CHAPTER XVII

BENEDICT XIV.: THE SCHOLAR-POPE

The seventeen Popes who occupied the Vatican between Sixtus V. and Benedict XIV. do not call for individual notice. With common integrity of life and general mediocrity of intelligence they guarded and administered their lessened inheritance. A few fragments of the lost provinces were regained--Ferrara and Urbino were reunited to the Papal States, and Protestantism was crushed in southern Germany and Poland--but the general situation was unchanged. The Papal conception of European life, the conviction that heresy must and would be only a temporary diversion of the minds of men, was definitely overthrown, and the Church of Rome became one of various flourishing branches of the Christian Church. The interest of the historian passes from the personalities of the Popes to the movements of thought which herald or prepare the next great revolution.

In regard to that specific development of European thought which we call the birth of science we are, perhaps, apt to misread its earlier stages because we find it in its final stage so destructive of old traditions. The Popes of the seventeenth century are too much flattered when they are credited with a distinct perception of the menace of science and a resolute opposition to it. Properly speaking, they had no attitude toward "science," but, as the history of science and the fortune of such men as Giordano Bruno, Galilei, and Vesalius show, they resented and hampered departures from the stock of traditional learning.[324] On the other hand, the period we are considering was marked by the phenomenal material success and the moral degeneration of the greatest force the Counter-Reformation had produced--the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits did far more than the Papacy to arrest the advance of Protestantism and to conquer new lands for the Church, but the diplomatic principles inherited from their founder and the desperate exigencies of a stubborn war led them into a pernicious casuistry, while prosperity led to such relaxation as it had produced in the old religious bodies. In politics the new age was characterized by the decay of Spain and "the Empire," and the rise of France, and the increased power of France led to a revival of the old Gallic defiance, within orthodox limits, of the Papacy, culminating in the famous "Declaration of the Gallican Clergy" (1682), and to the powerful lay movements which gathered round Pascal and the Jansenists or Voltaire and the philosophers. Benedict XIV. mounted the Papal throne in the height of these developments, and his attitude of compromise makes him one of the most singular and interesting Popes of the new era.

Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini was born at Bologna, of good family, on March 31, 1675. At the age of thirteen he entered the Clementine College at Rome, and with the advance of years he became a very industrious student of law--canon and civil--and history. He took degrees in theology and law, and was incorporated in the Roman system as Consultor to the Holy Office, Canon of St. Peter's, and Prelate of the Roman Court. Successive Popes made the indefatigable scholar Archbishop of Theodosia _in partibus_, Archbishop of Ancona and Cardinal (1728), and Archbishop of Bologna (1731). Lambertini was a rare type of prelate. He did not, as so many high-born prelates did, relieve the tedium of the clerical estate with the hunt, the banquet, and the mistress. His episcopal duties were discharged with the most rigorous fidelity, his clergy were sedulously exhorted to cultivate learning and virtue, and his leisure was devoted to the composition of erudite treatises on _The Beatification of the Servants of God_, _The Sacrifice of the Mass_, _The Festivals of Our Lord Jesus Christ_, and _Canonical Questions_. Yet the Cardinal-Archbishop was no ascetic in spirit, and there was much gossip about his conversation. He loved Tasso and Ariosto as much as juridical writings. He liked witty society, and his good stories circulated beyond the little group of his scholarly friends. President de Brosses visited him at Bologna in 1739, the year before he became Pope, and wrote of him:

A good fellow, without any airs, who told us some very good stories about women (_filles_) or about the Roman court. I took care to commit some of them to memory and will find them useful. He especially liked to tell or to hear stories about the Regent and his confidant Cardinal Dubois. He used to say, "Tell me something about this Cardinal del Bosco." I ransacked my memory, and told him all the tales I knew. His conversation is very pleasant: he is a clever man, full of gaiety and well read. In his speech he makes use of certain expletive particles which are not cardinalitial. In that and other things he is like Cardinal Camus; for he is otherwise irreproachable in conduct, very charitable, and very devoted to his archiepiscopal duties. But the first and most essential of his duties is to go three times a week to the Opera.[325]

Lambertini's liberty and joviality of speech did not, in spite of his strict virtue and most zealous administration, commend him to the more severe cardinals, and when Clement XII. died, on February 6, 1740, he was not regarded as a candidate for the Papacy. But the struggle of French, Spanish, and Austrian partisans continued for six months without prospect of a settlement, and in the intolerable heat of the summer the cardinals cast about, as usual, for an outsider. Lambertini had humorously recommended himself from time to time. He used to say, President de Brosses reports: "If you want a good fellow (_coglione_--a

## particularly gross word) choose me."[326] The Emperor Joseph II., who

did not want an inflexible Pope, supported his candidature, and he was assuredly the most distinguished of the cardinals to whom the wearied voters now looked. He was elected on August 17th, and he took the name of Benedict XIV.

He was now sixty-five years old: a round, full-faced, merry little man, with piercing small eyes and an obstinate resolution to live at peace with the world. A few years later,[327] he describes his daily life to his friend Cardinal Tencin. He rises early and takes a cup of chocolate and a crust. At midday he has a soup, an entrée, a roast, and a pear: on "fast" days he reduces himself to a _pot-au-feu_ and a pear, but it does not agree with him to observe the law of abstinence from meat, and he advises the cardinals to follow his example. In the evening he takes only a glass of water with a little cinnamon, and he retires very late. He works hard all day and feels that he is justified in seeking relief in sprightly conversation. Indeed, when one surveys the vast published series of Benedict's Bulls (some of which are lengthy and severe treatises), rescripts, works, and letters, one realizes that his industry was phenomenal. When he had to condemn some volume of the new sceptical literature which was springing up in Europe, he read it himself three times and reflected long on it. His interest ranged from England, whose political affairs he followed closely, to the mountains of Syria and the missions of China. Every branch of Papal administration had his personal attention. He thought little of the cardinals, and often pours genial irony on them in his innumerable letters. Of his two predecessors, Benedict XIII. "had not the least idea of government," and Clement XII. "passed his life in conversation," and "it is with the oxen from this stable [the cardinals promoted by them] that we have to work today."[328] In finance, politics, administration, liturgy, and all other respects he had inherited a formidable task, and he discharged it in such wise that he died at peace with all except his Roman reactionaries. The Catholic rulers deeply appreciated him. Frederick of Prussia had a genial regard for him. Horace Walpole celebrated his virtues in Latin verse, and one of the Pitts treasured a bust of him. Voltaire, through Cardinal Acquaviva, presented his _Mahomet_ to him in 1746, and the amiable Pope, quite innocent of the satire on Christianity, wrote to tell Voltaire how he had successfully defended his Latin verses.[329]

Benedict's immediate predecessor, Clement XII., an elderly disciplinarian whose strength was not equal to his pretensions, had left the internal and foreign affairs of the Quirinal--the Popes now dwelt chiefly in that palace--in a condition of strain and disorder, nor was Benedict's Secretary of State, Cardinal Valenti, the man to relieve the Pope of the work of reform. Choiseul, who was then the French representative at Rome, describes Valenti as very able but very lazy: a man of great charm, especially to ladies, and easy morals. Yet the treasury was empty, and the finances were shockingly disorganized. Although Clement XII. had introduced the lottery to support his extravagant expenditure, the Papal income in 1739 fell short of the expenses by 200,000 crowns a year, and the Camera owed between fifty and sixty million crowns--President de Brosses says 380,000,000 francs--to the _Monti_, or funds out of which the Popes paid life-incomes. Smuggling was so general, even among ambassadors and cardinals, that half the Papal revenue was lost. Cardinals Acquaviva and Albani each granted immunity from excise to four thousand traders: so Benedict wrote to Tencin in 1743. A third of the population of Rome consisted of ecclesiastics who lived on the Papal system, and a third were foreigners of no greater financial value; while the natives could so easily obtain food at the innumerable monasteries, or by begging, that there was little incentive to industry.

Benedict XIV. had no financial capacity, but the desperate and ever worsening condition of the treasury spurred him to work. He restricted the immunities from excise, cut down the extravagant payment of the troops, and severely curtailed the number of his servants. In a few years he had a surplus, which he divided among the impoverished nobles. He then reduced the taxes, had new factories built, and encouraged the introduction of new methods into agriculture. His zeal in suppressing "usury" was not so fortunate, but he restored the Papal finances to such a degree that he could at length indulge his cultural tastes. Sandini gives a list of the monuments he restored at Rome--including the new façade with which he disfigured Sta. Maria Maggiore--and we know from his letters that he was assiduous in collecting classical statues and fine books for the Roman galleries and libraries. He founded four academies at Rome--for the study of Roman history and antiquities, Christian history and antiquities, the history of the Councils, and liturgy--and once in each week presided, at the Quirinal, over a sitting of each academy. To the Roman university (Sapienza) he added chairs of chemistry, mathematics, and art, and he pressed in every way the higher education of the clergy. In 1750 he appointed a woman teacher, Maria Gaetana d'Agnesi, of mathematics at Bologna University, and wrote her a gracious letter commending the ambition of her sex.

Jansenists and philosophers were now fiercely exposing the weaknesses of Papal culture, and Benedict, who freely criticized the errors of his predecessors, attempted some revision of the mass of legends which had been accepted by the Church. In 1741 he appointed a commission to revise the Breviary, but the extensive alterations they proposed to make in the lives of the saints alarmed the reactionaries. On April 26, 1743, we find Benedict wearily complaining to Tencin of the difficulty of reform: "There is now all over the world such a disdain of the Holy See that--I will not say the protest of a bishop, a city, or a nation--but the opposition of a single monk is enough to thwart the most salutary and most pious designs."[330] The French clergy had been compelled in 1680 and 1736 to issue more critical editions of the Breviary, and Benedict wished to provide one for the universal Church. But the bigots were too strong for the Pope and the scheme of reform lies in the dust of the Vatican archives, while the Roman Breviary still contains legends of the most remarkable character. In reforming the Martyrology (1748) the Pope was more successful, and he published a new Ceremonial for Bishops (1752). He also published an indult permitting any diocese that cared to reduce the number of Church-festivals. The number of days on which men rested from work had become a scandal, and many complaints had reached the Holy See. Benedict's indult was gradually adopted by entire nations.

Of far greater interest is Benedict's attitude toward what we may call foreign affairs, and in this we discover again the more genial side of his character. Those who had known the different aspects of the Pope's personality--the punctilious learning of the ecclesiastic and the _bonhomie_ of the man--must have wondered how he would confront the hereditary problems of the Papacy. Benedict at once made it plain that his policy would be one of deliberate and judicious compromise. Anxious though he was, especially in view of the Italian ambitions of Maria Theresa, about his temporal possessions, he placed his spiritual power and responsibility in the foreground, and on temporal matters he made more concessions than any Pope of equal wit and will had ever made. He was, he told Tencin, "the mortal enemy of secrets and useless mysticism." For disguised Jesuits and intriguing Nuncii he had no employment. He took court after court, with which his predecessor had embroiled the Papacy, and came to an agreement which almost invariably satisfied them; and in the war of the Spanish succession, when Spanish and Austrian troops in turn violated his territory, he remained strictly neutral.

The chief problem in France was the conflict of the Jesuits and the Jansenists, which was complicated by a revival of the Gallican spirit that put difficulties in the way of Papal interference. The Bull _Unigenitus_, with which Clement XI. had sought to extinguish the controversy, had increased the disorder, and the zealots pressed the Pope to intervene. Parlement would have resented his interference, and it was not until 1755, when the Assembly of the Clergy failed to find a solution, that Louis XV. asked the Pope to make a further declaration. The credit of his moderate Encyclical[331] is not wholly due to him. The French asked him to refrain from pressing the _Unigenitus_ as a standard of faith and merely to demand external respect for it. This agreed with the Pope's moderate disposition, but the Jesuits and other zealots at Rome were enraged, and Choiseul--without Benedict's knowledge, of course--made extensive use of bribery to win the College of Cardinals. Benedict's letters reflect his weariness between the antagonistic parties and frequently express that he is willing to respect Gallican susceptibilities to any extent short of a surrender of the faith. A draft of the Encyclical was submitted to the French court before it was published. Both the Jesuits and the lawyers attacked it, but the Parlement was won to the King by an attempt on his life and the Jesuits soon found all their energy needed to defend their existence.

With Spain the Pope concluded one of the most remarkable Concordats in Papal history. There had gradually been established a custom by which the Papacy appointed to all benefices which fell vacant during eight months of the year, and the bishops and their chapters appointed to vacant benefices during the remaining third of the year. The court had the right of appointment only to benefices in Granada and the Indies. As a natural result, Spanish ecclesiastics crowded to Rome, and it was estimated that the Dataria derived from them about 250,000 crowns a year. Spain resented the arrangement, but the clerical population of Rome clung tenaciously to it. Benedict in 1751 entered into secret negotiations with Spain, and contrived to keep them secret until 1753, when he startled and irritated Rome by publishing his famous Concordat. By this he granted the Spanish King the right to nominate to all except fifty-two benefices in Spain and America. The cardinals bitterly complained that they had not been consulted, while the officials deplored the abandonment of Papal prestige and the cessation of so much profitable employment. Benedict had, however, made a shrewd bargain with Ferdinand VI. The King had to pay a capital sum of 1,143,330 crowns, which, at an interest of three per cent., would cover the yearly loss to the Curia. At a later date the Pope released the Spanish Infanta from the dignity of cardinal, yet permitted him to retain a large part of his clerical income.

A similar agreement ended the long friction with Portugal and (in 1740) gave John V. the right to present to all the episcopal sees and abbeys in his dominions; and in 1748 the Pope further gratified the King with the title of _Fidelissimus_. The King of Sardinia received, soon after Benedict's succession, the title of Vicar of all the Papal fiefs in his dominions and the right, for an annual payment of 2000 crowns, to gather their revenues. Naples, in turn, was pacified, after many years of dangerous friction. There had been stern quarrels about jurisdiction over the clergy, and by a Concordat of the year 1741 Benedict consented to the creation of a supreme court, with an equal number of clerical and lay judges and an ecclesiastical president, for the trial of such cases. With Venice the Pope was less successful. The decaying Republic had a standing quarrel with Austria about the patriarchate of Aquileia; Austria, which possessed part of the territory, would not acknowledge the authority of the Venetian patriarch. Benedict appointed a Vicar for the Austrian section, and Venice, ever ready to flout Papal orders, drove the Nuncio from the city. The Pope thereupon divided the province into two archbishoprics, but Venice still angrily protested and the dispute remained unsettled at Benedict's death.

Austria gave the Pope his most anxious hours. The joy of Rome at the fidelity of southern Germany was in the eighteenth century clouded by the growth of a spirit akin to Gallicanism: the spirit which would presently be known as Febronianism. Charles VI. had in 1740 left the Empire to his elder daughter, Maria Theresa, and Spain had contested the succession in the hope of winning for itself the provinces of Lombardy and Tuscany. In the war which followed Benedict took no side, but the conflicting armies devastated his territory and approached very near to Rome. His letters to Tencin reflect his distress and anxiety, no less than his helplessness. When the war was over, he sent a representative to the conference at Aix-la-Chapelle, where his rights were endangered by the contest of the two ambitious queens; Elizabeth of Spain was the last of the Farnese and was disposed to claim for her son the principality which Paul III. had wantonly conferred on his son Pier Luigi. The chief question that interested the Papacy was whether Don Philip should receive the investiture of Parma and Piacenza from Rome or the Empress, and Benedict had the satisfaction of seeing it virtually settled in favour of Rome. On Paul III. himself, and other nepotist Popes, Benedict passes a very severe judgment in his letters. For his part he severely excluded his relatives from Rome, and when a young son of his nephew came to study at the Clementine College, he took care that the boy should receive no particular favour.

It is one of the remarkable features of Benedict's Pontificate that he won considerable respect even in the Protestant lands. Englishmen, perhaps, did not know, as we know from the Pope's letters, how deeply he sympathized with the exiled Stuarts. "James III." lived for some time at Rome on a pension provided by France, Spain, and the Papacy, and Benedict had often to relieve the financial embarrassment of the foolish and extravagant prince. His second son became Cardinal York, and, in conferring the dignity on him, Benedict declared that he would be pleased to withdraw it if ever Providence recalled him to the throne of his fathers. In spite of these amiable sympathies, Benedict was much appreciated by cultivated Englishmen, and in 1753 he reconstituted and enlarged the English hierarchy.

With Frederic of Prussia, also, he had friendly relations. He was the first Pope to recognize the title of "King of Prussia" assumed in 1701 by the Electors of Brandenburg, and in this again he overruled the opposition of the cardinals. In 1744 Frederic begged the Pope to make Scatfgoch, a Breslau canon whom the King liked, coadjutor to the Bishop of Breslau. Scatfgoch talked with scandalous license about religion and morals; it was said at Rome that he dipped his crucifix into his wine to give the Saviour the first drink. Benedict, to Frederic's anger, refused; but three years later, when the bishop died, and the Nuncio reported the conversion of the canon, the Pope gratified Frederic by making him bishop. Frederic permitted the erection of a Catholic chapel at Berlin.

The new Catholic world beyond the seas made more than one claim on the untiring Pope. Immediately after his election we find him sending a Vicar Apostolic to settle the troubles of the Maronites of Syria, and in 1744 he reconciled and regulated the affairs of the Greek Melchites of Antioch. In the farther East a fierce controversy still raged, both in China and India, regarding the heathen rites and practices which the Jesuit missionaries permitted their native converts to retain. Clement XI., Innocent XIII., and Benedict XIII. had successively employed him, when he was an official of the Curia, to prepare a verdict on these "Chinese and Malabar rites," but it was reported that the Jesuits still defied the orders of the Popes. In his private letters to Tencin, Benedict sternly condemns the "tergiversations" of the Jesuit missionaries, but in his Papal pronouncements he is more cautious. His Bulls _Ex Quo Singulari_,[332] which puts an end to the trouble in China, and _Omnium Solicitudinum_,[333] which condemns the practices in Malabar (India), are scholarly and severe treatises. They hardly mention the Jesuits, but they leave no loophole for those casuistic missionaries. From the other side of the globe Benedict received complaints that Christians were still enslaving the American natives, on the pretext of converting them, and he renewed the prohibition issued by Paul III. and Urban VIII.

From all quarters of the globe Benedict received heated complaints about the Jesuits. They permitted the worship of ancestors in China, and closed their eyes to Hindu charms and amulets in India. They conducted great commercial enterprises in North and South America, and struggled bitterly against the bishops in England. France accused them of intensifying the domestic strife of its Church, and Spain and Portugal brought grave charges against them. But Benedict XIV. seems to have dreaded the overweening and doomed Society. Even his private letters are singularly free from direct allusions to them, and more than one Jesuit scholar was employed by him on tasks of importance. His friend Cardinal Passionei, a worldly cardinal, of easy ways, who spent his days in luxurious ease at Frascati, often urged him to reform the Society, but it was not until the last year of his life that he took any step in that direction. Portugal was now approaching its great struggle with the Jesuits, and Benedict, on April 1, 1758, directed Cardinal Saldanha to inspect and report upon the condition of the Jesuit houses and colleges in that country. He died a month later, unconscious of the great revolution which the Catholic Powers were preparing to force on the Papacy.

Of the isolated ecclesiastical acts of Benedict it is impossible to give here even a summary. No Pope since the great Pontiffs of the early Middle Ages had enriched his Church with so much (from the Papal point of view) sound legislation: none had had so scientific a command of ecclesiastical affairs or united with it so indefatigable an industry. His Bull _Magnæ Nobis Admirationis_[334] prescribes, in the case of mixed marriages, the rules which are enforced in the Church today. He forbade monks to practise surgery or dispense drugs; though Europe would have been more completely indebted to him in this respect if he had not made an exception in favour of the atrocious drug known as "theriac" and the foolish compound which went by the name of "apoplectic balsam." He condemned Freemasonry,[335] though his decree was not enforced. But one must glance over the thirteen volumes of his _Bullarium_ and the seventeen volumes of his religious and liturgical works if one would realize his massive industry and devotion to his duties.

In the spring of 1758 his robust constitution yielded to the ravages of gout, labour, and anxiety, and he died on May 3d. He was not, as some say, "the idol of Rome." The cardinals felt the disdain of them which he often expresses in his letters, and many of the clergy regarded him as too severe on them and too pliant to the laity. Neither was he a genius. Clearness of mind, immense industry, and sober ways are the sources of his output. His works are not read today even by ecclesiastics, and it is ludicrous to represent them as his title to immortality. Yet Benedict XIV. was a great Pope: a wise ruler of the Church at a time when once more, unconsciously, it approached a world-crisis. The magnitude of the change which was taking place in Europe he never perceived, but his policy was wise in the measure of his perception, and his geniality of temperament, united to so wholehearted a devotion to his duty, won some respect for the name of Pope in lands where it had been for two hundred years a thing of contempt.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 324: Modern research has easily settled that Galilei was not physically ill-treated, and that there was probably no intention to carry out the formal threat of torture. But this refutation of the excesses of the older anti-Papal historians leaves the serious part of the indictment intact. Galilei was forbidden by the Holy Office in 1616 to advance as a positive discovery his view of the earth's position. In 1632, to the great indignation of Urban VIII., he disregarded this prohibition, which he thought a dead letter, and was condemned by the Inquisition as "vehemently suspected of heresy." The crime against culture is not materially lessened by the fact that the Inquisition lodged the astronomer in its most comfortable rooms.]

[Footnote 325: _Lettres familières_ (1858), i., 250-1. The President was in Rome during the conclave in the following year and repeated that Lambertini was "licentious in speech but exemplary in conduct" (ii., 399). On a later page (439) he frankly describes the Pope as "indecent in speech." There is a passage in one of the Pope's later letters to Cardinal Tencin which may illustrate his censure. Benedict tells the Cardinal that he has bought a nude Venus for his collection, and finds that the Prince and Princess of Württemberg have, with a diamond ring, scratched their names on a part of the statue which one may not

## particularize as plainly as the Pope does (_Correspondance de Benoît

XIV._, ii., 268).]

[Footnote 326: _Lettres familières_, ii., 439.]

[Footnote 327: September 29, 1745.]

[Footnote 328: Letter to Tencin August 1, 1753 (ii., 282).]

[Footnote 329: The correspondence is reproduced in Artaud de Montor's _Histoire des Souverains Pontifes_ (1849), vii., 79. Benedict was severely censured by the pious, and he declared to Cardinal Tencin that he "did not find it clear that Voltaire was a stranger to the faith" (i., 246). The biography of Benedict, one of the most interesting of the Popes, is still to be written. F.X. Kraus, in his edition of Benedict's letters, reproduces fragments of a pretentious Latin biography by a contemporary, Scarselli, and M. Guarnacci has a sketch in his _Vitæ Pontificum Romanorum_ (1751, vol. ii., col. 487-94). These relate only to his earlier years. A. Sandini (_Vitæ Pontificum Romanorum_, 1754) has only three pages on Benedict, and the anonymous _Vie du Pape Benoît XIV._ (1783--really written by Cardinal Caraccioli) is not critical. The biographical sketches in Artaud de Montor and Ranke are quite inadequate. But the biographer has now a rich material in Benedict's Bulls (complete _Bullarium_, 13 vols., 1826 and 1827), works (chief edition, 17 vols., 1839-1846, and three further works edited by Heiner in 1904), and letters. Of the latter the best editions are those of F.X. Kraus (_Briefe Benedicts XIV. an den Canonicus Pier Francesco Peggi_, 1884), Morani ("Lettere di Benedetto XIV. all' arcidiacono Innocenzo Storani" in the _Archivio Storico per le Marche e per l'Umbria_, 1885), Fresco ("Lettere inedite di Benedetto XIV. al Cardinale Angelo Maria Querini" in the _Nuovo Archivio Veneto_, 1909, tomo xviii., pp. 5-93, and xix., pp. 159-215), "Lettere inedite di Benedetto XIV. al Cardinale F. Tamburini" in the _Archivio della R. Società Romana di Storia Patria_, vol. xxxiv. (1911), pp. 35-73, and E. de Heeckeren (_Correspondance de Benoît XIV._, 2 vols., 1912).]

[Footnote 330: I., 49.]

[Footnote 331: _Ex omnibus Christiani orbis_, Oct. 16, 1756. It prescribes silence on the disputed issues and leaves it to confessors to determine whether their penitents are so wilfully rebellious against the Bull _Unigenitus_ as to be excluded from the sacraments.]

[Footnote 332: July 1, 1742.]

[Footnote 333: September 12, 1744.]

[Footnote 334: June 29, 1748.]

[Footnote 335: March 18, 1751.]

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