MENDOZA y BOBADILLA, FRANCISCO de. - Theologian and cardinal, born in Cuenca on September 25, 1508, died in Arcos (Burgos) on November 26, 1566. Having graduated in utroque iure at the University of Salamanca, where he probably
An intimate friend of St. Ignatius of Loyola, whom he had known and admired since 1527 in the prisons of Salamanca, he defended his ascetical doctrine, favored his work (in the foundation of the Germanic Colleges of Salamanca and Burgos, and in the spread of the Society), and vindicated his memory. Created cardinal in 1544 by Paul III ad praeses Caesaris, in 1550 he became bishop of Burgos, which, urged by St. Ignatius, he reached in person in 1557. He renewed his diocese through a pastoral visitation, the erection of a seminary with a rich library, the economic improvement of the chapter mensa, the restoration of the bishop's residence, the embellishment of the Cathedral, and the solemn promulgation of the Tridentine decrees (June 11, 1564). Such manifold activities had marked him out for the benevolence of Philip II, who had him promoted archbishop of Valencia, but death prevented him from taking possession of the new see.
Formed in the climate of nascent Spanish Humanism, M. y B. became one of its distinguished representatives. Esteemed by Erasmus, in contact with the finest men of the Italian Renaissance and the Catholic Reformation, an assiduous student of St. Thomas and the greatest Scholastics, and a passionate collector of manuscripts, in 1557 he returned to Spain with many crates of codices and a richer store of patristic and theological knowledge. He utilized these in the drafting of a Eucharistic work conceived in defense of the real presence against the Protestants, particularly against Ecolampadius: the extensive treatise De naturali cum Christo unitate, quam per dignam Eucharistiae sumptionem fideles consequuntur. Written between 1561 and 1566, it warmly and with extraordinary erudition develops a highly original thesis: the Eucharist worthily received produces two unions, one spiritual through sanctifying Grace (common to all the Sacraments), the other natural (in the sense of true and real), which consists in the communication of all the properties of Christ's human nature to the entire substance of the believer (therefore not only to the soul, but also to the body, per quandam redundantiam), by virtue of the sacramental Grace proper to the Eucharist. This special charism is a donum quoddam christificum, which makes the communicant "christiform," just as habitual grace makes the baptized person "deiform." Such union endures even after the species are consumed and produces in the faithful the deepest harmony among themselves, an incoercible propensity toward unity with the Father in heaven, and an intimate demand for somatic resurrection at the end of time (v. COMUNIONE EUCARISTICA). The author develops this theme in five books, in which vast positive culture is blended with the best Thomistic speculation.
The work, having remained unpublished and therefore misunderstood, gave rise to many disputes while the author was still alive, and its memory was still vividly preserved forty years later by Gabriel Vásquez (Commentarii et disputationes in III Sum. Theol., disp. 204, cap. 1). The resolute opposition of contemporaries culminated in an adverse judgment by Suárez. Vásquez, the only one who had read the work in a Toledo manuscript, greatly mitigated the unfavorable verdict of the Exquisite Doctor, and from then on, in Eucharistic theology, a threefold current emerged consisting of staunch opponents (Henriquez, Tanner, Wiggers, Fugandez, Martínez del Prado, Becanus, Mastro, Granado, the Salmanticenses), moderate defenders (Pietro Martínez, Diego de Tapia, Luis de León, Andrea de la Guadalupe, Thomassin), and exaggerated amplifiers of Mendozian thought (Card. Cienfuegos, De la Raguera, Selleri, Card. Belluga, Rávago, and Agramunt). In the eighteenth century, with the decline of theology, almost all trace of M. y B. and his doctrine was lost.
The Mendozian manuscript was rediscovered in 1937 by A. Piolanti in the library of the Roman Seminary (to which it had come by bequest from Msgr. Ubaldo Mannucci) and was published by him with an introduction and notes in the Lateranum collection. In today's fervor for the doctrine of the Mystical Body, the work of M. y B. has once again become topical and is susceptible of further deepening, since it inscribes itself in the ever-living tradition of Greek realism and Thomistic speculation.