MIRACULOUS MIRACLES™

Saint — Robert Bellarmine

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St. Robert Bellarmine
October 4, 1542, Montepulciano — September 17, 1621, Rome
Doctor of the Church — Cardinal of the Controversies
Church of Sant'Ignazio di Loyola, Rome, Italy
Feast
September 17
Canonized
Canonized 1930 (by Pius XI); Doctor 1931 (by Pius XI)
Doctor of the Church
Yes
Life

Roberto Bellarmino was nephew on his mother's side to Pope Marcellus II. Brilliant from boyhood — he had translated Virgil's Georgics into Italian by the time he was fourteen — he entered the Society of Jesus in 1560. He was sent to teach at the new University of Louvain, then to the Roman College, where for eleven years he held the chair of Controversial Theology established by Gregory XIII specifically to refute Protestant doctrine.

From those lectures came the Disputationes de controversiis Christianae fidei (1586–93) — three folio volumes that systematically engaged the major Reformers on every contested point of doctrine. The work was so formidable that Protestant universities established chairs of 'anti-Bellarmine' theology to teach generations of refutations of it.

Made Cardinal by Clement VIII (1599) and briefly Archbishop of Capua, he was active in the Curia under Clement VIII, Leo XI, and Paul V. He served as inquisitor in two consequential trials: that of Giordano Bruno (condemned and burned at the stake, 1600 — Bellarmine concurred in the verdict on doctrinal grounds) and the first phase of the Galileo case (1616), where he met Galileo privately, warned him against teaching the Copernican system as physical fact rather than mathematical hypothesis, and signed the cautionary admonition. He wrote spiritual works of great gentleness in his final years (The Mind's Ascent to God by the Ladder of Created Things, The Art of Dying Well), gave his cardinal's tapestries away to the poor in time of famine, and died on the same day as another Jesuit, Aloysius Gonzaga, twenty years his junior.

Miracles & Phenomena

  • Disputationes de Controversiis (1586–93)

    Three folio volumes systematically engaging Lutheran and Reformed theologians on every point of contested doctrine. The work was the principal Catholic theological response to the Reformation for almost three centuries.

  • Spiritual Direction of St. Aloysius Gonzaga

    He was the spiritual director of the young Jesuit novice Aloysius Gonzaga, who died at twenty-three in 1591. At his own death thirty years later he asked to be buried at the feet of his former penitent; the request was eventually honoured at Sant'Ignazio.

  • Charity in the Roman Famine

    During a famine in Rome he sold the tapestries from the walls of his cardinal's apartment to feed the poor. 'The walls,' he said, 'won't catch cold.'

Relics
  • Body
    Tomb of St. Robert Bellarmine
    Beneath the altar of St. Ignatius, Church of Sant'Ignazio di Loyola, Rome

    His remains rest beneath the altar of the chapel of St. Ignatius — at the feet, by his own request, of his former penitent St. Aloysius Gonzaga, whose body rests above.

Iconography
  • Bellarmine the Cardinal-Theologian

    Depicted in the red of a cardinal over the black Jesuit cassock, holding a book — sometimes the Disputationes — with a small dove or beretta at hand. Vincenzo Berrettini's portrait (Sant'Ignazio) is the standard.

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Sources & Further Reading
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