Counter-Reformation (16th–17th century)
Feast: September 17
The Jesuit cardinal who argued with Protestants so fairly that they used his books as their own textbooks.
Robert Bellarmine's Disputations were meant to refute Protestant theology, but he stated the Protestant position so accurately and so fairly that some Protestant universities adopted his books as their own course texts. His Catholic critics complained he was being too kind to heretics. That was Bellarmine in a nutshell: sharp enough to win an argument, charitable enough to make his opponents feel heard. He was a tiny man — barely five feet tall — with a huge intellect and an unexpectedly warm personality. As archbishop of Capua, he gave away most of his income to the poor and used the curtains from his residence to clothe people who had none. He was involved in the Galileo affair, and his role there is complicated — he warned Galileo not to teach heliocentrism as established fact without better proof, which was not unreasonable by the scientific standards of the time, though history has judged the episode harshly. In his final years, he wrote devotional books for ordinary laypeople, having spent most of his career writing for scholars. He died in 1621 at seventy-eight. Pope Pius XI named him a Doctor of the Church in 1931, recognizing that arguing with love is its own kind of genius.