Homily for the Memorial of
St. Robert Bellarmine
Sept. 17, 2021
1 Tim 6: 2-12 (1st reading, Year I)
Provincial House, New Rochelle, N.Y.
“Beloved: Teach and urge these things. Whoever teaches something different and does
not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the religious
teachings … understands nothing…” (1 Tim 6: 2-4).
St. Robert Bellarmine is a very rare bird—a cardinal of the Roman Curia who’s been canonized. The Collect noted that God “adorned him with wonderful learning and virtue.” It wasn’t for his learning that he was canonized—309 years after his death—but for his virtue: zeal in the pastoral care of souls, prayer, simplicity, trust in God. He was virtuous in a setting not especially noted for it, 16th- and 17-century Rome.
St.
Paul urges his disciple Timothy to be firm in teaching sound Christian
truth. Bellarmine was very much a
teacher. Physically he wasn’t imposing;
he was so short that when he mounted the Baroque pulpits of his age, he had to
stand on a stool. But his teaching was
clear and eloquent. His presentations of
Catholic truth against the teachings of the Reformers in the decades after Trent
were polite but so masterful and so widely read that they aroused hundreds of
responses.
Before
he was a writer and curial cardinal, Bellarmine was a professor, covering
dogmatics, Scripture, and the spiritual life; a sample of his spiritual
teaching was in today’s Office of Readings.
He wrote 2 very popular catechisms.
As a spiritual director he had Aloysius Gonzaga as one of his directees.
In
a Wednesday audience, Benedict XVI said of Bellarmine, “[He] teaches with great
clarity and with the example of his own life that there can be no true reform
of the Church unless there is first our own personal reform and the conversion
of our own heart.”[1]
That
personal reform goes to the heart of what we do as teachers—in classroom, church,
extracurriculars, and youth ministry programs.
We heard in Luke (8:1-3) that the 12 and some women accompanied
Jesus. Were they accompanying Jesus, or
vice versa? Our magisterium tells us accompaniment
is a 2-way street, that we find our holiness in being present to the young, who
are also guides to us, who are always challenging us to be better teachers of
sound Christian life.
[1] Holy
Men & Women of the Middle Ages and Beyond (San Francisco: Ignatius,
2012), p. 210.
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