Editor’s note: due to the importance of the Fourth of July for our current crisis post-Vatican II, we will publish a number of Catholic perspectives on America and Americanism (see the first article “The United States of Freemasonry” by D. L. Gray). The article below, originally published by Catholic Family News, addresses the Catholic claim that the American Revolution is based in Catholic ideas from St. Robert Bellarmine. Please support Mr. Grant’s Bellarmine translation project and buy his fine books at Mediatrix Press.
The beatification of St. Robert Bellarmine in 1923 was the penultimate step in a battle which had begun on the very day St. Robert was laid to rest in the Gesu just over 300 years earlier. Although he was one of the very greatest and most celebrated theologians of his own time, Bellarmine also had detractors who opposed his beatification for one reason or another. His beatification brought celebration not only to the Jesuit order, but to a great many who celebrated his place in the history of the Church. It also brought a theory which was attractive to some men, that Bellarmine was really the main influence for modern democracy, or modern republicanism, or again, a veritable ghost writer of the United States Constitution.
Yet, while this is certainly attractive to Catholics looking to vindicate Catholicism’s place in the history of the U.S., it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The truth is that St. Robert Bellarmine, trained in the tradition of his time, was through and through a monarchist, though he was quite willing to accept other forms of government which had prevailed in various countries with the tacit consent of the people to be legitimate. Additionally, he was opposed to the very novel doctrine which had arisen in his time of the “Divine Right of Kings,” or what is often termed “absolute monarchy”, where the king is believed to rule exclusively by divine right, without any question of the Church or the people. But was he a herald of American Federalism?