possibly endorse their view. He knows that his opponents will retort: General Councils anathematise those who contradict; they do not restrain their anathemas until the Pope has confirmed them. Bellarmine answers: They must certainly mean that their anathemas are conditional on the Pope's endorsement!
What forces Bellarmine to these eccentricities is his opinion that no authority was given by Christ to the Universal Church but only to St Peter. Consequently, if the General Council represent the Universal Church, yet it cannot possess what the entire Body did not receive. To Bellarmine's view the Supreme Pontiff is simply and absolutely above the Universal Church, and above the General Council; so that no judgment on earth can be superior to his. If the objection be urged that on this theory the Church is left in case of trouble without a remedy: Bellarmine answers, No; there is the divine Protection. We may pray God to convert the Pope, or to take him away before he ruins the Church.
It is certainly one of the ironies of history that the volume of Controversies, in which these theories are contained, was placed on the Index by Pope Sixtus V. as deficient, in certain respects, in the regard which a Catholic owed to the Holy Father. In the curiously self-laudatory pages of Bellarmine's Autobiography there still survives his own comment on this act of papal authority. He informs us that in the year 1591 Gregory XIV. was reflecting what he ought to do with the Vulgate edited by Sixtus V. There were not wanting men of importance who held that the use of this edition ought to be publicly prohibited. But Bellarmine suggested, in the Pope's presence, that correction was better than prohibition. Thus the honour of Pope Sixtus would be saved, and the book
