As an undergrad, I was fascinated by the English recusants so I ended up reading nearly everything by and about them and became deeply immersed in a lot of the politics and arguments around the counter-reformation vs the English reformation and the Catholic missionary movement to England at the time so as a consequence, Robert Bellarmine was a name that I encountered a lot, so much so that I had in the back of my mind the idea that he was an English exile (which he was not). I hadn’t realized that he was involved with the suppression of Galileo’s ideas although his role is perhaps a bit more nuanced than the standard Galileo-good, church-bad narrative that gets taught, although not as positive as one would like either.
The church by his name was built in 1969, but given the older school building to which it’s attached, I’m guessing that the church building replaced an older more traditional structure.
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