The Thomist 83 (2019): 547-88

THREE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY THOMIST SOLUTIONS TO

THE PROBLEM OF A HERETICAL POPE:
CAJETAN, CANO, AND BELLARMINE

CHRISTIAN D. WASHBURN

University of Saint Thomas

St. Paul, Minnesota

A
NY CHRISTIAN ECCLESIOLOGY that recognizes an
external magisterial authority has to reckon with the
question, what happens if that authority tries to teach

words, heresy? Theoretically, the question is of perennial

interest; historically, it occasionally has been a very lively one.1

1
One can see this lively debate surrounding the cases of Popes Honorius in the
seventh century and John XXII in the fourteenth century. See Georg Kreuzer, Die
Honoriusfrage im Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1975). For a
detailed presentation of the controversy surrounding Pope John XXII, see Jared Wicks,
nd Medieval Doctrinal Development and Recent
The Hope of Eternal Life: Common Statement of the Eleventh Round of
the U.S. Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue, ed. Lowell G. Almen and Richard J. Sklba
(Minneapolis, Minn.: Lutheran University Press, 2011), 159-70. In the
nineteenth century the issue of papal heresy was also vigorously discussed in the debates
over papal infallibility before and during the First Vatican Council. Prior to the council,
theologians such as Peter le Page Renouf (1822-97) and Ignaz von Döllinger (1799-
1890) wrote pamphlets on the question of the papa haereticus, arguing that Pope
Honorius had been condemned for heresy. During the council some bishops in the
minority, such as Karl Josef von Hefele (1809-93) and Augustin Verot (1804-76),
objected to the ultramontane doctrine because they thought it ignored the cases of
popes like Honorius and Vigilius, who had in their opinion taught error. See
Mansi, Collectio conciliorum recentiorum (Arnhem: H. Welter, 1927), 52: col. 83; cols.
295-300. In our own day, some theologians have made a stir in accusing Pope Francis of
heresy. While, in my judgment, these last are wrong, the very existence of these false
accusations shows the ongoing relevance of the theories of our three authors for helping
the Church to discern faithful teaching from unfaithful.

547
548 CHRISTIAN D. WASHBURN

In Catholic theology the question tends to be centered on the

pope (though it could just as easily be posed of a council). The
possibility of papal heresy was commonly treated in medieval
reflections on canon law and ecclesiology and was generally
affirmed in the Thomist school. In the sixteenth century, three
Thomist theologians, Cajetan, O.P. (1468-1534), Melchior
Cano, O.P. (1509-60), and St. Robert Bellarmine, S.J. (1542-
1621), took up the question in the context of conciliarism and
the Reformation. This article will examine the views of these
three theologians about which kinds of papal teachings are
subject to error and which are not, and about whether and how
the Church could depose a heretical pope. To this end, this

infallibility, since each of the authors thought that there are

conditions under which God necessarily protects the pope from
teaching error. It also will examine their understanding of the
limits of papal infallibility. This article will treat the three

in order better to understand their theory of the papa

haereticus, but it will prescind from analyzing whether their
historical judgment is correct. Finally, it will treat whether and
under what conditions a pope could be a heretic and the process
by which the Church can be freed from a heretical pope.

I. THEOLOGICAL BACKGROUND

Concordia discordantium canonum appeared

around A.D.
containing a collection of authoritative texts.2
presents a series of texts concerned with the limits of papal
authority. Perhaps the best known is the following canon,
known by its incipit, Si Papa, written by St. Boniface, apostle to
the Germans and a martyr:

If the Pope, negligent of his own and of

slack and remiss in his deeds, and silent, moreover, in the cause of good when

Magisterium (Summa Theologiae The Thomist 38 (1974): 90.

 THE PROBLEM OF A HERETICAL POPE 549

he should speak, which last is the more harmful to himself and to others, then
no less does he lead countless people along with him in a throng to their first
slave of hell, he himself to be beaten with many stripes together with Satan for
all eternity. Here no mortal presumes to rebuke his faults, because he, the one
who is to judge all, is to be judged by none, unless he be found straying from
the faith.3

Gratian had both received and transmitted a basic tension in the

4
Gratian also holds that a person does not fall into heresy
by simply holding erroneous doctrine. One has to hold this
error pertinaciously after being corrected.5 Gratian not only
presents papal heresy as theoretically possible, but he seems to
have thought that it had occurred and gives the unhistorical
example of Pope Anastasius II (r. 496-98).6 While Si Papa is
clear that the pope could be judged for a deviation from the
faith, it also leaves much unsaid. It does not sanction any
particular method for judging a pope for heresy, nor who may
judge the pope, nor when the pope may be judged (e.g., after a
rebuke), nor in what condition a pope finds himself when

3
ligens reprehenditur inutilis et remissus in
operibus suis, et insuper a bono taciturnus, quod magis officit sibi et omnibus,
nichilominus innumerabiles populos cateruatim secum ducit, primo mancipio gehennae
cum ipso plagis multis in eternum uapulaturus. Huius culpas istic redarguere presummit
mortalium nullus, quia cunctos ipse iudicaturus a nemine est iudicandus, nisi
Concordantia discordantium canonum,
Decretum, part 1, d. 40, c. 6 [Aemilius Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici (Graz:
Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1955), 1:146]). English translation by James M.
Moynihan, Papal Immunity and Liability in the Writings of the Medieval Canonists
(Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1961), 26.
4 Klaus Schatz, Papal Primacy: From Its Origins to the Present, trans. John A. Otto

and Linda M. Maloney (Collegeville, Minn: The Liturgical Press, 1996), 95.
5
Gratian, Concordantia discordantium canonum, part 2, cause 24, q. 3, c. 31
(Friedberg, ed., 1:998); Moynihan, Papal Immunity, 50.
6
Gratian, Concordantia discordantium canonum, part 1, d. 19, c. 9, q. 1 (Friedberg,
ed., 1:64); Moynihan, Papal Immunity, 49 n. 23.
550 CHRISTIAN D. WASHBURN

judged (e.g., is he still the pope or is he a heretic who was

deposed ipso facto?).
Si Papa ensured that the issue of papal heresy was a common
theme in the canonistic debates of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries.7 The issue was in fact so common that the papal
magisterium itself recognized the truth contained in it. Thus,
Pope Innocent III (r. 1198-1216) stated that

For faith is so necessary to me, that, while I have only God for my judge in
other sins, I am able to be judged by the Church only on account of the sin
which is committed against faith. For he who does not believe is already
judged.8

A similar view was also held by Pope Innocent IV (r. 1243-54)

who, in his commentary on Gratian, approved of the doctrinal
content of Si Papa.9 In the sixteenth century, Pope Paul IV (r.
1555-59) reconfirmed the essential content of Si Papa in the
bull Cum ex apostolates officio (1559).10
The various schools of theology in the Middle Ages were one
in accepting the doctrine that a pope can be a heretic.
Dominican and Thomist theologians took up the issue in their
ecclesiological writings, and this became more pronounced
during their fights first with conciliarists and later with

infallibility in certain matters, such as promulgating a new creed

and canonizing a saint.11 At the same time, he affirmed that it is

7
Moynihan, Papal Immunity, 141-42. Brian Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar
Theory: The Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010
Ius ecclesiae 31 (2019):
189-202.
8

judicem habeam, propter solum peccatum, quod in fide committitur, possem ab ecclesia
Sermo II in consecratione
pontificis maximi [PL 217, col. 656]).
9
Moynihan, Papal Immunity, 115.
10
Bullarum, diplomatum et privilegiorum sanctorum romanorum pontificum
taurinensis, ed. Seb. Franco et Henrico Dalmazzo (Turin, 1857), 6:551.
11
STh II-II, q. 1, a. 10. Ulrich Horst, The Dominicans and the Pope: Papal Teaching
Authority in the Medieval and Early Modern Thomist Tradition (Notre Dame, Ind.:
 THE PROBLEM OF A HERETICAL POPE 551

possible for the pope to err as a person.12 In the fourteenth and

fifteenth centuries, the Thomist school followed Aquinas in

certain conditions, although these conditions were not always

laid out with great clarity.13 Hervaeus Natalis, O.P. (c. 1260-

O.Carm. (d. 1342), Juan de Torquemada, O.P. (1388-1468),

and St. Antoninus, O.P. (1389-1459) all affirm that the pope
can teach infallibly. Many of these Thomist theologians,
however, also explicitly hold that the pope can err doctrinally

person.14 Many of these authors either explicitly cite Si Papa as

University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 20.

12
Quodlibet IX.8.
13
Hervaeus Natalis, O.P., De potestate papae, in In quatuor libros Sententiarum
commentaria. Quibus adiectus est eiusdem auctoris tractatus De postestate papae (1647;
reprint, Farnborough: Gregg, 1966), 365. Petrus de Palude, O.P., Tractatus de potestate
papae, ed. P. T. Stella (Zurich: Pas-Verlag, 1966), 191. Guido Terreni, Quaestio de
magisterio infallibili romani pontificis, ed. Bartolomé María Xiberta y Roqueta
(Münster: typis Aschendorff, 1926), 16, 25, lib. 2, c. 112. Juan de Torquemada, O.P.,
De inerrantia romani pontificis ex cathedra definientis suffragium praeclarissimi Card. Jo.
Turrecremata O.P. legati pontificii ad concilium Basileense deinde ad concilium
florentinum latinorum oratoris ex aureo illius opere summa de potestate papali
depromptum et Rev. patribus concilii Vaticani exhibitum (Turin: P. H. F. Marietti,
1870), lib. 2, c. 109. Saint Antoninus, O.P., Summa theologica (Graz: Akademische
Drucku. Verlagsanstalt, 1959), 3:364-65.
14
Hervaeus Natalis, De potestate papae, 365; Petrus de Palude, Tractatus de
potestate papae, 196; St. Antoninus, Summa theologica, 3:1207-8; Juan de
Torquemada, Summa de ecclesia ...: una cum eiusdem apparatu, nunc primum in lucem
edito, super decreto Papae Eugenij IIII. in Concilio Florentino de unione Graecorum
emanato (Venice: Apud Michaelem Tramezinum, 1561), lib. 2, c. 102; Terreni,
Quaestio de magisterio infallibili romani pontificis, 28, 30. Tierney reads Terreni as
holding a position that the pope simply cannot err (Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal
Infallibility, 1150-1350: A Study on the Concepts of Infallibility, Sovereignty and
Tradition in the Middle Ages [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988], 245). Terreni is at pains,
however, to be clear that the pope is only infallible when defining a matter of faith for
the universal Church.
552 CHRISTIAN D. WASHBURN

one of their sources for this teaching15 or admit that popes have
in fact been deficient in living the faith in some respect. 16 For
these authors, once the pope commits incorrigible heresy, the
pope ceases to be pope ipso facto.17 They also hold that the
pope is the highest authority in the Church and cannot be
judged by anyone, including a council.18 Nevertheless some, like
Petrus de Palude, St. Antoninus, and Torquemada, think that a
council can recognize officially the de facto situation in the
Church that there is no pope.19
In the sixteenth century, there were two different theological
fights over the nature of the papal teaching office, and our three
authors explicitly responded to both. The first was between
papalists and conciliarists; the second was between Protestant
and Catholic theologians. Conciliarism arose in the fourteenth
century, and it gained momentum during the great Western
Schism (1378-1417). The basic position of all conciliarists is
that a general council of the Church is higher in authority than
the pope. In the sixteenth century, conciliarism found able
defenders in men such as Jacques Almain (ca. 1480-1515) and
John Mair (ca. 1467-1550).20 Central to their argument that a

15
St. Antoninus, Summa theologica, 3:1207; Juan de Torquemada, O.P., A
Disputation on the Authority of Pope and Council (Blackfriars Publications, 1988), 48;
Petrus de Palude, Tractatus de potestate papae, 195.
16
Hervaeus Natalis, De potestate papae, 365; Juan de Torquemada, Summa de
ecclesia of Honorius in book four is at odds
with his account in book two. On this apparent contradiction, see Kreuzer, Die
Honoriusfrage im Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit, 132-33.
17
Petrus de Palude, Tractatus de potestate papae, 195. Juan de Torquemada, O.P., A
Disputation on the Authority of Pope and Council, 47. St. Antoninus, Summa theologica,
3:1208.
18
Petrus de Palude, Tractatus de potestate papae, 196.
19
Ibid., 196, 200; St. Antoninus, Summa theologica, 3:1208-9; Juan de
Torquemada, O.P., A Disputation on the Authority of Pope and Council, 47; Juan de
Torquemada, Summa de ecclesia, 1. III, c. 8 ad 4, fol. 282r.
20

American Historical Review 70 (1965): 673-90; idem, The Conciliarist

Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 111-40; Friedrich
Speculum juris et ecclesiarum:
Festschrift für Willibald M. Plöchl zum 60 (Vienna: Herder, 1967), 301-12.