Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition

by Eamon Duffy

  In all this, the drive towards centralisation in the organisation of the papacy resembled the aspirations of the strong national monarchies which dominated Europe. It was signalled accordingly In an age of Absolutism, the popes more than any other rulers surrounded themselves with the trappings of absolute rule, rebuilt throne-rooms and ceremonial approaches, commissioned grandiose programmatic art and architecture which spoke of power. The century of rebuilding in Rome, which would culminate in the work of Bernini under the popes of the mid-seventeenth century, was designed to proclaim the untrammelled rule of the sovereign pontiff. But the sober reality was a good deal more complex. Central as the papacy now was to every major Catholic enterprise, the direct authority of the popes encountered even in Italy, and emphatically beyond it, a hundred drags and resistances: the political interests of the kings of Spain who governed southwards in Naples and northwards in Milan, the inertia or vested interest of the bodies which made up the local churches – religious orders and religious corporations, convents or colleges of canons – the non-cooperation of local bishops or priestly collectives excessively (or realistically) deferential to petty princes, regional aristocracies or city governments. Popes were elected monarchs, their reigns for the most part short, their freedom of action curtailed even in Rome by the presence of independent-minded cardinals – their wealthy families and clientages – who had been created by their predecessors, and who were often at odds with each other, jostling for influence or promoting the rivalries of the Congregations they headed or served in, and sometimes hostile or indifferent to the policies of new popes. The consistent formulation and promotion of long term strategies in such circumstances was dogged with difficulty. Even the best-intentioned papal attempts to forward the programme of Trent involved in practice a constant exercise in the art of the possible, and a hundred compromises.

  Not least of these papal difficulties was the fact that popes often found themselves in conflict even with devout Catholic princes. In some cases, this was a matter of the jealous national defence of the ‘liberties’ of the local church. The French crown had got control of an almost separatist church in France by the Concordat of 1516. It resisted any moves on the part of the popes or the wider Church, however laudable in themselves, which might erode that control. France was by no means alone in this. It absolutely refused to accept the disciplinary decrees of Trent, Spain accepted them only after much delay, and then only with a restrictive clause ‘saving the royal power’.

  Resistance by the secular ruler might touch any number of ‘spiritual’ issues, large and small. In 1568 Pope Pius V prohibited bullfights as sinful, and ruled that no one killed in a bullfight might receive Christian burial. The Spanish crown refused to allow the decree to be promulgated in its territories, and found theologians to prove the Pope was wrong. The appointment of reform-minded clergy might be hindered, as in Spanish-ruled Sicily, by the crown’s traditional monopoly on clerical appointments.

  Such frictions arose in direct proportion to the zeal of the popes. The Counter-Reformation papacy saw itself as called to unite all Catholic princes in an effort to reform the Church internally, and to suppress the enemies of the Church, be they Turks or Protestants. The undoubted papal triumph in the latter of these endeavours was the Christian League between Spain and Venice which in October 1571 defeated the Turkish fleet in the Gulf of Corinth, at Lepanto. Clement VIII in the 1590s raised and paid for an army of 11,000 soldiers to help break the Turkish hold on Hungary, and Paul V and Gregory XV between them would pour more than 2,000,000 florins in subsidies to the Catholic armies in the opening years of the Thirty Years War (1618–48).

  No pope, however, could now hope to act as arbiter over the fate of nations in the way that Innocent III had done, though the universal prestige of the papacy might still have an impact on the international scene. Popes or their nuncios might play a key role in negotiating peace between warring princes – as the future Gregory XV did between Spain and Savoy in 1616. The popes, however, were not content with such walk-on parts in the history of Europe. They believed that the princes should pursue Catholic policies in all things, and believed that the papacy was the divinely chosen instrument for shaping such policies.

  Catholic princes rarely saw things so simply. The Habsburg emperors in the second half of the sixteenth century presided over a complex and ramshackle empire in which Catholics coexisted with every conceivable variety of Protestant, from high Calvinist to Unitarian. The popes thought that for the Emperor to tolerate religious error was to abdicate his imperial responsibilities as protector of the Church. They urged drastic measures to produce conformity, demanded that earlier concessions made to Protestant sensibilities, like marriage of the clergy or communion from the chalice, should now be withdrawn. The emperors, receptive enough to the idea of a strong state with only a single religion, knew that as things stood it was an unattainable ideal, and dreaded the rebellion such measures would provoke. They saw to it that their Church was staffed by men who shared their realism, and who could stonewall Roman centralism. Between 1553 and 1600, no Hungarian bishop set foot in Rome, and neither the Inquisition nor the Index was sanctioned in imperial lands.

  Elsewhere in Europe, the popes pursued a similar aggressive policy towards heresy. Successive popes poured money into supporting the Catholic side in the French Wars of Religion, and worked to prevent the accession of the Huguenot (French Protestant) King Henri of Navarre as Henri IV of France. In 1572, after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France, during which between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants had been butchered, Gregory XIII ordered the celebration of a solemn ‘Te Deum’ of thanksgiving. Such policies threw the popes into alliance with extremist forces like the Catholic League in France, which in turn was being bankrolled by Spain. It was difficult in such circumstances for the popes to preserve the neutrality among Catholic princes looked for in the Father of all the Faithful. Under the saintly but realist Pope Clement VIII (1592–1605) better counsels prevailed, and the papacy came to terms with Henri IV, accepted (though after long hesitation) the toleration granted to Protestants by the Edict of Nantes, and thereby freed itself, for the time being at least, from its unhealthy dependence on Spain.

  The frictions between the papacy and the Catholic powers were symbolised and rubbed to rawness each year by the annual proclamation of the bull In Coena Domini, which was essentially a solemn list of condemnations for crimes against the Church. In 1568 Pope Pius V expanded this bull with clauses listing the usurpations of secular authorities against the rights of the Church and the clergy. The new clauses excommunicated anyone who appealed to a general council against the Pope, any ruler who banished a cardinal, bishop, nuncio or legate, and any secular court or individual which instituted criminal proceedings against clerics. Spain and Austria both forbade the promulgation of this bull, the Viceroy in Naples confiscated and destroyed all copies, and Venice, which had recently expelled a cardinal, refused to allow it to be published on Venetian soil.

  And it was in Venice that the conflict of the papacy with the Catholic states received its most spectacular expression. The Republic of Venice was an Italian Catholic state which fiercely guarded its practical independence of the papacy It existed to trade: it had Protestant mercantile communities within its territory, it needed to maintain good relations with the Turks. Fierce Counter-Reformation papal policies, calling for Crusade against the Turks and persecution of Protestants, could not be adopted as Venetian policy. Venice was devout and orthodox, but it policed its own orthodoxy. Inquisitors functioned in Venetian territory (Sixtus V had been inquisitor for Venice under Paul IV), heretics were harassed, books were burned. But the inquisitors sat alongside secular officials appointed by the Signoria (governing council), and they did not have a free hand.

  Moreover, Venice was a republic and (in this respect like Rome) elected its own rulers. Venetians disliked the monarchic character of the Counter-Reformation papacy, and they rejected the Pope’s claim to be able to unseat
rulers. The Republic considered all its citizens to be subject to its authority, whether they be clergy or laity, and reserved the right to tax the Church. In 1605 the election of Camillo Borghese as Pope Paul V (1605–21) precipitated a showdown. Paul had an exalted understanding of the secular authority of the popes: in 1606 he would canonise Gregory VII. Venice had recently passed laws forbidding the foundation of new churches or the leaving of legacies to the clergy. It was also proposing to put two priests on trial. For these blatant breaches of In Coena Domini Paul solemnly excommunicated the whole Signoria in April 1606, and placed the city of Venice under interdict, so that no sacraments could be celebrated there, no Masses said, no babies baptised, no corpse given Christian burial.

  The Interdict was a bad mistake. Catholic opinion everywhere thought it a disproportionate reaction to the provocation, rulers everywhere were alarmed at this direct confrontation with a sovereign state. Worse, it simply did not work. Paul had been convinced that the deprivation of the sacraments would create a groundswell of opinion in Venice which would force the Signoria to come to terms. Instead, anti-papal feeling flared in the city, a damaging propaganda war was launched in which papal claims were put under the microscope, and the authorities remained defiant. The clergy were given an ultimatum. They must ignore the Interdict – and the Pope’s authority – and go on providing sacraments and services, or they must leave Venice for ever. The Jesuits agonised, then left: it was to be fifty years before they were allowed back on to Venetian territory. Venice portrayed the Pope’s action as an assault on the freedoms of every state, and the Pope began to fear that Venice might throw in its lot with the Protestants. In 1607 he was obliged to lift the Interdict, without having exacted any real concessions from the Republic. The ultimate papal weapon, excommunication and interdict, had been tried with maximum publicity, and found ineffective.

  The Venetian Interdict revealed the hollowness of papal claims to universal jurisdiction in early modern Europe. The changing role of the popes in the history of missions in the sixteenth century, by contrast, demonstrates better than almost any other issue the enormously enhanced prestige of the papacy. The sixteenth century was a period of quite unparalleled European expansion, to both east and west. To begin with, however, this did not strike the popes as a matter of direct concern to them. In a series of bulls between 1456 and 1514 successive popes granted the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies the task of converting the peoples encountered in the course of exploration. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI had divided the world into two regions, east and west of the Cape Verde Islands, the Spaniards to rule in the west, the Portuguese in the east. The power over the personnel and revenues of the Church thus granted to the two Iberian crowns was among their most treasured prerogatives, and the Spanish crown in particular took seriously the missionary obligations which accompanied it. In the course of the first half of the century new hierarchies were planted in Mexico, Peru and central America, a constellation of new churches. It seemed that God had called a new world into existence to compensate for the souls being lost by the Church to Protestantism in Germany and elsewhere.

  As the sixteenth century progressed, missions multiplied, and the papacy became more central to them. The popes of the first half of the century never initiated missionary enterprises, though their sanction was essential for their success. Only popes could establish new hierarchies, and only popes could adjudicate the theological conundrums thrown up by mission, such as whether or not pagan peoples might be enslaved by their Christian conquerors or (later) whether Chinese Christians might be allowed to continue to venerate their ancestors and to practise other traditional customs which looked as if they might imply pagan beliefs. The Jesuit order had been founded to promote mission, and its fourth vow of unquestioning obedience to the Pope was explicitly framed in terms of readiness for mission wherever the Pope might send them. The spectacular (and well-publicised) missionary successes of Francis Xavier and his Jesuit successors in the Far East contributed to a mounting sense of the unfolding of the Gospel through the whole world, for which the papacy provided the obvious and indeed the only focus.

  It became increasingly clear, too, that the patronage exercised by Spain and Portugal over the missions might hinder as well as assist the spread of the Gospel, limiting the freedom of action of missionaries as much as royal authority limited the freedom of national churches in Europe. From the time of Pius V there were growing papal efforts to bring missionary activity under papal control. Pius established two congregations of cardinals to co-ordinate missionary activity both to Protestant Europe and to the pagan East and West. In the second half of the century Rome became the natural point of reference for all such ventures, for only the papacy had the universal concern and single point of vantage denied to the monarchies, however conscientious. Gregory XIII’s seminary provision for missionaries to Germany, England and eastern Europe, mostly staffed by the Jesuits, were another stage in this development. It culminated under Gregory XV in 1622 with the establishment of a special Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, fifteen strong instead of the more usual half-dozen, to oversee all aspects of mission, from Protestant England to China and Japan. Propaganda Fide, as the Congregation was known in Latin, under its energetic secretary Francis Ingoli, rapidly found itself backing native Indian and Chinese clergy against Portuguese racism, attacking royal delay in appointing bishops for mission territories and supplying the lack by appointing ‘vicars apostolic’, missionary priests in episcopal orders, directly responsible to the Pope. In its first twenty-five years Propaganda founded forty-six new missions. By 1627 it had its own multi-racial seminary, the Urbanum, and its own printing-press at Rome, fit symbols of the proactive and universalist papacy which had brought it into being.

  The increased authority of the Counter-Reformation papacy triggered a corresponding surge of Protestant hostility. For many of the reformers, the popes were not merely the leaders of a corrupt Church, but the willing instruments of Satan himself. A revived interest in the prophecies of the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation led to the identification of the Pope as Antichrist, and of the Catholic Church as the ‘Synagogue of Satan’, which was to murder the saints and witnesses of Christ, and to make war against the true Church in the last days.

  These fears were focused in 1582, when the vigorous reforming Pope Gregory XIII revised the existing hopelessly inaccurate ‘Julian’ Calendar, omitting ten days from October 1582 to correct the errors which had crept in over the centuries, and introducing a new method of calculating the Leap Years to prevent new inaccuracies arising. Gregory’s reform was long overdue: the need for a reform had been discussed for centuries, and it was a huge improvement on the existing calendar. It was widely welcomed by astronomers and scientists, including the Protestants Johann Kepler and Tycho Brahe. The Gregorian Calendar, however, caused widespread anger and fear among Protestants, many of whom saw it as a device of Antichrist to subject the world to the devil. Gregory’s coat of arms included a dragon, and this was seized on by opponents of the calendar reform as an omen. The Pope, it was claimed, was trying to confuse calculations of the imminent end of the world, so that Christians would be caught unprepared. The changes were an interference with the divine arrangement of the universe, and they would plunge Europe into a bloodbath. With the ‘mind of a serpent and the cunning of a wolf’, Gregory was attempting to smuggle idolatrous observances into the world under the pretext of more efficient calculation. The University of Tubingen decreed that anyone who accepted the new Calendar was reconciling themselves to Antichrist. It was outlawed in Denmark, Holland, and the Protestant cantons of Switzerland, and in many German Protestant states the civil authorities prevented the Catholic clergy from using it. The Emperor Rudolf II was able to secure its acceptance more widely in the empire only by omitting any reference to the Pope, and imposing the new calculations as an imperial secular decree. England, where anti-papal feeling was particularly strong, did not accept the new calendar til
l 1752, and Sweden not until 1753. The Pope had become the bogey-man of Protestant Europe.

  IV THE POPES IN AN AGE OF ABSOLUTISM

  On 8 November 1620, an international Catholic army routed the forces of the Protestant Elector Palatine, Frederick of Bohemia, on a hillock just west of the city of Prague. The Battle of the White Mountain, the first major Catholic victory of the Thirty Years War had some of the trappings of the Crusade, and the password chosen for the day was ‘Sancta Maria’. The battle marked the beginning of the end for the Protestant cause in central Europe, and represented a triumph of the confessional politics which the papacy had been advocating since the opening of the Council of Trent. Massive papal subsidies had helped equip the Emperor Ferdinand lis troops and those of the German Catholic League. Ferdinand himself was a representative of a new kind of Catholic prince, educated and guided by the Jesuits, determined to end the uneasy coexistence with Protestantism which had characterised imperial politics in the later sixteenth century, and to impose Catholicism everywhere. To celebrate the rout of Protestantism, the Lutheran church of the Holy Trinity in Prague was confiscated and rededicated to Our Lady of Victories, and the Emperor deposited there in thanksgiving a wax image of the child Jesus. Under the title the ‘Infant of Prague’, it was endlessly reproduced, and is still venerated all over the world as one of the most popular of all Catholic devotional images. In Rome a new church dedicated to St Paul was rededicated to Our Lady of Victories. Bernini would later place there his extraordinary image of St Teresa in Ecstasy.