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 example of such immortality on the part of such 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 the institution but which also the entire Christian commonwealth, as it did at the beginning of the Church, when it conjoined ‘Jews and Gentiles, as if it were one two walls united in one and creating one Christian Church’.
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