Secret Conclaves
There hadn’t been a period of easy and orderly papal transition since the institution’s first centuries. The very first pope was the apostle Peter, appointed by Christ when he said before others: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it” (Mt. 16:18). Peter then appointed his successor, Saint Linus (ca. 68–79), by designating Linus to act in his place when Peter was away from Rome. Peter’s appointment of Linus is attested to by at least two of the most important Latin Church Fathers, and one of the historians of that era.7 It is also generally agreed by historians that Peter predesignated two, and perhaps three, men to follow Linus. These bishops of Rome, sitting at the epicenter and capital of the new faith, each served relatively briefly by modern standards, leading the Church up to about the year 108 C.E. For the next few centuries, with occasional interruptions when one pope simply appointed another, elections were usually held from among the Christian community of Rome, then by the clergy and bishops of Rome, and eventually—first in the year 499—by a synod of all Italian bishops at St. Peter’s Basilica.
But throughout the Middle Ages papal elections were irregular and often corrupt. There were many successions by usurpers, simoniacs, and by hereditary and imperial appointments. It wasn’t until the first century of the second millennium that a more orderly process was firmly established through a series of reforms. By the year 1059 the basic principles of papal elections were set in place; most important, a defined group of cardinal-electors, the Sacred College, would elect a new pope.8 This did not solve the incidents of corruption; nevertheless, it was a step in the right direction.
The first true conclave elected Pope Gregory X in 1271. Conclave comes from the Latin cum clave and literally means “with a key,” a phrase that’s akin to our own “behind closed doors.” Locking the doors was an emergency measure undertaken by local authorities and the people of Viterbo as a way of solving the deadlock facing the Church. Once he was elected, Gregory X then undertook to write the principle of conclave into the permanent rules of how popes are selected. He drew up a constitution called Ubi majus periculum and took it to the Second Council of Lyon in 1274 for formal approval. The constitution decreed that within ten days of the death of a pope all cardinals involved in papal elections should gather in the papal palace. They were to live austerely during this time. They must remain together cum clave, remotely, secretively, until the election came to a successful completion. They were not to receive any income or monetary support (to encourage focused listening to discern the guiding of the Holy Spirit), and local authorities were to ensure their safety and needs for provisions—food, water, and wine rations per cardinal-elector; the rations were to be reduced for each day that a protracted conclave continued.9
For it to be a true conclave, the cardinal-electors had to be sequestered behind doors that were locked or barred, and guarded. Conclaves usually took place in Rome or at the episcopal palace of one of the cities outside Rome, such as Perugia or Viterbo. The principles were followed fully in the election of Gregory X’s successor, Innocent V, and then again for the election of Adrian V, but then Adrian decided that the special measures were no longer necessary, a decision that his successor, the Portuguese pope John XXI, reinforced. The reign of all three of these popes spanned a period of less than eighteen months. By 1292, both cardinals and ordinary citizens remembered how devastating it could be to go for months or years without a successful papal election, but locking cardinal-electors in a room and forcing them to work out their differences in a timely manner had fallen out of practice.10
Papal elections were once again becoming times of great commotion. Actually, commotion doesn’t do justice to what happened. Don’t imagine the simple and pious displays that were broadcast from St. Peter’s in the aftermath of John Paul II’s death, with nuns gathering in groups, young and old holding candlelight vigils, and teenagers kneeling silently in prayer. In the time of Peter Morrone there were riots in the streets, sometimes massacres, terroristic threats, and assaults upon the cardinal-electors themselves—not to mention plenty of wagering. Imagine trying to hold a papal election in the center of a bullfighting ring while a riot is going on in the stands. The cardinal-electors, who were ideally supposed to be discerning the will of God, were coming into frequent contact with the people, who were known to hold protests that would make a march on Washington seem mild mannered by comparison.
Some of the earliest papal elections are remembered for their high points of drama. In 366, for example, during the election of Pope Damasus I, some of Damasus’s supporters physically attacked the supporters of a rival deacon. The violence was so widespread that soldiers were sent in by the Roman emperor. In 903 the commotion that surrounded the election of Leo V continued after he assumed the throne, and he ruled for less than three months before he was strangled by the antipope who forcibly supplanted him. And then much later, in 1378, the Roman people rioted in the streets upon the death of French-born Pope Gregory XI, screaming for the next pope to be a Roman. The cardinals elected the archbishop of Bari and fled Rome before the people heard the news, fearing for their lives because they had elected a Neapolitan.
A Boccaccian Scene
If the Sacred College had met in conclave from 1292 to 1294, not only would the election have taken less time to complete, but the cardinals might have avoided the risk of contracting the plague in Rome during those long summers. The disease was common in the late thirteenth century before reaching its high point in the early to mid-fourteenth, when the Black Death was ubiquitous. Whenever it flared, people contemplated their eternal destiny. One might think that at times when people were faced with such calamity, the clergy might demonstrate their ability to channel God’s grace, clemency, and peace in the face of near-certain death, or that at least they might offer comfort, hear confessions, and administer last rites to those on death’s door. Instead, what often happened was quite the opposite: the clergy, such as the very cardinals who elected the pope, suspended all religious activity and fled to the quieter, safer countryside.11
Before they left Rome entirely, to get away from the clamoring crowds and the dangers of disease, the cardinals moved from the Savelli Palace to the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria sopra Minerva (later made famous by Saint Catherine of Siena, who is buried there). For weeks the Colonna family faction remained in Rome while Cardinal Benedict Gaetani retired to a villa in Viterbo to recuperate from illness. At that time Viterbo was known as “the city of popes,” having in recent years witnessed the election of five popes (most recently Martin IV, in 1281), and the deaths of four. The rest of the cardinals removed to the lovely town of Rieti, a provincial capital rich with associations with the life of Francis of Assisi. It was just southwest of Rieti, near the base of the 5,575-foot Mount Terminillo, that Saint Francis dictated the Rule of his order while standing in a grove of holly trees in 1223. And it was only nine miles northwest of Rieti in Greccio where Francis celebrated Christmas with a live nativity later that same year.
Pages were running back and forth from Rome to Rieti carrying threatening letters, sometimes laced with theological arguments, from the Colonnas to the Orsinis and back again. The distance from Rieti to Rome is about fifty miles on foot through the Tiber Valley, yet the Sacred College never did gather all together in Rieti. Instead, while the streets of Rome and the Papal States filled with unrest, all the cardinal-electors made their way to Perugia, perceived to be neutral ground. It was there, removed from the clamor of ordinary life, during their third hot summer of deliberations, that the Sacred College finally seemed motivated to do something.
3
A MOST UNLIKELY DECISION
Few people during the Middle Ages possessed mechanical clocks. Very few ever even glimpsed one. Tolling bells tended to mark the time in and around a village. Still there was an understanding that time was connected to destiny. In that sense, Peter Morrone’s letter arrived at what seemed to
be a divinely appointed moment.
Everyone had something to say to the Sacred College. On the table where the mail was kept, correspondence from King Wenceslaus of Bohemia, or Edward I the King of England, or a warning note from the Grand Master of the Knights Templar about the election of a new sultan in Egypt—all would have looked vital. As would a handwritten letter from the famous octogenarian hermit of Mount Morrone, delivered on July 5, 1294.
Cardinal Latino Malabranca was a doctor of law as well as theology. Pope Nicholas III had been his uncle. In addition to his role as leader of the Sacred College, Malabranca was a fiery Dominican who also served as the Inquisitor General, the leader of all papal inquisitions, until his death just one month after Peter’s letter arrived.
Malabranca first read the letter quietly to himself. Soon afterward he announced to the others that he had received an important communiqué from one of the most holy men of the Church. He told them of its contents without naming the author.
It was well known among the members of the Sacred College that Malabranca had an affection for the teachings and personality of Peter Morrone. The annals tell us that the first cardinal in the room to respond to the letter was Cardinal Gaetani. He looked at Malabranca, smiled with a bit of a sneer, and said sarcastically, “I suppose this is one of your Peter of Morrone’s visions.”
There ensued some discussion of Peter the man, his views, and his reputation, until Cardinal Malabranca loudly interrupted the din to proclaim, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I elect Brother Peter of Morrone!”
In what happened next it seems that, despite the twenty-seven months that had passed without the election of a holy father, some of the eleven remaining cardinals (one had died of old age) must have retained hope that a good man, a truly spiritual man, could once again occupy the chair of St. Peter. There were those who said there hadn’t been a holy pope since Saint Gregory the Great (590–604 C.E.), or an effective one since Innocent III (1198–1216 C.E.). Perhaps a righteous man could unite the spiritual and the temporal, bringing balance and peace to the world.
Even the cardinals of the Sacred College, men who had seen all kinds of intrigue in the halls of imperial and religious power during the past few decades, were prepared to be inspired. That is what happened at that moment when Malabranca called out: the process of electing a pope by inspiration.
The Latin phrase quasi ex inspiratione literally means “from inspiration”; in that era it was an acceptable method of electing a pope. It consisted of a vocal acclamation, usually expressed in the form of a shout, just as Latino Malabranca had done. Although it was an acceptable method, it wasn’t commonly used, so the dean’s shout probably took the other cardinals by surprise.
When we think of papal elections, we think of balloting, the most common method, with the required two-thirds majority to finally settle upon a name. This first and most common way of election was most often called “scrutiny”—secret balloting until a consensus was reached on one candidate. Ballots would be passed around and names written down. The slips of paper from a balloting would never be seen by anyone outside the room where the election was held, and the cardinal-electors would keep balloting until the necessary majority was reached.
Second, there was the delegated compromise method. A sort of electoral college would be nominated by the larger group of cardinals, and this group of representatives would meet to choose the man. And then there was the third and last method, the one that Latino Malabranca used in the summer of 1294: popular consensus that begins with one man’s inspired vocal acclamation. In the thirteenth century a saint was also sometimes declared this way, quasi ex inspiratione. There were not then the involved procedures for making saints that there are now. Saints were often made more spontaneously.
Not long before, in the early springtime of 1294, Charles II of Naples had addressed the eleven cardinals in the papal palace in Perugia. The days were drawing longer, the nights were getting shorter, but they spent little time outside in the sun. The silk curtains hung heavily to the floor in the high-ceilinged library where they were gathered, and the beeswax candles glowed without a flicker. Charles addressed them in measured tones. He knew every man in the room personally. Some were his friends, some not. Charles was impatiently waiting to take full control of the Kingdom of Sicily, which he had lost twelve years earlier, but which had then been granted to Charles by papal decree. Now he hoped to have a new pope’s assistance in order to truly take control of the island. The Sacred College must act, he told them. The continued survival of Mother Church and the security of the world—tied up as it was with the Church—depended on their wisdom and speed. Before the end of the evening, Charles clashed in fierce argument with Cardinal Gaetani, who felt that Charles was really pitching a candidate of his own choosing. Charles left dissatisfied.1
It was two months later that Peter wrote the letter that changed everything. He knew a few of the men meeting in the palace library and was a personal friend to at least one of them, Malabranca. The others knew him only by reputation, as the founder of a religious order, and not in the ways that they knew other powerful men—from shared days at university or casual contact in papal palaces or meetings in Rome. A hermit like Peter would rarely get to know other men in the ways that men of the world would. And he wasn’t known for making public statements. But in his letter Peter told the cardinals in no uncertain terms that God could bring vengeance down upon the Church, and perhaps their houses, if they didn’t act. Peter’s argument convinced them whereas Charles II’s had not.
Even the mostly cynical cardinals couldn’t ignore that what Peter had written might be a genuine locution. These were days when God seemed to speak more freely to holy men and women in mountains or monasteries or convents than he did to others. Is this why Latino Malabranca cried out as he did?
What caused Malabranca to suggest Peter is something we will never know. Perhaps it was the Spirit of God. At least one scholar suggests that Malabranca’s inspiration might have been the result of a dream he’d had, more than a response to an actual letter that he received.2 Another offers that a general weariness and the manipulations of Charles would have reduced the cardinal-electors “to a mood susceptible to inspiration.”3 We know only that the cardinals unanimously ratified their dean’s seemingly desperate suggestion. An acclamation quasi ex inspiratione was supposed to be ratified unanimously in order to be deemed truly inspired.
A decision by inspiration was also, by definition, unballoted. There were no actual ballots to be counted. The process was supposed to proceed like a rush of wind. We can imagine the shouts of acclamation that came forth from one cardinal after another. Cardinal Latino Malabranca called out, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I elect Brother Peter of Morrone!” Five of the others immediately agreed, repeating the name of Peter Morrone. Je suis d’accord. Aio, Pietro di Morrone! These included John Boccamazza, a cousin of Pope Honorius IV (1285–87); Gerard of Parma, the eldest member; Peter Peregrosso, the former protector of the Humiliati; Hugo Aycelin, a French Dominican; Matthew d’Acquasparta, a Franciscan philosopher; and Benedict Gaetani, who perhaps instinctively knew how this selection would displease the Colonnas.
For their part, James Colonna and his nephew Peter Colonna wanted to pause to consider the idea, leaving this instance of quasi ex inspiratione short of the ideal. The Colonnas had aligned themselves with Philip the Fair, the king of France, and were seeking a pope who would unify the interests of France, Italy, and the Papal States.4 Could the enigmatic Peter Morrone be expected to do such things? It is unclear precisely how long the dissenters held out, but it couldn’t have been more than forty-eight hours.
The Spirit and the Process
It was the late-thirteenth-century theologian Giles of Rome who said that a pope either comes to the chair of St. Peter already a saint or else occupying it makes him one. But the Catholic Church has never claimed that the Holy Spirit infallibly guides the choosing
of popes. If they did, they’d have to explain how God selected several men in history who even the most faithful (especially the most faithful) historians of the Church would call lechers, fornicators, even murderers. There are several easy examples: Pope Stephen VI (896–97), for instance, who had his predecessor’s rotting corpse exhumed and put on trial; Pope John XII (955–64), who ordered the killing of people, turned the most sacred Apostolic Palace of the Lateran into a brothel, and was ultimately murdered by the husband of his mistress; and the eleventh-century Benedict IX, who sold the papacy to his godfather, Gregory VI, only to change his mind and come back and try to reclaim it.
There have been a variety of explanations over the centuries for these election mistakes. One comes from Saint James of the Marches (1391–1476), a renowned Franciscan preacher and inquisitor. He once reproached a heretic who was accused of criticizing past and present popes by saying:
Although certain Supreme Pontiffs have died without faith, you will never find that, when one pope died in heresy, a right Catholic Pope didn’t immediately succeed him. It cannot be found, in the whole series of the list of Supreme Pontiffs, that any two popes were successively and immediately heretics. Thus it cannot be said that faith has ever failed without qualification in the order of popes, since our Lord said to St. Peter, “I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail” [Lk. 22:32]—and he said it not only for him but for the whole Church.5
The expectations were lower then than they are today. Apparently every other pope was good, and that wasn’t all that bad during the Middle Ages.
The Pope Who Quit Page 4
