[boatbums]

Yep, history is fun. For example, the Roman Catholic Church opposed religious freedom right up to Vatican II (the same Vatican II routinely decried by FR traditionalists and closet sedevacantists), even to the point of censoring Catholic commentators advocating religious freedom and forbidding Catholics from reading Protestant Bibles. So it seems Bellarmine’s treatise fell upon deaf ears within his own church. What’s that old saying about a prophet and his own country?

Thanks for stating this. That Bellarmine was a Roman Catholic and wrote about the ideas he had concerning a just government, and Thomas Jefferson possibly using some of these ideas as inspiration for the founding documents he helped create, does not necessarily make those documents "uniquely Catholic".

[Bill Russell]

I will stick with “uniquely Catholic” for the ideas Jefferson used. Cardinal Bellarmine was writing with the approval of the Pope to defend the independence of the Church from Henry VIII’s take over of the Church in England and forcing it into submission under the crown.