What St. Robert Bellarmine Really Said About Resisting a Pope

Hey Subscribers (Free or Paid, this time). A couple of updates before we get into this article

If you value my work and believe in its mission, please consider supporting it. thank you for considering it. God bless and be with you. Now let's get to the article

Article

A commenter recently told me that my Catholicism is “a game of Simon Says” because St. Robert Bellarmine taught that a bad pope could be resisted.

Bellarmine did say that a pope could be resisted if he attacked souls, disturbed civil order, or tried to destroy the Church. But radical traditionalists take that one passage and use it to establish a much larger position than Bellarmine ever gave them.

They treat a situation Bellarmine discussed as though it were a command addressed directly to Catholics today: The pope is harming the Church, so resist him. The problem is that the entire claim depends on their own judgment that Bellarmine’s situation has come true.