"This Book Has Ruined Us!"
 Thus said Theodore Beza, successor to John Calvin as head of
the Protestant church at Geneva, of the writings of the Jesuit
theological genius. St. Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621).
 Certain historians have long propagated the legend that the
traditional Roman Catholic Church was synonymous with tyranny,
inquisition and despotic monarchy; that against this reactionary
triumvirate arose the "Protestant movement for freedom." In fact,
as historian John Clement Rager demonstrates in The Political
Philosophy of St. Robert Bellarmine, the opposite held true:
Protestants were defenders of the Divine Right of Kings, while
Bellarmine, a Doctor of the Church, was the champion of freedom,
 Cardinal Bellarmine debated and refuted some of the greatest
Protestant thinkers of the Reformation. So vast was his knowledge
that a Professor at the Protestant university at Heidelburg, opened
the "College Anti-Bellarminianum" exclusively to cope with his
writings.
 In England, under the Tudor monarchs Henry VIII, Edward VI
and Elizabeth, government absolutism,not freedom, was the fruit
of the revolt against the Catholic Church. Protestant philosophers
such as Tyndall in his Obedience of a Christian Man, insisted that
kings ruled by Divine Right and citizens owed them servile
obedience.
 This doctrine reached its nadir in the reign of King James I,
whose persecution of Catholics was founded upon it. Bellarmine
challenged James in a series of pamphlets. His disputation was so
powerful that the king was forced to reply in a pamphlet of his
own, which Bellarmine quickly demolished, necessitating yet
another rejoinder from the desperate Protestant monarch, whose
self-serving arguments unraveled before the world.
 Against the Reformation notion of the absolutism of kings,
Bellarmine posited the mediaeval philosophy of natural rights,
popular sovereignty and the freedom of municipalities and guilds.
He advocated the Catholic via media (middle way) between
anarchy and the Anglican, Lutheran and late Anabaptist concept of
slavish obedience to civil authority.
 It was St. Robert Bellarmine who proclaimed, "Unjust laws arc,
properly speaking, no laws," thereby articulating the limits of the
state, the Dominion of God and the Scriptural principle of freedom
from tyrannical oppression, upon which the American War of
Independence and all legitimate movements for government by
consent of the people, are based.
 Father Rager writes: "...at a time when royal heads were tracing
the origin of their power from the Olympic heights of divine
appointment, when as a sacred and royal caste they set themselves
apart from and above the rest of mankind; when they were no
longer content to deck their brows with die crown of temporal
power, but coveted likewise the tiara of spiritual supremacy, there
stepped out before the despotic court of that day...this staunch and
fearless Cardinal of the ancient Church, in unfaltering terms
defining the...obligations of kings and...the principles of civil
liberty..."

 The late John Clement Rager, S.T.D., was a Catholic historian
and a priest of the diocese of Indianapolis.
 The Political Philosophy of St. Robert Bellarmine
 Political Science/Catholic Studies
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