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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Cardinal Bellarmine, the chief controversialist who has written against Protestantism, has within less than fifteen months been elevated to the two highest ecclesiastical dignities conferred within the Roman communion upon the dead. He was declared to be a saint on June 29, 1930, and a Doctor of the Church—doctor ecclesiae—on September 17, 1931. Five years before, the same dignities had been conferred on Peter Canisius, likewise a member of the Society of Jesus and in the latter half of the sixteenth century next to Bellarmine the leading literary opponent of the “Lutheran rebellion”,—words used by Pius XI in his bulls of canonization.
1 De sane. beat. 1. 9.
2 Praising this resolution, Döllinger-Reusch give some examples of nepotism under Paul V (1605–21), and his two immediate successors. Paul made a young nephew cardinal and lifted two brothers to the highest civil positions in Rome. Gregory XV, three days after his election, made a nephew cardinal, and Urban VIII made three nephews cardinals, one at the age of eighteen. These three men, at Urban's death, had to flee from the city, so bad were their reputations.
3 Acts of the Apostolic See for 1931, pp. 433–438.Google Scholar
4 De laicis, XIV, XV.Google Scholar
5 Dg membris ecclesiae, I, 28.Google Scholar
6 Sixtus' bull was made by Döllinger (1870) one of the historic arguments against papal infallibility. However, that other notable Catholic historian, Pastor, in the German edition of his History of the Popes, vol. X, 158 sqq., 590 sqq.Google Scholar, sought to prove that the bull and its issuance lacked certain formalities—Förmlichkeiten—and for this reason it belongs not to the class of infallible utterances. Pastor had rescued Innocent VIII's bull calling for the punishment of witches in Germany by the Inquisition on the ground that a pope is not responsible for the accuracy of the accounts which are made to him—in Innocent's case that actual witches were infesting the German regions. There is no room for doubt that Sixtus meant his bull to have authority for all time.
7 There was a copy of Bellarmine's Disputations in Increase Mather's library, but, so far as I know, in no other early Colonial library. The libraries of the Virginians Col. Byrd and Robert Carter each contained one copy of Bellarmine's minor writings.
