Cardinal Robert Bellarmine
Robert Bellarmine was a Jesuit priest and a cardinal of the Catholic Church. And a leading member of the Inquisition.
Robert Bellarmine was born in a small town in Italy in 1542. His parents were Catholics. And they were poor. But they raised young Robert to be well-read.
As a young adult, Bellarmine joined the Jesuit order. He studied Greek.
Then he was sent to the prestigious University of Padua. His professors were Thomists.
Thomism is a school of thought based on Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274).
Bellarmine finished his studies at the University of Leuven in Brabant. He was ordained as a priest in the Jesuit order.
He became a professor at that same university. He based his course on the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas.
After some years, Bellarmine’s health declined.
In 1576 he made a journey to Italy. There he was called by Pope Gregory XIII to give lectures on polemical theology.
Polemics is contentious rhetoric. It is intended to support a specific position by positing forthright claims and by undermining the opposing position.
These lectures on polemics were to take place in the newly-formed Roman College. In our day it is known as the Pontifical Gregorian University. Or The Gregorian. Or The Greg.
In the ensuing years, Bellarmine took on a variety of other assignments. Then in 1599 Bellarmine was named a Cardinal. In fact, he was named a Cardinal Inquisitor. That meant he was a prominent leader of the Inquisition.
The Inquisition used violence and torture to extract confessions and denunciations from anyone they deemed a heretic.
In that capacity as a prominent leader of the Inquisition, Bellarmine was one of the judges at the Inquisition trial of Giordano Bruno.
Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was an Italian philosopher, poet, cosmological theorist and esotericist. He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets (exoplanets).
Bellarmine shared in the decision to burn Bruno at the stake as a heretic.
In the ensuing years, Bellarmine was named the archbishop of Capua.
In 1616, the pope put Bellarmine in charge of the first Inquisition trial of Galileo.
In that capacity, Bellarmine ordered Galileo to abandon his Copernican doctrine.
The Copernican doctrine held that the Sun, rather than Earth, was at the center.
Bellarmine allowed Galileo to continue using and teaching the mathematical content of Copernicus’s theory as a purely theoretical device for predicting the apparent motions of the planets.
In later years, Bellarmine retired to the Jesuit college of Saint Andrew in Rome.
During his retirement, Bellarmine wrote several short books intended to help ordinary people in their spiritual lives. One of those was The Art of Dying Well (1619).
Bellarmine died on September 17, 1621, at 78 years old. He was canonized a saint in 1930. Then in 1931 he was named a Doctor of the Church.
The Memorial of Robert Bellarmine is observed each year on September 17.
SUMMARY
Robert Bellarmine was a theologian, scholar and leader of the Catholic church.
But Bellarmine was also a leading member of the Inquisition. He shared in the decision to burn a man at the stake as a heretic.
And Bellarmine was the leader of the first Inquisition trial of Galileo.
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