The Jesuit cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621), the 400th anniversary of whose death is noticed in 2021, was the greatest polemical theologian, controversialist and defender of the Papacy that the Church of Rome ever produced. Whereas the Council of Trent (1545-1563) dogmatically defined the doctrine of the Church of Rome in a series of decrees and anathemas, it fell to Bellarmine to provide all the theological underpinnings and, by controversy, to counter every argument of Protestantism, whether Lutheran, Calvinist or whatever. He did so principally by his lectures to young Jesuits training to be the foot soldiers of the Counter-Reformation, and by his printed Controversies. Bellarmine also produced a catechism that was adopted by the Roman Catholic Church as its official teaching until the First Vatican Council in 1870, which relied heavily on Bellarmine’s arguments in favour of Papal infallibility.[1] He was declared by Rome a Doctor of the Church in 1931, the prerequisite to which was his canonization as a saint the previous year.
The Protestant Reformers had studied the Scriptures in their original languages, and deeply familiarized themselves with church history and the writings of the Church Fathers, but there was little comparable expertise within the Church of Rome: few Roman apologists until Bellarmine could argue convincingly from history, or from the Fathers, or from the original languages, leaving the Church of Rome at a significant disadvantage in controversy. A milestone in modern history was the production of the Historia Ecclesiae Christi by Lutheran scholars at Magdeburg (1559-74), thirteen volumes covering a century each, often known as the Magdeburg Centuries. Painstakingly and meticulously researched using primary sources from all over Europe, the Magdeburg Centuries demonstrated the continuity in all ages of the Church and her doctrine in each article of faith. This made it relatively easy for Protestants to expose and counter the errors in the traditional narrative of the Roman church with its mediaeval legends, inventions, hagiographies, and forgeries.[2]
Roberto Francesco Romolo Bellarmino was born on October 4, 1542 in the town of Montepulciano in Tuscany, then within the Papal States. He was the third of five sons, and had seven sisters. His maternal uncle, Cardinal Marcello Cervini, hailed from the town, and became Pope Marcellus II when Robert was 12. In 1557 Spanish Jesuits set up a school in the town, which attracted away Robert from the local grammar school. Robert quickly came under their spell to join the order, contrary to the will of his father, who wished him to qualify in medicine. In an extraordinary circumvention of the requirement for a 2-year noviciate, Robert was fast-tracked into taking vows at the age of seventeen. Within days Robert was fitted with his cassock and dispatched to the Jesuits’ Roman College in Rome. He became Il Maestro Roberto at 21, and thereafter taught at Florence, then at Mondovi in Piedmont, and at Padua, all the while honing his skills in preaching.
In 1569 Bellarmine was sent to Louvain in the Low Countries, where he distinguished himself by regular preaching and public lectures in Latin, his auditors exceeding 2000 persons at a time.[3] Louvain was a Roman Catholic stronghold in a region much influenced by Protestantism, and his Jesuit superiors knew that there he could in relative safety cut his teeth in controversy. The main dispute when he arrived was an intramural affair at the University, where Michael de Bay (Latin ‘Baius’), who had attended the Council of Trent as a theologian delegate, taught that Roman theology had become too reliant on mediaeval scholasticism and the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Baius records that he ‘endeavoured to bring theology back to Holy Scripture and the writings of the Fathers’, which sounded suspiciously like the trail that the Reformers had blazed. Unsurprisingly, Baius’ views were condemned by a Papal Bull and yet rumbled on.[4] The Jesuits, disliking any sympathy at the University for what they considered crypto-Protestantism, set up their own college in Louvain in 1570 and installed the recently ordained Bellarmine as its first professor, where he dutifully lectured and wrote against the views of Baius, while avoiding mention of his name. His star in controversy being in the ascendant, but now ailing in health and troubled by regional wars, Bellarmine was recalled to Rome in 1576 to take up the chair of Controversial Theology at the Roman College, where he had once trained. He served successively as lecturer, then as Spiritual Father of the college (1588), and at length its Rector (1592).
