For many reasons a whole-hearted welcome will be given to Father Brodrick’s Life of Blessed Robert Bellarmine. The profound sanctity of the great controversialist was a legacy to the Church which has long called for recognition and acclamation; and all Catholic students have felt deep gratitude to the Holy See for raising this great member of the Society of Jesus to the altars of the Church. The new Beatus will rightly become a fitting patron in these days of missionary need. The period of his life was, roughly speaking, the hour when the great schism in modern Europe was becoming stabilised. Looking back now over the intervening centuries, we see him as one of the last great warriors in defence of the old Church of Christendom, before the night of the Reformation had settled down upon us. After his day the Church withdrew in large measure from the guidance of Northern Europe, and a situation arose in which Catholicism stood enclosed and in a state of siege. Even into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the siege had to some extent been raised, the Church seemed to have been passed by, and half Europe stood determined to forget it. During this long period intermittent warfare has continued, and in the ephemeral and local controversies Catholic writers have mainly drawn on the armoury fashioned by Robert Bellarmine.

But the northern nations, until quite recently, went another way, and only in our generation have men begun to see that the way was false, and has led us all towards chaos.