Catholics should not, Bellarmine declares, deny
those examples; rather they should openly recognize that ‘the vices of the
popes were not few’. Indeed for Bellarmine it is the examples of such immorality on the part of some popes that demonstrates how the institution, having
survived the less than optimal behavior of some of its occupants is truly not
just the ‘lapis,’ the rock on which the Church is built, but indeed the lapis
angularis, the cornerstone which not only secures unity witin the institution but also contributes to keeping together the entire Christian commonwealth, as it did at the beginning of the
Church, when it conjoined ‘Jews and Gentiles, as if it were two walls
united in one and creating one Christian Church’.
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