Friday, September 17, 2021

Homily for Memorial of St. Robert Bellarmine

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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