ABSTRACT
Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) was an Italian Jesuit and a cardinal of the Catholic Church. He was a central figure in the Counter-Reformation as a strenuous defender of Catholic orthodoxy against the doctrines of the reformers. During his youth, he did not attend university courses regularly. A “self-master and self-disciple,” Bellarmine accumulated a solid body of knowledge reading on his own the collections of the Corpus Iuris Canonici and several works in jurisprudence. He offered significant contributions to the development of the canon law doctrine in several subjects, such as the constitution of the Church, the discipline governing relationships between the Church and the State, ecclesiastical immunity, and the inseparability of the matrimonial contract and the sacrament. He was canonized in 1930 and named doctor of the Church in 1931.
