W. C. Cartwright

“ Formerly the Pope's demise was practically tantamount to a fact cancelling the titles of existing authorities—as if an intrusive Government had come to an end by the demise of its immediate representative, and usurped power had returned thereon to the people. All the jails in Rome used to be immediately thrown open, not by an irruption of the populace, but by intervention of the old civic magistracy, which, on the proclamation of an Interregnum, stepped forward at once on the public stage and claimed to represent the Roman people. This tradition of civic authority in Rome has not died out. ”

“ Everyone indeed has long felt that the Conclave which must assemble on the decease of the reigning Pope will be invested with unusual importance. Speculation has been instinctively attracted towards so broadly looming and unavoidable a mystery. It is not our purpose to attempt to cast the horoscope for the issue of the coming Papal election—to venture on the task of reducing from a distance to fixity the sensitive and shifting elements of a purely personal nature that enter into the actual conformation of every Conclave ”

“ As an institution regulated by palpable laws, the Papacy exists only in the season of its creation; the moment it has been embodied it passes into the state of irresponsible incarnation, above all conditions, all liens, and all obligations. The privileges and provisions that authorize and limit the actions of a Cardinal are absolutely non-existing for him the instant he has been transformed into a Pope. ”

“ Instead of being, as once he was, a dictator for the time of the interregnum, the real King of Rome during the interval between the death of one and the creation of another Pope, whose authority was actively invoked to secure the peace of the city at that season, and did effectively intervene in the course of general government at all periods, the Camerlengo is now confined to the exercise of mere ceremonial, and the hollow display of a dumb-show of authority. ”

“ To insure, therefore, the object of this act of legislation—the quick and safe election of a successor,—the Cardinals were empowered forthwith to confer amongst themselves on all points of importance for the election, as the appointment of a suitable locality to hold it in, and the mode in which to conduct it, the faculty of dispensing, if they saw fit, even with the practice of immurement in Conclave being conceded, though not that of canvassing in behalf of a specific candidate during the Pope's lifetime. So direct an approach to election was absolutely forbidden. ”

“ When the Cardinals, therefore—fifty in number,—began to ballot on the 13th June, they appeared divided into one compact body at the beck of Cardinal Lambruschini, and an opposition, not so compact as to vote systematically together, but yet sufficiently united in hostility to the late Secretary, not to give him any votes; while a small flying troop, under the command of Altieri, acted like shrewd electors on the look-out for a profitable windfall. The first ballot gave at once the measure of Lambruschini's following, and led to the crisis that decided the election against him. ”

“ At present the peace of the Popeless city is left entirely to the care of Monsignor Governatore, who with drilled gendarmes in modern plight has superseded the once rival powers and fantastic archers of the Church's Lieutenant and the civic Bargello,—ruling Rome during an interregnum by the same grim intervention of prowling police that is ordinarily busy in its streets when an actual Pope resides in the Vatican. ”

“ All the landmarks of legitimacy had become removed, and an Egyptian darkness enveloped society, rival pretenders to the Papacy circulating freely in the world without its being possible to arrive at a conclusion who was legitimate and who was spurious. Against such a bewildering state of things the conscience of the Church instinctively rose, and the Council of Constance is the act of this uprising by the Churchmen of the day, in rescue of the institution they cherished, from what were felt to be exceptional evils requiring exceptional remedies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Their pay as a rule was terribly in arrear, and therefore they hardly ever failed to begin operations on the decease of a Pope by a demand to have their claims settled or they would do no duty. These men, swept together from all corners, true mercenaries and adventurers of the purest water, were the dread of all classes-of the Cardinals, who could not dipense with their services, and had to buy their good humour; —of the townspeople, who were at the mercy of their recklessness. The natural consequence was that during an interregnum Rome wore the look of a city armed for civil war. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The constitution of the Court of Rome is therefore so far from being what it is popularly supposed, a thing of strictly limited nature, over-weighted with the encumbrance of absolute injunctions, that it will be found, when the heart of the system is reached, to be actually one of the most elastic in existence. Let only the instincts of the body representing the Church be alive to a necessity, however new, and that body can at once, without taint of illegal and revolutionary pretension, recognise the call for new conditions. ”

“ On his way thither, Cardinal Antonelli passed through Florence, where he contrived to obtain two audiences of Pius VI., but only by an artifice, and became painfully impressed with the Pope's decaying powers of body and mind, and the isolation in which he was placed from intercourse with men equal to giving him counsel in his delicate position. ”

“ As soon as ever the ballot has furnished a return with a majority of two-thirds,—the scrutators have satisfied themselves, in the event of its being a bare majority, that this is not due to the successful candidate's own vote,—and he himself has accepted the choice fallen on him, the Conclave is declared at an end, the doors are thrown open to the world, and in the chapel, where all the canopies are instantly lowered, except that over the newly elected, the Pope receives the homage of the assembled Cardinals, which is called the first act of adoration. ”

“ The Council of Constance is distinguished from every other Council by its convocation having been due, not to the individual impulse of a Pontiff, but to the spontaneous instinct of society in general, panting for repose from confusion and discussion, and exhausted by the evils flowing from the great schism. ”

“ The gambling propensities prevalent amongst Italians darted upon the conflicting elements offered by a Conclave to reduce them into a series of chances on which to pitch stakes. The shopkeepers and merchants of Rome entered into the game with a passion which resembled the habits of speculation in stock which have made the Funds a subject of palpitating interest, and the Bourse a capital institution for a great section of the society of our day, more particularly on the Continent. ”

“ Every noble in self-defence assumed the privilege of arming his retainers and of drawing chains across the street in the neighbourhood of his palace, which was garrisoned by his followers, and converted into an asylum. He usurped the right of keeping his own quarter of the city free from all police but his own. Some of the great families succeeded in obtaining a recognition of this claim, like the Mattei, who had the right to hold the bridges of San Sisto and Quattro Capi, together with the intervening region of the Ghetto, with retainers wearing the badges of their house. ”

“ A Bull of Clement XII., impregnated with the spirit of economy, abolished, together with a number of other offices, the Governorship of the Leonine city. The reforming hand of the age, quickened by the prickings of inexorable penury, has been successfully engaged in paring down the old-fashioned lavishness of even arch-conservative Rome. ”

“ In short, from day to day did the evil grow so much, that had the making a new Pope been deferred as long as it once seemed likely, through the dissensions of the Cardinals, there was ground to apprehend many other strange and most grievous inconyeniences.' Against such an all-pervading spirit of law- lessness it was a very inadequate provision for making the streets safe at night that every householder was bound to hang out a lamp before his dwelling during the period of interregnum. Even now, Rome is, of all capitals in Europe, the least pleasant to walk about in the dark ”

“ In the despatches of these agents to their employers can one alone expect to find a revelation of the crafty steps and counter-steps which, springing from no higher source than intrigue of the lowest stamp, have had memorable consequences, by lodging at critical moments the supreme prerogatives of the Papacy, and therewith the religious and political destinies of a large section of the human race, in hands that had too often no title to wield this preponderating authority beyond the favour and the successful craft of a patron. ”

“ For centuries, athwart the many political vicissitudes which, with frightful rapidity, came tumbling over Rome in wild confusion, the election of its bishop, who was ever growing steadily in might, remained yet fixedly lodged in a joint action of the whole community, as falling into the three classes, of civil authorities, people, and clergy. Every other provision connected with public institutions was subjected to incessant revolution ”

“ The idea has, in fact, been entertained in circles 'worthy of credit, that, in view of the political dangers besetting the Holy See, some Papal instrument has been duly provided by Pius IX., absolving the Cardinals from the obligatory observance of the prescribed forms of election, and empowering them to make, if they saw fit, a new Pope over his yet warm corpse. There can be no question as to the Pope's perfect competency in principle to authorize so grave a departure from the custom of ages by an individual act, even without the concurrence of any Cardinals. ”

“ History presents no more astonishing spectacle than the contrast between the mean causes which have frequently decided the fate of Papal elections and the momentous issues that have flowed from them.
It is to be hoped that students will turn their attention to the great Italian Archives, which now are freely open to inspection, and furnish us with the documentary records for this interesting and unwritten portion of history. The richness of these all but virgin mines of historical knowledge exceeds imagination ”

“ There was a general sweep of established organism, and a state of things had been produced like a void, wherein the dispersed atoms of the Court of Rome had to steer themselves as they best could by lights adapted to the novel atmosphere. If the Pope expired in the Certosa, as there was every reason to anticipate, his death would occur away from all Cardinals, and under conditions that would render every formal summons to a Conclave impossible. ”

“ Amongst the many cases repudiated, that of canvassing for a Pope, without the knowledge of the living one, is considered so heinous as to have a whole clause specially devoted to its absolute condemnation. The object of the Bull is laudable; it was inspired by a just indignation at the interests of a manifestly secular nature which had decided, elections in more than one recent Conclave; but its tone and fierce denunciations are signally characteristic of that intemperate zeal which has made the name of Paul IV. survive only as the ill-sounding synonym of cruel and precipitate passions ”

“ During a Conclave, the Marshal still takes up his quarters in the building where it meets, and just outside the barriers that shut in the Cardinals, to watch over whose strict confinement, and to inspect the un-impeachable nature of the articles passed through the turning-wheels for the admission of really indispensable objects, constitute the only duties he still has any pretensions to perform. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It had before happened that Cardinals suffered imprisonment at the hands of violence, but now it was decreed that they should always be immured as long as they were engaged in the sacred avocation of creating a Pope. It was ruled that on a Pope's decease ten days must. be allowed to elapse before his successor could be chosen, with the view of thriving time for Cardinals at a distance to come to Conclave; on the tenth day the Cardinals present could proceed to an election, the legitimacy of which could not be impugned on account of the absence of any colleagues. ”

“ Such a predicament instinctively inspired a demand for increased motive power to the ecclesiastical machinery in the breasts of those who might not be disposed to acquiesce in a timid abandonment of the Church to its fate. It happened, by one of those coincidences which some call providential, and others organic, that at this conjuncture the destinies of the Church were lodged in the bands of men, and especially of one man, pre-eminently endowed with the instincts demanded by the moment. ”

“ I for one will not rebel against the Holy Ghost,' and with these words he led the way, followed by most Cardinals, to the cell of Cervini, who was carried forcibly into the chapel amidst the vociferous acclamations not merely of his supporters, but even of most of his opponents, when they saw the day lost for them. ”

“ There is no publication which sheds so full a light into the whole process of Conclave proceedings as these pages in Father Theiner's book. 'It must never be forgotten that the election itself is a human act, and that human impulses and weaknesses of all kinds come here into play,' writes the present Keeper of the secret Records of the Vatican. ”

“ The expedient of delegating to a small committee of Cardinals the power which the whole body found itself too much torn by dissension to exercise, has been resorted to on several occasions, and is still considered in Rome as not obsolete. The most memorable instance of its application was furnished when the impossibility for the Cardinals assembled in 1304 to agree on a candidate induced them to intrust the election to a delegation out of their own body, which gave to the Church Pope Clement V., who then transferred to Avignon the Holy See. ”

“ In Rome, for instance, there are several family archives, about whose wealth in precious documents for the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there are traditions, but whereof no student—at least no foreign student—is allowed to see more than the outside. Yet even these family archives would hardly furnish the information for a full insight into the various incidents which marked Papal elections, and caused them to turn in favour of particular candidates. ”