St. Robert Bellarmine

Who they were

Robert Bellarmine was the finest theological controversialist of the Counter Reformation. His Disputations answered the era's arguments so thoroughly that opposing universities founded chairs specifically to rebut him. He was a Jesuit cardinal who wrote two catechisms used for three centuries, served on the great commissions of his age, and lived, amid Roman splendour, like a poor man: pawning his furnishings for the hungry of the city, eating a peasant's diet, giving away the curtains of his apartments on the grounds that the walls would not catch cold.

His hardest file belongs in the same paragraph. He delivered the 1616 injunction to Galileo, courteously by every account and within his era's categories rather than ours, and that is history rather than an embarrassment to be sanded off. His last years produced the gentler books: The Art of Dying Well, and his commentary on the psalms. He was named a Doctor of the Church in 1931.

Why people turn to St. Robert Bellarmine

Catechists, whose formal patron he is. Canon lawyers. And apologists who want his actual method, which was to answer the strongest version of the objection and then give your curtains away.

How to ask their intercession

Before teaching the faith to anyone, which was his catechisms' whole audience. And at a deathbed, where The Art of Dying Well is still the best thing he wrote.