# On Papal Conclaves/Chapter 6
### VI.

BEFORE proceeding to actual business, the Cardinals go through the formality of proving their identity and right to attend Conclave. In reality, this is nothing more than a form glibly run through, for there can be no danger of personation in this small constituency. But this ceremony affords the opportunity of saying a few words on a point about which, more than on any other connected with Roman ceremonial, there prevails misapprehension—the real nature and position of a Cardinal. That laymen can be made Cardinals is generally known, but much confusion of ideas exists on the nature of the Cardinalitian dignity, and of the difference of standing between Cardinals with and without orders. The Sacred College, according to a rule in force since 1585, is fixed at seventy members—divided into six Cardinal Bishops, fifty Cardinal ​Priests, and fourteen Cardinal Deacons. The first popular misapprehension in regard to these dignitaries is that their rank is an ecclesiastical one. The Cardinalitian title, properly speaking, is not a grade in the Church, but merely a dignity in the Court of Rome. The Cardinal is a high personage in the Pope's Court, which being strictly ecclesiastical, it is incumbent on all who are members thereof to conform, for as long as they continue so, to the garb and fashion of an ecclesiastical character. For the Cardinal, as such, there is no specific ordination; ​he is simply created by the sovereign. It is true that the Council of Trent, in its twenty-fourth session, ruled that the same canonical conditions required from Bishops should be incumbent on Cardinals. But this prescription has been habitually disregarded, and it would seem as if celibacy were the only palpable qualification which is absolutely indispensable. Let a man have no wife living and there appears to be no tangible obstacle to arrest a Pope, if so disposed, from naming him Cardinal. It would, however, seem that a lay Cardinal becomes de facto so far subject to ecclesiastical discipline as to require the Pope's consent to return legitimately into secular life and to lay aside the insignia of his rank. There is a long list of Cardinals who have done so, but with the exception of rebellious ones like Chatillon, they all had sought and obtained the Pope's sanction. On the other hand, ​the instances on record of Cardinals who were relieved from their ecclesiastical obligations are extremely curious, and testify strikingly to the wonderful elasticity in the regulations of the Church. These dispensations constitute a highly instructive, but also a little read chapter in the history of the Romish organization. Cardinals even in orders have repeatedly been permitted to divest themselves of their dignity and to marry; but in every such case well-defined political influences appear to have been the predominating cause that induced the Pope to concede the favour. Thus in 1588 we find Ferdinand Medicis authorized to throw off the purple, and become Grand Duke of Tuscany; in 1642 Cardinal Maurice of Savoy to take a wife and a duchy; in 1695 Cardinal Rainaldo of Este to make the same change in his condition. On the death of King Ladislas of Poland, his brother Casimir, ​a member of the Society of Jesus, and named Cardinal in 1646, received a dispensation not merely to abandon the purple, but also to marry the King's widow, his sister-in-law, Mary Gonzaga. Still more astonishing were the favours conceded to two brothers of this lady's house. To prevent extinction of the family, Paul V., in 1615, permitted Cardinal Ferdinand Gonzaga to go back into the world. On this change he became enamoured of a woman of inferior rank, Camilla Erdizzani, and married her; but becoming afterwards tired of his wife, he sought and procured the Pope's authority for repudiating her, when he espoused Catherine Medicis, daughter of Duke Cosmo II. But there was at the same time, a second Cardinal Gonzaga—Vincenzo, the brother of Ferdinand,—and he also succeeded in obtaining permission to give up the Church for the sake of indulging his passion for a kinswoman, Isabella Gonzaga. In all these ​cases, however, it is clear that some orders had been taken; and therefore, in the strict sense of the term, these Cardinals were no longer laymen. The real state of the case is that the rank of Cardinal is, as every degree in the Pope's Court should strictly speaking he, ecclesiastical, though it is no sacred order, but that practically it has been conferred on laymen by the intervention of a fiction like that invented to make ​Protestants capable of wearing the cross of St. Louis in France, which was given only for ninety-nine years to heretics, who forfeited it, if still unconverted at the end of that period. Laymen were named Cardinals only for twelve months, being bound within that period to take Deacon's orders; but then the same plenary power which elevated them could extend its favours to an indefinite renewal of the expired ​dispensation at the end of each year. By the Bull of Pius IV. it was, however, distinctly ruled that no Cardinal still a layman should exercise the privileges of his dignity in Conclave. To be entitled to vote in the election of a Pope he must have taken deacon's orders, and this rule has been observed in practice until in Rome it is the general off-hand statement that this is laid down in canon law. Rut here we find, on going to the fundamental authorities, that, as is so often the case in matters connected with the subject of Conclaves, the current version is not accurate. In Gregory XV.'s (1621) elaborate Bull and Ritual, which are at the present moment the ruling statutes for Papal elections, it is distinctly laid down that this exclusion is only against such lay Cardinals as may not be furnished with a specific Papal dispensation. The power of especial favour here recognised has not been exercised generally, and it may be practically correct to say that lay Cardinals have, as a rule, to take orders before being admitted to a Conclave. In this century, this was certainly the case with Cardinal Albani, who became a deacon only when in 1823 the Pope's death offered the opportunity of ​giving a vote. One instance of a lay Cardinal admitted to Conclave did, however, certainly occur when Sixtus V. was elected. The Cardinal Archduke Albert (who eventually married) arrived in hot haste from Innspruck, and having exhibited his license from the late Pope, was permitted to co-operate with his fellow-Cardinals in giving a new chief to Catholic Christendom, although, as is explicitly stated, he never had taken any orders. At the present moment there are no lay members of the Sacred College; but this is so only since, quite recently, the reigning Pope expressed his desire that those amongst the Cardinals who had not taken deacon's orders should do so.
A freshly-named Cardinal is subject to a form of novitiate, during which he is technically said to be cum ore clauso, being invested with the symbols of his rank, but precluded ​from uttering an opinion on, or taking an active part in, any matters falling within a Cardinal's sphere, until he shall have been relieved from apprenticeship by the Pope solemnly unsealing his mouth. Of late this phase of preparatory state has in practice been reduced to a mere form—the closing injunction and the opening confirmation in full rights being performed in one consistory. Still, this is as yet an innovation, without written authority, and a return to stricter observance of primitive custom is at any moment quite possible. At the time when this novitiate was a reality, it was a matter of importance to decide whether this limitation of powers in a Cardinal actually created could extend even to the suspension of the franchise belonging to his rank in the event of the Pope's demise before his mouth had been solemnly unsealed. Eugenius IV., by a ​Constitution, prohibited Cardinals in this state from taking part in elections; but that prohibition was repealed by Pius IV., and the question must he considered absolutely set at rest by the confirmatory ruling of Gregory XV., that every promulgated Cardinal (in distinction to those in petto) has an inalienable right to participate in Conclaves, which ruling has been confirmed by the circumstances that marked the Conclave convened on the death of Clement IX. in 1670. At that moment there were seven Cardinals cum oribus clausis. All went into Conclave, and one of their number, Altieri, came out of it as Pope. The condition of Cardinals in petto is altogether different. Nothing can indeed be conceived more anomalous than the status of Prelates who in principle must be considered Cardinals, because mentally promulgated by a Pope, while yet liable to pass their lives in ignorance of their own eminence, should the same Pope either change his mind or die without having made a record of the names of those he has inwardly appointed Cardinals, as a direction for the honourable obligation of his successor. It appears that at one time the ​Popes used to name Cardinals in private when it was thought that their public promulgation might be attended with injurious consequences. In these cases, however, the Cardinals in Consistory were informed by the Pope of the names of those whom he designated fur participation in this honour. Consequently, there was here an established clandestine concert amongst the principal parties interested in the matter, so that the secret was one only against the outer world. Nevertheless it was ruled that a nomination of this nature did not suffice to entitle an individual to act as Cardinal. On two occasions Martin V. made such nominations, admitting duly the Sacred College to a knowledge of them. Yet when, on the Pope's decease (1431), Dominic Capranica, one of the prelates so named, in the name of himself and his companions, claimed the right to take part in the Conclave, the claim was rejected, though the authenticity of the alleged nomination was not disputed. This precedent was rendered the more conclusive for the indispensable necessity of a promulgation in public to constitute a full Cardinal, that Martin V. shortly before death had held ​a Consistory, wherein he recalled to mind the fact of his secret nominations, and specially enjoined the Cardinals to admit those included in them to all the privileges of their quality. In the face of this solemn injunction the Cardinals nevertheless refused to recognise the right to vote of the prelates in question, and their decision was confirmed in a constitution by Eugenius IV., the Pope next in succession. Still there is an affirmed instance of an unpromulgated Cardinal having been admitted, through special protection, to a Conclave. Frederick Sanseverino, created by Innocent VIII. in secret, obtained the privilege of voting for Alexander VI. through the intervention of Cardinal Sforza; but this occurrence is only another example of the reckless license prevailing in these times. When, in 1550, on the death of Paul III., Bernardino della Croce, named, but not promulgated, Cardinal, demanded to exercise his supposed right, the claim was absolutely repudiated; and the decision in this instance seems to have finally put a stop to the habit of going through the process of a clandestine nomination, instead of which the Pope since has adopted the practice of merely intimating to ​the Cardinals in Consistory the fact of his having mentally resolved on a stated number of promotions, but without making any intimation of the names, the only apparent effect of which announcement being to limit the range of this Pope's power of creation, inasmuch as those whom he has announced to have reserved in petto are thenceforth counted in the number of the Sacred College, and therefore swell its ranks by so much. It is indeed the custom for the Pope to write down in sealed papers the names of those whom he has mentally promoted, and the same custom makes it usual for the successor to fulfil these intentions should death have intervened to prevent their execution by his predecessor. But both this writing down of names and the observance of a predecessor's expressed wishes are quite arbitrary, and there are well-established precedents of Cardinals in petto who never were promoted into the full-fledged state.
​A Cardinal's right to record his vote at Papal elections is regarded as so sacred that it has been guarded by perfectly exceptional provisions, such as seem to constitute in canon law the single limitation set on the Pope's plenary authority. It has been distinctly ruled that no censure, suspension, interdict, nor even excommunication, can involve forfeiture by a Cardinal of his right to exercise this specific privilege of his order. There is no more startling provision in the whole Roman organization; indeed it is so startling that many Catholics will be disposed at the first blush to doubt its authenticity. Yet does this enactment stand not merely as an obsolete curiosity on some forgotten page in the statute-book; Roman Curialists hold it to be still in full force, and when the last case in point occurred, in 1740, with Cardinal Coscia, it was invoked, and strictly acted upon without discussion. ​The principle dictating this provision is to be found in the feeling (very natural in times of bitter feuds) that, unless this particular privilege of Cardinals were set beyond the reach of confiscation, a Pope of strong partisan views would have only to impose from his plenary authority ecclesiastical penalties to disable Cardinals of a faction opposed to his own from having any weight in the choice of his successors. Nor were such apprehensions without their warrant in facts. Like all the organic laws concerning the mode of Papal elections, this provision was due to no abstract theory, but was simply the outcome of a want that had been practically encountered. On the 10th May 1207, Boniface VII., blinded by furious passion against the house of Colonna, excommunicated and degraded from their rank the Cardinals James and Peter Colonna, declaring them stripped of every privilege appertaining to their dignity. The extraordinary severity of a sentence, manifestly imposed by the bitter hatred of family feuds, because not justified at the moment of promulgation by adequate canonical delinquencies on the part of these prelates, produced a profound sensation. It was evidently ​a point of principle with Boniface VIII. to wield his power for extermination of the Colonna influence, if not for the actual extinction of the race. Solemnly degraded from their rank, these Cardinals, on the death of Boniface, found themselves excluded from the Conclave, and vainly sought from his successor restitution to rights which they declared to have been taken away in defiance of justice. The consequence was a protracted state of angry feelings, rendered formidable by the material power of the malcontent Colonnas, and accompanied by muttered protests against the canonical legality of a situation in which dignitaries of the Church were arbitrarily deprived of their inherent prerogatives. A sense of the danger to be apprehended from the recurrence of arbitrary acts of the same nature was awakened. It was felt that a Pope of headstrong passions like Boniface VIII. must absolutely be precluded from exposing the Church again to grave peril for the sake of purely personal hatreds and ambitions. Accordingly, just thirteen years after the memorable degradation of the Colonna Cardinals, a Bull in reference to Papal elections was issued by Clement V., ​in which the following most remarkable clause was inserted:—'But in order that, as concerns the before-mentioned elections, dissensions and schisms be so much the more avoided, as the occasion for dissent is removed from those elections, we decree that no Cardinal may be expelled from the said elections on the ground of any excommunication, suspension, or interdict whatsoever.' The provision thus made has been subsequently confirmed by Pius IV. and Gregory XV. in so full a manner as to remove all ambiguity on this head, for not only have those under sentence been declared relieved at election times from the disabilities involved thereby, but, what was quite as necessary, their colleagues were dispensed, during this interval, as regarded the case in point alone, from the obligation to hold no intercourse with excommunicated and censured individuals. There are instances of Cardinals who, since this enactment, have undergone extreme penalties, even decapitation; but we know of no instance in which this particular provision in regard to the indelible right of franchise has been set at nought. In the time of Leo X. several Cardinals were convicted of a conspiracy against ​his life. Of these, one, Cardinal Petrucci, was strangled in the Castle of St. Angelo on the 6th June 1517; while Cardinals Saoli and Soderini were indeed degraded, and declared stripped of both active and passive voice in a Conclave—that is, of the power of either voting or being elected; but this sentence was cancelled before the Pope's demise tested its validity. Under Leo's successor Cardinal Soderini again stood convicted of conspiracy, and was imprisoned in the Castle of St. Angelo; but on the last day of the Pope's obsequies he was let out by the Sacred College, and gave his vote in Conclave for Clement VII., by whom then he was restored to all the honours of his rank. But the ruling case on this head ​is that of the notorious Cardinal Coscia, who, under Benedict XIII., wielded the whole power and dipensed the whole patronage of the State. On this Pope's death, his favourite was so universally an object of detestation, from his iniquitously corrupt proceedings, that he fled from fear of popular vengeance to Cisterna, then, as now, the family seat of the Duke of Sermoneta, who, in a letter to Cardinal Barberini, preserved in the Gaetani archives, describes him to have arrived more dead than alive from fright. Under the protection of a safe-conduct from the Sacred College, Coscia stole back into Conclave. The new Pope, Clement XII. (Corsini), was unable to withstand the clamour of denunciation which from all sides was raised against this member of the Sacred College. Cardinal Coscia was brought to trial for fraud, malversation, and peculation of the most scandalous kind; the charges were fully established, and he was sentenced to a fine of 200,000 crowns, to ten years' close confinement in St. Angelo, ​deprivation of his See of Benevento, and to absolute degradation from the rank and privileges of the Cardinalate. Before long the Pope felt misgivings about the sentence so pronounced, and wrote a Chirograph, bearing date 11th December 1734, to regulate and modify the conditions of Coscia's penalties. This Chirograph will be found in a volume of manuscript documents in the Corsini Library, relating to the Conclave held on the Pope's death, which is manifestly composed of papers that belonged to the Cardinal-Nephew of Clement XII. There does not exist a more remarkable Papal utterance than this document, wherein the Pope explains fully the afterthought that induced him to revoke his first sentence as objectionable, if not actually faulty in principle, in spite of his haring pronounced it, as he admits, with the deliberate intention of cancelling the binding force of previous Papal edicts of limitation. That a person labouring under such grave convictions as Coscia should have part in creating a Pope was contrary to propriety; therefore, said Clement XII., it had been originally pronounced that every election in which he ​intervened should be ipso jure null and void, 'every power and faculty being taken away of calling the said Cardinal Coscia to give his vote in such election on the ground of any claim or motive specified in canon law, or in virtue of any constitution whatsoever of Pius IV., Gregory XV., and other our predecessors.' A more carefully worded expression of Pontifical plenitude, so as to effectively override every apparently opposing enactment, cannot be conceived. Yet Pope Clement goes on to state that, having reflected on the grave consequences that might follow on such annullations and invalidations, he feels himself bound to put forward the declaration that he did not in any way pretend of his authority to impugn the validity of a yet future election. 'Wherefore,' writes the Pope, 'we declare that never has it been our wish or intention to prejudice the canonical election of our successor, or the supreme dignity and authority of the Church, which, after our demise, shall he lawfully vested in the person of him who has been chosen with the accustomed forms, it being neither according to reason nor equity that the transmission to his person of a penalty attaching to the delinquent be ​assumed capable of occurrence, and that injury should befall the freedom and union of the Apostolical College in its so needful mystic body.' By this Chirograph the Pope accordingly abrogated the sentence striking with invalidity an election in which Coscia took part, with the proviso, however, that an election, to be canonical, must not gain its obligatory majority of two-thirds by his individual vote; and that during his ten years of strict confinement this Cardinal's electoral privileges should be restricted to voting, and not entitle him to obtain the suffrages of the Sacred College, because it would be unseemly to consider eligible for Head of the Church an individual let out of prison only for as long as Conclave lasted. This is what happened, therefore, on the death of Clement XII. In the same volume containing this Chirograph, there is the autograph letter of Cardinal Coscia, dated the 6th February 1740, from the Castle of St. Angelo, and written to the Cardinal-Nephew of the late Pope, in which he claims to be set free for admission to Conclave, a request which was at once conceded. The President de Brosses, as he was going home from witnessing the procession of the Cardinals ​walking to Conclave, met 'Coscia in the shut chariot of Cardinal Acquaviva, who had been to fetch him from prison in the Castle of St. Angelo, and was taking him to his cell.'
The precedent furnished by this case has never been reversed, although sentences of degradation have since been launched against Cardinals. In a secret Consistory of the 13th February 1780, Pius VI. suspended and declared stripped of both active and passive voice in Papal elections, Cardinal Rohan, for having violated his duties by acknowledging the jurisdiction of the Parliament of Paris, a lay tribunal, unless within six months he exculpated himself before the Holy See for this dereliction of his obligations. Far more sweeping and absolute was the condemnation pronounced by the same Pope, on the 26th September 1791, against Cardinal Lomenie de Brienne, for having sworn the civil constitution of the ​clergy that had been voted in France. He was pronounced to be a schismatic, and as such perjured, degraded, and wholly stripped of all his dignities and privileges. But it happened that both these Cardinals died before there had been any opportunity for testing the validity of these sentences to disable them from admission at election time to the exercise of indelible rights. The stormy days in the wake of the French Revolution furnished also some instances of Cardinals smitten with the prevailing passion for repudiating old-fashioned institutions, and indulging in a display of new ideas. During the heyday excitement of a republic that seemed triumphant on the Capitol, two Cardinals, of whom one belonged to a great and princely family in Rome, thought it good policy to turn their backs on what looked like a foundering fortune. In March 1798, Cardinal Altieri wrote to the Pope expressing his wish to divest himself of the purple, on the ground of a growing sense of bodily infirmities. But Pius VI., who knew that other motives prompted the unusual application, addressed a letter to the Cardinal, remonstrating against his setting an example of faint-​hearted desertion. Before this appeal reached Cardinal Altieri, he had, however, already taken an irrevocable step, by sending his absolute renunciation of the Cardinalate to the Pope, in imitation of Cardinal Antici, who, on the 7th March, had done the same in two letters, one addressed to the Pope, and the other to the two consuls of Rome. Still Pius VI. declined to accept these renunciations. He persisted to regard the two renegades as still Cardinals, and canonically not relieved from their obligations, until the consideration of the consequences that might follow from their claiming, in virtue of this refusal on his part, to take part in the Conclave, induced him from his prison at the Certosa, by two briefs of the 7th September 1798, to declare Altieri and Antici, on their own renunciation, stripped of all the privileges and rights appertaining to their former dignity, especially of any voice, active or passive, in Papal elections. The Pope's decisive step was brought about mainly by Cardinal Antonelli's energetic representations. Altieri died soon after, in 1800, without seeing any turn in Pontifical fortunes which might have made him regret his step as hasty. ​Not so Antici, who not only witnessed the restoration of Pius VII. to his dominions, and of the Sacred College to its good estate, but when he looked on all this pleasant recovery, desired himself to participate in it. On the death of Pius VII., Antici addressed the Sacred College to be admitted to the Conclave, on the plea that his privileges had been merely superseded. The request was at once rejected, and Moroni says that the letter written in reply to the communication of this decision was signed Thomas Antici, late Cardinal. He ended his days in obscurity at Recanati. There is still another important instance of a Cardinal who, in this century, placed himself in opposition to the Pope, and thereby became the object of proceedings on the part of the highest ecclesiastical authorities. The well-known defender of royalist principles in the French National Assembly, Abbé Maury, was created Cardinal in 1794, and Bishop of Montefiascone in the Papal States. He attended the Conclave in 1799 in Venice, where, on the testimony of Consalvi, he had much to do with bringing about the election of Pius VII., to whom he was afterwards accredited as envoy by the then titular Louis XVIII. of ​France. The assumption of the Imperial Crown by Napoleon made a conversion of this, up to that moment, fanatical royalist. Having gone to Paris in 1806, he courted the new sun with so much effect, that in 1810 the Emperor conferred on him an uncanonical nomination to the See of Paris, which the Cardinal accepted, distinguishing himself as a fiery advocate of the Imperial Government in all its discussions with the Holy See. His conduct on this occasion was certainly that of a priest who defied his ecclesiastical superior. On the Restoration, Cardinal Maury was ejected from the Paris See he had usurped. He went then back to Italy, hut Pius VII. deprived him likewise of his old See of Montefiascone, and forbade him coming into his presence, or appearing at any Consistory or Congregation of which he had before been member. Maury took all these sentences very quietly, and coolly dwelt on in Rome, until, in March 1815, the Pope left the city in consequence of Napoleon's return from Elba. Then Cardinal Maury likewise abandoned the reserve he had hitherto observed, and manifested political feelings, which induced the Junta left behind by Pius VI. to seek the Pope's ​permission to lay hands on the Cardinal; and he was accordingly arrested and lodged in St. Angelo. Here he still sat, when the Pope came hack and instructed his Secretary of State, Pacca, to take the necessary steps to proceed criminally against the seditious Cardinal. For this purpose a special Congregation was appointed, and began to investigate the case, when suddenly the proceedings dropped by sovereign injunction, and the prisoner left the castle restored to all the privileges of his rank, and admitted to take part in those consistorial and other duties from which he had before been steadily excluded. He died in 1817—that is, before another Conclave.
With such precedents, it might have been ​deemed that the fact of a Cardinal's privilege of franchise being beyond any Pope's power of confiscation was irrevocably determined. Every sacred guarantee conceivable against the arbitrary action of an authority which claims to be above limitation might well have seemed to surround this point of law, that a Pope, though perfectly empowered to interdict, excommunicate, degrade, and even send to the scaffold a Cardinal, was absolutely debarred from depriving him of his prerogative to vote at a Papal election. It must therefore be the subject of no small surprise that this apparently inviolable principle should have been completely set aside in the Papal Brief of the 29th September of this year, against Cardinal Andrea. Although it would be out of place, in these pages, to enter into the controversy as to the canonical validity of the course pursued against this Cardinal, the precedent which would be established by this Papal statute, if finally accepted and acted upon, involves so great an innovation on what hitherto has been held the law in regard to the degree in which Cardinals can be dependent for their prerogatives on the Pope's mere goodwill, that it is necessary here to state the bare facts of ​the case. Cardinal Andrea, who is, or at all events was, Bishop of Sabina, after having vainly sought several times the Pope's consent to his going to his native city, Naples, on the ground that impaired health required this change of air, finally went thither, in June 1864, of his own authority. This step was branded in Rome as an act of illegal flight and desertion, and after minor preliminary proceedings, the Pope, in a Brief of 12th June 1866, suspended Cardinal Andrea, in his quality of Bishop, from his See, on the ground of insubordination and a violation of his official oaths. Against this sentence Cardinal Andrea, on the 6th July 1866, protested from Naples, in an appeal addressed to Pius IX., and made public, wherein he 'respectfully and solemnly appealed to His Holiness melius informandus.' If the Cardinal was ever sanguine enough to think that the pleas put forward by him in this appeal would have any effect in making the Pope pause in his proceedings, this expectation must have been rudely dispelled. After an interchange of several more or less formal summonses and replies between the respective parties, Pius IX., on the 29th September 1867, issued a Brief, which, served on ​Cardinal Andrea the 12th October, and publicly promulgated in Rome the 4th December, declared him to have forfeited all the privileges of his Cardinalitian dignity, with the explicit inclusion of his vote, unless he presented himself in person before the Pope within three months from date of the Brief; and furthermore imposed on the Sacred College the solemn obligation not to admit the said Cardinal into Conclave, if, after continuing contumaciously to disregard this citation, he were to venture on claiming a right of franchise. The gravity of the sentence is self-evident, and without straying into the delicate region of pleadings replete with points of controversy, it is undeniable that in uttering this injunction to bind the Sacred College after his demise, Pius IX. has gone against not only historical precedent, but the explicit ruling of predecessors; and that here is a stretch of authority, which at all events one rope acknowledged to lie beyond the attributes of his power, after having himself sought to assert the same. The reader will call to mind the declaration of Clement XII. in the Chirograph whereby he repealed his own sentence of exclusion from Conclave against Cardinal Coscia, on the ​ground that, in having pronounced this, he had practically presumed on assuming a power of control over 'the freedom and union of the Apostolic College in its so needful mystic body.' In other words, Pope Clement recognised a divine instinct resident in the Church as ever embodied in its living representatives, which it must be beyond the legitimate authority of a Pope to presume on superseding and controlling from out of his grave in virtue of some decree of his own. This power of supersession and control has now however been laid claim to by Pius IX. in this noteworthy Brief, which must be held to mark an epoch in the discipline of the Roman system, and in the development of Papal autocracy, if the dictatorial sentence promulgated in it for Cardinals assembled in Conclave comes to be really accepted by them as of binding force.
* ↑ It adds much to the confusion on this subject, that this division into categories is often only nominal, a Cardinal being put. by favour, or for other reasons, into an order he does not belong to. The present Dean of the College, Cardinal Mattei, for a long time figured as a Cardinal Deacon, although he had taken priest's orders. More perplexing is it to find Cardinal Priests who have never taken these orders. Such was the case with Cardinal Dandini, who, when merely a deacon, was made in 1823 a Cardinal Priest and Bishop of Osimo. 'Only nine years later,' says Moroni, 'did he take priest's orders, having in the interval taken part in three Conclaves as a Cardinal Priest, without really having that character.' Nor is this all. Moroni speaks of persons having ranked amongst the six Cardinal Bishops when they had never been more than deacons.
* ↑ This is the position of the lay Monsignori so plentiful in Rome. They are merely functionaries wearing the priestly dress as a uniform, and debarred from having a legitimate wife as long as they remain in their posts.
* ↑ To give one striking example of what liberties have been taken with this prescription, it is enough to mention the case of Don Luis of Bourbon, who in 1735, when only eight years old, was named Archbishop of Toledo and Cardinal by Clement XII. Even the stern Sixtus V. was not immaculate on this score, for he made a Cardinal of his nephew Alessandro Damasceni Peretti, as a youth of fourteen.
* ↑ In Crétineau Joly's edition of Consalvi's Memoirs, there is a French version of a letter written by Pius VI. to Cardinal Altieri, when he insisted on throwing off the purple, wherein the Pope gives it as his opinion (subject to correction, as writing from prison, and without the means to consult the canonical authors), that a Cardinal has not the power to divest himself of his faculty of Papal Election, that faculty being summe publicum.—Mém. du Card. Consalvi, t. i. p. 203. The editor says that the original draft of this letter is in his possession.
* ↑ A very remarkable dispensation was granted by Alexander III. for the express purpose of preventing the extinction of the Giustiniani family, then reduced to one male member, Niccola Giustiniani, a Benedictine monk who has since been beatified. In virtue thereof Niccola left his convent, married the daughter of the Venetian Doge Micheli, and when he had begotten a sufficient number of sons to secure the continuation of the line, went back to his religious profession. A yet more singular example of the length to which a Pope may venture on stretching his assumed authority to dispense from the observance of the fundamental rules of morality, would seem to be furnished by Spanish history. Henry IV. of Castile had no children by his wife, Dona Blanca of Arragon, sister to Ferdinand the Catholic. Being desirous of having offspring, he sought the Pope's dispensation to marry another wife, and obtained it, but with the extraordinary condition that if no children were born from her within a fixed term, then King Henry must separate from his second spouse and return to the original one. This second wife was the Infanta Juana of Portugal. The appointed term passed without any offspring having been actually born, but shortly after there came into the world a girl. This girl King Henry declared legitimate, and his heir; but on his death his sister, Isabella the Catholic, successfully disputed the succession on two grounds,—that Dona Juana was no child of her brother's, but of a certain Don Beltran de la Cueva, and that having come into the world at the period she did, she never could claim to be legitimate, inasmuch as the marriage had then ceased to be valid. This disputed right reacted on Charles V., if we can trust a State-paper recently recovered out of the dusty records of Simancas, by weighing among the grounds that induced him to wed the Portuguese Infanta Isabella, with the view of conciliating the friendship of the King of Portugal, under whose protection the disinherited Dona Juana was then still living.—See Bergenroth, Calendar of Negotiations, vol. ii. p. cxxvi. and p. 396. [See Appendix A.] Amongst the curiosities of Papal history that are little borne in mind, is the fact that the chair of St. Peter has been occupied by father and son—Pope Silverius (536) having been son to the canonized Pope Hormisdas. In this instance the Pope had become a widower before election. But in the third portion of the Annales Bertinianorum, written by the celebrated Archbishop Hincmar, and to be found in Pertz, Mon., Germanica, vol. i., there is given an account of the abduction of the daughter and the wife Stephania of Pope Adrian in 868—that is to say, a period to which the Archbishop was a contemporary witness. The story is narrated with much detail, and with the names of all the parties implicated.
* ↑ Cardinal Albani's proceedings are recounted in the following way by Crose, Sardinian Envoy to Rome, in a confidential despatch:—'Another historical observation is supplied by Cardinal Albani, who at the period of Conclave was not yet ordained. Until then he had always expressed an intention to abandon the purple and to marry, with the view of not letting his most noble family become extinct. While in this state of hesitation, he had always obtained from the Pope a prolongation of the terms within which he had to come to a decision; but it happened that this term would have expired just during Conclave, so that he would have been obliged to go out of it, inasmuch as, during the vacancy of the See, there existed no authority which could renew the requisite authorization. From a sense of this, Cardinal Albani made up his mind to become Sub-deacon on entering Conclave, and thus he was qualified to exercise his influence on behalf of the Imperial Court.'—Bianchi, Diplomazia Europæa in Italia, vol. ii. p. 389.
* ↑ It has been reserved to Pius IX. to furnish a case in the history of Cardinalitian nominations that is unique. It has never been before known for a nomination not to be executed after the Pope has gone so far as formally to intimate by letter to an individual his intention to make him Cardinal at the next promotion. Yet this is what happened to the illustrious Rosmini, certainly the most distinguished man whom the Church has produced in Italy in this century. He received the Pope's formal intimation of his promulgation, and was directed to make the preparations for his public reception, when the efforts of the Jesuits succeeded in defeating the Domination and in initiating a course of persecution, which ended in the inclusion of Rosmini's book, The Wounds of the Church, in the Index.
* ↑ The case of Cardinal Soderini is doubly important, because Adrian VI. tried to enforce his authority for proclaiming exclusion, and the attempt, though made with the exceptional solemnity of a Pope speaking from his deathbed, was disallowed by the Cardinals. The last official act of Pope Adrian was that, almost at the hour of his death, he gave a Bull motu proprio, ordering that the Cardinal of Volterra (Soderini) should on no condition be released from prison. The College of Cardinals, however, which had not shown much respect for his lawful orders whilst he was alive, entirely disregarded his commands, which were of very doubtful legality, when he was dead. The prison of the Cardinal of Volterra was opened, and it was he who said the Mass of Spiritus Sanctus on the 1st of October, when the Cardinals were entering the Conclave.'—Bergenroth, Calendar of Letters relating to Negotiations between England and Spain, vol. ii., Introduction, p. clxxviii.
* ↑ Vol. 1618 in Catalogue of MSS. in Corsini Library.
* ↑ 'Coscia, Minister under Benedict XIII., meriting the gallows—condemned to imprisonment for life in St. Angelo, where, it is said, he throve wonderfully, because it cost him nothing, and he was hoarding money,' is the character given of this notorious Cardinal by the President.
* ↑ In the matter of the Diamond Necklace.
* ↑ It is evident that we do not know the secret motives which brought about this mysterious change. Moroni would seem to hint at some action of Consalvi in the cessation of all proceedings. See the Dizionario Storico Ecclesiastico, sub voce Maury. This bulky Encyclopædia (103 volumes) is a crude jumble of good, bad, and indifferent matter; but it is of value in so far as it may be regarded to express what are considered in Rome to be orthodox views on the topics treated.
* ↑ The latest case of a Cardinal divesting himself of the purple occurred in 1838, when Cardinal Odescalchi insisted on entering the Society of Jesus, and would not be content until the Pope in Consistory had acquiesced in his ascetic desire to abandon the purple.
* ↑ The unexpected return of Cardinal Andrea to Rome in obedience to this citation, has reduced the scope of the issues immediately under adjudication. Still, the whole transaction is calculated to effect so great modifications in the hitherto received system of discipline, that we refer the reader to further observations on it in Appendix B.