Wednesday, September 17
St. Robert Bellarmine: Great-Grandfather of the Constitution
Today is the feast of St. Robert Bellarmine, the formidable Jesuit-educated cardinal who was both spiritual father to St. Aloysius Gonzaga and who gained Papal approval for the Visitation Order of St. Francis. Most interestingly, for all the fondness historians have for tarring him with the reactionary brush for his misunderstood role in the trial of Galileo (he actually urged against it), his theory of government was one of startling modernity and democracy. He said that authority was vested in the people by God, and it was their consent that gave rulers legitimacy. Understandably, both the kings of France and England were enraged, but it seems that it was St. Robert, not they, who had the last word. He headed the Vatican library and, after dying this day in 1621 (before which he had written a book on how to die properly), was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1931.
On the Franciscan calendar, today is the feast of the Stigmata of St. Francis, though I might be wrong as I have had bad luck with getting the dates right on feasts like this before. Today is also the feast of St. Agathoclia, a martyred slave; St. Ariadne, another martyred slave who was swallowed up by a large rock and never seen again; and St. Columba of Cordoba, a nun (and thus a woman, unlike, say, the Scottish St. Columba, who was not) decapitated by the Moors in 852.
There's also St. Hildegard of Bingen, a fave of mine. The tenth child of her family, she was known as the Sibyl of the Rhine, wrote innumerable hymns, and had seen visions of luminous objects starting at the age of three (after which she slowly figured out this wasn't typical for most people). She also seems to have been the first person ever to devise a "constructed language," beating out J.R.R. Tolkien by about a millenium. Cool.
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