I’m reliably informed that we’re late to the game of celebrating a very rare Pythagorean theorem day: 9/16/25. (The last one was March 4, 2005 I believe.)

Fortunately, we at the The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law can beat that with “The Double Coincidence of September 17.”

One double coincidence is personal to the office held by CIT’s Director Prof. Joel Alicea. Alicea is the St. Robert Bellarmine Professor of Law and Director, the Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition (CIT). This overlap between CIT and Alicea’s endowed chair provides today’s first double coincidence: the Feast Day of St. Robert Bellarmine and Constitution Day. (We can save for another time why September 17 was a strange day for Congress to have picked to celebrate what might better have been called “We Finally Have a Plan for a Constitution Day.”)

The second coincidence is “Double Doctor Day” (perhaps the one and only such day in the Church calendar, though I haven’t done the research to verify this. Today is not only the feast of St. Robert Bellarmine, but also St. Hildegard of Bingen. Both of these saints are Doctors of the Church. St. Robert Bellarmine was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius XI in 1931. St. Hildegard of Bingen was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012. What does this second coincidence have to do with The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law? A clue may be found in the logo of our Center for Law and the Human Person. As explained on CLHP’s “Mission” page, “The human figure is the Universal Man of St. Hildegard of Bingen. Man, as presented by St. Hildegard, is the pinnacle of God’s creation and made in His image. St. Hildegard’s man is not autonomous and self-sovereign; rather, the human person is part of creation, embedded in a network of relations, drawn to the common good, and governed by God’s Providence.” CLHP Co-Director Professor Elizabeth Kirk provides further details in this Disputatio post. Vade et lege.