A Dedication
The defender of the faith of his age, and an ancestor of this family. His complete works gathered and readable here.
Roberto Francesco Romolo Bellarmino (1542–1621), born in Montepulciano, nephew of Pope Marcellus II through his mother Cinzia Cervini, of the same Cervini house that runs down to this family. Jesuit; Archbishop of Capua; Cardinal; Doctor of the Church; canonized 1930, declared Doctor 1931 by Pius XI; patron of catechists and catechumens; feast September 17.
He was the foremost defender of the faith of the entire Counter-Reformation, so formidable that Protestant universities endowed special chairs for the sole purpose of answering him.
Four centuries ago a son of the Cervini line wrote the most rigorous defense of the faith of his age. Four centuries on, a son of that same line writes faith letters defending the early church. The family's diligence did not end with the cardinal.
The Man and His Works
Roberto Bellarmino entered the Society of Jesus in 1560 and was formed in the great schools of the age: philosophy at the Roman College, theology at Padua and Louvain, where he was ordained. In 1576 he was given the new Chair of Controversies at the Roman College, the post that made his name; he went on to serve as the College's Spiritual Father and Rector, as Provincial of Naples, and from 1599 as Cardinal, later Archbishop of Capua.
In the Galileo affair of 1615 he took the measured line that an unproven theory should be taught as a hypothesis, yet that “if it were solidly demonstrated” Scripture must be read in accord with it. Contemporaries remembered his spirit of prayer, his humility and poverty, and his lavish charity to the poor. He died 17 September 1621, was canonized in 1930, and declared a Doctor of the Universal Church in 1931.
Several of these are readable in full below. The life and the survey of works above draw on the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).
All public-domain, and grabbed in full (not just linked): the Latin Disputationes (all 17 Controversies), the complete 12-volume Opera Omnia (Paris 1870), and the public-domain English devotional works. Pick a work to read it in the pane below. Tidy cleans the raw OCR for reading (long-s and broken line-ends); Raw shows the scan exactly. Our own renderings of the Latin, when written, are marked “our translation”; modern translations (Ryan Grant / Mediatrix) remain copyright and are linked, never reproduced.
One Latin volume holds all seventeen. Controversies 13–17 are the grace cluster (grace of the first man · loss of grace · grace & free choice · justification · good works): type gratia, justificatione, or libero arbitrio in the search box to jump there.
His themes, on the doctrine pages: Justification · Grace · Eternal Security · Free Will. And the broad history he stands in: The Church, One Story.