In the course of two interesting articles in the April

and May numbers of Blackfriars, Fr. Aelred Whitacre has developed a view of Bd. Robert Bellarmine which would have gladdened the heart of the ‘Advocatus Diaboli.’ Blessed Robert, we are to believe, was a man torn between two loyalties, that to truth and conviction on the one hand, and that to his own Order and its Superiors on the other. In the event, it was the latter which prevailed. Arnica veritas, sed magis arnica Societas is in substance Fr. Whitacre’s verdict. Such a view of one whom the Church has been pleased to honour with beatification is piquant, and, could it be sustained, might well cause grief to those who respect the Church’s decisions. Fortunately, however, for a great man’s reputation, Fr. Whitacre would appear, from the manner in which he has endeavoured to prove his point, not to have had access to the findings of recent research on the life of Bellarmine. His reading, it would seem, has been in the main confined to Serry’s eighteenth-century Historia Congregationum de Auxiliis Divinae Gratiae, a partisan document, long since discredited, and known to all students of the subject as utterly untrustworthy.

This History, besides having been, according to general belief, edited and prepared for the press by the arch-Jansenist Pasquier Quesnel, was based to a very large extent on documents about which Pope Innocent X ruled as follows in a decree against the Jansenists issued in 1654 :