United States or Tajikistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
For the Borghese avarice, see Ranke's Popes, vol. iii. pp. 9-20. For the development of Pope Paul's theory of government, see Ranke, vol. ii. p. 345, and note in which Bellarmine's doctrine is cited textually; also Bellarmine's Selbstbiographie, herausgegeben von Dollinger und Rensch Bonn, 1887. pp. 181, et seq. Moreover there was, in his pride, something akin to fanaticism.
I know also that during his lifetime, when the twelve first Houses of the Order were established, he saw that in them all those rules were carried out. I cannot here refrain from quoting for you a passage from Cardinal Bellarmine's reply to the letter written to him by our Blessed Father on this subject.
"I would have received them readily enough. Why, the book I took to Concord to study was the Catechism of the Council of Trent, which has the strongest kind of statement of that doctrine. Bellarmine's formula of nudus and nudatus would have opened my eyes amazingly to a solution of the whole difficulty."*
Next to the mass, the books Don Gervaso lent him were his chief pleasure: the Lives of the Saints, Cardinal Bellarmine's Fables and The Mirror of true Penitence. The Lives of the Saints fed at once his imagination and his heart, and over the story of Saint Francis, now first made known to him, he trembled with delicious sympathy.
It was believed by Sarpi's friends that Bellarmine's Scotch ideas of duty to humanity prevailed over his Roman ideas of fealty to the Vatican, and we may rejoice in the hope that his nobler qualities did really assert themselves against the casuistry of his brother prelates which sanctioned assassination. These warnings were soon seen to be well founded.
Could he with his vast powers have taken a different course, humanity would have been spared the long and fearful war which ensued, and religion would have saved to herself thousands on thousands of the best and brightest men in after ages. The weapons, which men of Bellarmine's stamp used, were theological.
Scholars die as well as illiterates, and there might be provided for them, among other things, The Phaedo in two languages, Plato's and Jowett's. Then The Seven Sayings from the Cross. Bellarmine's Art of Dying Well would stand well beside John Bunyan's Dying Sayings. And, were I the editor, I would put in Bishop Andrewes' Private Devotions, if only for my own last use.
Very good post-boys they were, too, till Hughie took to drinking and wenching and cards and other devil's tricks. Dan'l was always a steady sort: walked with a nice young woman that was under-housemaid up to the old Lord Bellarmine's at Castle Cannick, and was saving up to be married, when Hughie robbed the mail. Hughie robbed the mail out of doubt.
But Philip, of course, only expressed his sympathy with Suarez, and exhorted James to return to the Faith. The Parlement of Paris also consigned the book to the flames in 1614, as it had a few years before Bellarmine's Tractatus de Potestate summi Pontificis in Temporalibus, in which the same high pretensions were claimed for the Pope as were claimed by Suarez.
For other proofs in the line of Lord Acton's citation, see Bellarmine's Selbstbiographie, cited in a previous article, pp. 306, et seq. But there was in Father Paul a trust in Providence akin to fatalism.
Word Of The Day