly of people bound together by the profession of the same Christian faith, the communion of the same sacraments, under the rule of legitimate pastors and above all of the one vicar of Christ on earth.

Despite his intellectual standing he lived simply, ate the food of the poor, and gave away the hangings of his apartment to clothe the naked, saying that the walls would not catch cold.

The Galileo Controversy

Bellarmine is often remembered for his role in the Galileo affair. As a cardinal of the Holy Office, he was the man instructed to admonish Galileo, in February 1616, that he was not to hold or defend the doctrine that the earth moves around the sun.

His own position is on the record in a letter he wrote in April 1615 to the Carmelite Paolo Antonio Foscarini, who had published a book arguing that Copernicus could be reconciled with Scripture. Bellarmine made three points. Treating the Copernican system as a mathematical hypothesis that saves the appearances was perfectly acceptable and always had been. Asserting it as physically true, in the absence of demonstration, was dangerous because it appeared to contradict the plain sense of Scripture and the common reading of the Fathers. And if a true demonstration were ever produced that the sun stands still and the earth moves, then interpreters would have to say that we do not understand the passages of Scripture that appear to say otherwise, rather than declare the demonstration false.

That third clause is the important one, and it is close to the position the Church holds today, stated in the First Vatican Council and in Leo XIII's encyclical Providentissimus Deus: truth cannot contradict truth, so a demonstrated finding of natural science cannot contradict the faith rightly understood. Bellarmine's judgment in 1616 was that the demonstration had not been produced, which was defensible on the evidence then available, since stellar parallax had not been observed and the physics that would account for a moving earth did not yet exist.

What followed was still a real injustice. In 1616 the Congregation of the Index censured the Copernican doctrine and suspended Copernicus's book until it should be corrected. Bellarmine gave Galileo a signed certificate in May 1616 stating that he had not abjured anything and had received no penance, only that the doctrine had been declared contrary to Scripture and could not be held or defended. Galileo kept that document, and it mattered in his defence at the trial of 1633. Bellarmine had been dead twelve years by then and had no part in the condemnation.

The full account of how the Church has since assessed the case belongs elsewhere. For that discussion see our page on science and faith.

Doctor of the Church

He was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1931, the year after his canonisation. His catechisms for children and for adults were standard texts for centuries. He is a case for the compatibility of faith and reason, and for the rule that truth is to be served with charity.

The Doctor title recognises two things in particular. The first is his ecclesiology, the treatment of what the Church is, which shaped Catholic teaching on the subject until the Second Vatican Council reframed it. The second is his catechetical work: the short Christian doctrine he wrote in 1597 was translated into dozens of languages, including missionary languages in Asia and the Americas, and generations of Catholics learned the faith from it.

Quotable Wisdom

"Charity is that with which no man is lost, and without which no man is saved."

The line states the priority he kept in view through forty years of controversy. St. Paul makes the same judgment in 1 Corinthians 13:2, that a man who has all knowledge and all faith and lacks love is nothing.

The Life: Montepulciano, Louvain, Rome

Roberto Bellarmino was born into a noble family of modest means at Montepulciano. His mother, Cinzia Cervini, was the sister of Cardinal Marcello Cervini, who was elected pope as Marcellus II in 1555 and reigned for twenty-two days. She was a devout woman who directed her son toward the Society of Jesus against his father's plans for him.

He entered the Jesuits in 1560 and studied at the Roman College and at Padua. His superiors sent him to Louvain in the Spanish Netherlands, then a front line of the religious conflict, where he was ordained in 1570 and lectured on the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas. He preached in a city of contested loyalties and learned the Protestant arguments where they were being made.

In 1576 Gregory XIII called him to Rome to hold the chair of controversial theology at the Roman College. The lectures became the Disputations. He was made rector of the Roman College in 1592, provincial of Naples in 1594, and cardinal in 1599 by Clement VIII, who took him against his will out of the Jesuit poverty he preferred. From 1602 to 1605 he was archbishop of Capua, where he resided in his diocese, preached, catechised and made visitations, at a time when many bishops did none of those things. He was recalled to Rome in 1605 and spent his last sixteen years in the Roman congregations.

He also had a hand in the Vulgate. Sixtus V produced an edition of the Latin Bible in 1590 with his own corrections, which were poor. After the pope's death Bellarmine helped organise the revision that appeared in 1592 as the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate, and wrote its preface, handling the previous pope's failure with as much discretion as the situation allowed.

Church, State and the Trouble It Got Him Into

Bellarmine argued that the pope holds no direct temporal authority over kings, and that his power in temporal matters is indirect, engaged only when spiritual goods are at stake. That position annoyed defenders of a stronger papal claim, and Sixtus V had the first volume of the Disputations placed on the Index. The pope died before the new Index was published and the censure never took effect.

He was also drawn into the English controversy after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when James I imposed an oath of allegiance on English Catholics that required them to deny the pope's deposing power. Bellarmine wrote against the oath, and the king replied in print, so a Scottish monarch and an Italian cardinal conducted a public exchange over the limits of political obedience. His argument that political authority arises from the community, and comes to a particular ruler through the consent of the governed rather than directly from God, was read in the following century by writers arguing for limited government.

The Bruno Case

Bellarmine was among the theologians involved in the trial of Giordano Bruno, who was burned in Rome in February 1600. The charges concerned theological doctrines, denial of the Trinity, of the Incarnation and of the real presence among them, rather than astronomy, and the popular account of Bruno as a martyr for science does not match the record of the case.

That correction does not settle the matter. A man was burned alive for what he believed and taught, and the Church of a later age judges that act differently. The Second Vatican Council taught in Dignitatis Humanae that the human person has a right to religious freedom and that no one is to be forced to act against his conscience in religious matters, and Pope John Paul II asked pardon in the Jubilee of 2000 for the ways truth had been served by violence in the Church's history. A page that reports Bellarmine's holiness without reporting his part in this is not telling the reader the truth.

The Spiritual Writings

The controversialist wrote devotional books in his last years that are still in print. The Mind's Ascent to God by the Ladder of Created Things (1615) climbs from the visible world through the human person to God, in the tradition of St. Bonaventure. The Art of Dying Well (1620) is a practical treatise on preparing for death, written by a man in his late seventies, and it argues that dying well is the fruit of living well and that the preparation is made in the ordinary years rather than in the last hour.

That theme sits close to the doctrine that no one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32) and to the Catechism's teaching that death puts an end to the time open to us for accepting or rejecting the grace of God (CCC 1021). Bellarmine's advice was to make the preparation now, in confession, in the sacraments and in works of charity.

Feast Day, Patronage and Where He Is Buried

His feast is 17 September, the day he died, kept as an optional memorial. The older calendar placed it on 13 May. Pius XI beatified him in 1923, canonized him in 1930 and named him a Doctor of the Church in 1931.

He is a patron of catechists and of catechumens, a patronage that comes from his catechisms rather than from his controversial writing, and he is invoked by canon lawyers and by students of theology.

He asked to be buried at the feet of his former pupil St. Aloysius Gonzaga, the young Jesuit who died nursing plague victims in Rome in 1591 and whose spiritual director he had been. Both are in the church of Sant'Ignazio in Rome.

What to Take From Robert Bellarmine

State the other side accurately before you answer it. Bellarmine's opponents read him because he quoted them correctly. An argument built on a caricature convinces nobody who holds the position.

Let the evidence settle what evidence can settle. His letter to Foscarini conceded in advance that a real demonstration would require rereading the Scripture passages. Hold the principle even when you doubt the particular claim.

Keep the poverty when the honours arrive. He was a cardinal who gave away his wall hangings. The habits formed before promotion are the ones that survive it.

Prepare for death while you are well. His last book says the art of dying is learned in ordinary years. Confession, the sacraments and settled charity are the whole method.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Robert Bellarmine?

St. Robert Bellarmine was an Italian Jesuit theologian and cardinal who lived from 1542 to 1621. He wrote the Disputations on the Controversies of the Christian Faith, the most complete Catholic answer to the Protestant Reformers of that century, served as archbishop of Capua and as a cardinal of the Roman congregations, and was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1931.

What was St. Robert Bellarmine's role in the Galileo case?

As a cardinal of the Holy Office he delivered the admonition of February 1616 telling Galileo not to hold or defend the doctrine that the earth moves. He also gave Galileo a signed certificate in May 1616 confirming that he had not abjured and had received no penance. Bellarmine died in 1621 and had no part in the trial and condemnation of 1633.

Did Bellarmine think the earth moved?

He held that the Copernican system could be used as a mathematical hypothesis, and that asserting it as physically true without demonstration was dangerous. In his 1615 letter to Paolo Antonio Foscarini he wrote that if a true demonstration were ever produced, interpreters would have to say that we do not understand the Scripture passages that appear to say otherwise, rather than declare the demonstration false.

Was St. Robert Bellarmine involved in the death of Giordano Bruno?

He was among the theologians involved in Bruno's trial, which ended with Bruno being burned in Rome in February 1600. The charges were theological, including denial of the Trinity and of the Incarnation, rather than astronomical. The Second Vatican Council later taught in Dignitatis Humanae that no one is to be coerced in matters of religious belief.

What is St. Robert Bellarmine the patron saint of?

He is a patron of catechists and of catechumens, from the catechisms he wrote in 1597 that were used for centuries, and he is invoked by canon lawyers and students of theology.

When is the feast of St. Robert Bellarmine?

His feast is 17 September, the day he died in 1621, kept as an optional memorial. The older calendar placed it on 13 May. He is buried beside his former pupil St. Aloysius Gonzaga in the church of Sant'Ignazio in Rome.