The one thing he lacked was self-confidence. Shy and timid to a fault, he was incapable of making his own decisions. In consequence he became increasingly dependent on his secretary of state, Cardinal Luigi Torrigiani, whose deep admiration of the Society of Jesus did much to shape the pope’s own attitude in the crisis that was to come.
The problem of the Jesuits was to overshadow Clement’s entire pontificate. At the time of his accession the principal battlefield remained Portugal, where the Marquis of Pombal was stepping up his persecutions. Benedict XIV’s choice of Cardinal Saldanha as investigator had been a disastrous mistake. Saldanha was a distant relation of Pombal, to whom he owed his successful career and whom he obeyed in every particular. On June 5, 1758, barely a month after his appointment, he issued an edict announcing that he had certain knowledge that scandalous commercial transactions had been in operation in every Jesuit college, residence, novitiate, and all houses of other kinds owned by the order and under the protection of Portugal, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. All further trade was now forbidden under penalty of excommunication; all account books were to be surrendered. Two days later the Jesuits were formally suspended from preaching and the hearing of confessions.
The reaction in Portugal, among both the nobility and the people, was one of horror. In Rome, where the conclave was still in progress, it was much the same. The apostolic nuncio in Lisbon was instructed to inform Saldanha that his edict was excellent but for one slight omission: evidence. Without that, it was simple calumny. It was further remarked that although the cardinal’s inquiry had officially been opened on May 31, the decree had been printed four days earlier, on the twenty-seventh. Regarding the Jesuits’ suspension, the nuncio was to point out that this was entirely uncanonical: individual members of an order might be suspended, but not the order as a whole. The Patriarch of Lisbon was subsequently found to have signed the edict only under duress. On its publication he retired to his country retreat; a month later he was dead.
All this was only the beginning. On the night of September 3, shots were fired at King Joseph. Responsibility can almost certainly be laid at the door of a group of dissatisfied noblemen, twelve of whom were publicly executed, but soon the rumor was spreading that the attempted assassination had been instigated by the Jesuits—and Pombal had the perfect pretext for which he had been waiting. The seven Jesuit establishments in Lisbon were surrounded and searched, and on February 5, 1759, everything within them was sequestrated. This included all foodstuffs; had not pious benefactors taken pity on them, the fathers would have been reduced to beggary. On April 20, the king, by now recovered, wrote to Pope Clement reiterating the familiar charges against the Society and informing him that he had consequently expelled it from Portugal. The pope protested in vain. Soon afterward his nuncio suffered a similar expulsion, and, for the second time in thirty years, diplomatic relations were broken off.
And now the anti-Jesuit fever spread to France. For the past half century the France of Voltaire and Rousseau, of Diderot and his Encyclopédie, had been the European focus of antireligious thought. “So long as there are rogues and fools in the world,” wrote Voltaire to Frederick the Great, “there will always be religion. There can be no question but that ours is the most ridiculous, absurd, and bloodthirsty that ever infected the earth.” The Papacy was detested, and the Jesuits were its most vocal champions. They also had a virtual monopoly on education and stood, in the minds of the philosophes (freethinkers), as the principal bastion of reaction and obscurantism. No wonder, then, that Pombal’s activities against them had been viewed by many Frenchmen with approval. In short, France was a tinderbox and its fuse was lit, ironically enough, by a Jesuit, Father Antoine Lavalette.
Father Lavalette was the procurator of a mission run by his order on the island of Martinique who in 1753 became apostolic prefect of all the Jesuit settlements in the West Indies. He was, however, a man of business as well as a priest, and he also ran a large plantation on the neighboring island of Dominica where he employed some five hundred slaves, sending the produce of their labors back to France. All might have been well had it not been for the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), in which Britain and France fought on opposite sides. Two of Lavalette’s valuable shiploads were seized by the British outside Bordeaux, and the business was left a total of 1.5 million livres in debt. The Paris parlement pronounced the Society of Jesus responsible, further declaring its assets subject to confiscation and forbidding it to give instruction or to accept novices pending a thorough review of its constitution. A suggestion by the French government that the order should be administered by a special vicar general independent of Rome was instantly vetoed by the pope. “Let them be as they are or let them cease to be,” he said—a command rendered somewhat more pithily in Latin as “Sint ut sunt aut non sint.” The government chose the latter alternative, and on December 1, 1764, a royal decree declared the Society abolished and expelled from France.
NOW IT WAS the turn of Spain, to which King Charles had returned from Naples in 1759 on the death of his mentally unhinged half brother King Ferdinand. Though far more Catholic than its French neighbor, the country had been by no means unaffected by the Age of Enlightenment, and there were many who attributed its general backwardness to the influence of the Church. The Jesuits in particular were blamed, as they had been in Portugal, for the disturbances in Paraguay, while continuing to disclaim all responsibility. They were equally innocent of the charge that led to their third expulsion.
On March 10, 1766, a decree was published in Madrid forbidding the wearing of the traditional flowing cloak and broad-brimmed sombrero in all royal residential towns, university towns, and provincial capitals in Spain. Instead, men were enjoined to wear the short French wig and tricorne. The forbidden costume, it was claimed, was un-Spanish and served only to enable criminals to conceal their faces and so to pass unrecognized. A fortnight later, on Palm Sunday, serious riots—they were known as the “hat and cloak riots”—broke out; the Jesuits played no part but were once again held responsible. On February 27, 1767, Charles III banished them from Spain and all its overseas territories. In November of the same year they were similarly expelled from Naples and Sicily and in 1768 from the island of Malta—still in the hands of the Knights of St. John—as also from the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza, whose Duke Ferdinand was the nephew of Charles III.
Although the duchy had been created as a fief for a bastard son of Pope Paul III, it had long since ceased to acknowledge the historic suzerainty of the Holy See. Successive popes, on the other hand, had continued to assert their claims. Most recently, Clement XIII had reaffirmed the papal case when in 1765 Philip was succeeded by his fourteen-year-old son, Ferdinand. But Parma—or, more accurately, the duchy’s chief minister, Guillaume du Tillot, Marquis of Felino—was spoiling for a fight. Within months of Ferdinand’s accession he had issued a law imposing crippling dues on ecclesiastical property, and in January 1768 he promulgated another, forbidding the reference of disputes to Rome and the publication of any ecclesiastical decree without ducal permission. This was too much for Pope Clement, who immediately convened a congregation of cardinals and bishops to consider a suitable response. The result was a papal brief which reiterated the feudal rights of the Holy See over the duchy and declared all Parma’s anticlerical laws null and void. For good measure Clement included all those responsible for the two laws in the bull In Coena Domini, which contained a list of those excommunicated for reasons of faith or morals and according to an age-old tradition was read out on Maundy Thursday every year.
Here was just the pretext Tillot needed. Not only Parma but the three great Bourbon monarchies of France, Spain, and Naples reacted in fury. The pope’s ban, they maintained, applied as much to themselves as it did to the duchy; Clement had effectively released all their subjects from their duty to their sovereigns. Bernardo Tanucci, the chief minister in Naples, went so far as to suggest depriving him of all his worldly possessions. The French foreign mi
nister, the Duc de Choiseul, abandoned diplomatic language altogether:
The Pope is a complete ninny, and his minister is a first-class fool. The insult is aimed not only at the Duke of Parma: it applies to the whole House of Bourbon. It is an act of revenge, a reprisal against those monarchs who have driven out the Jesuits. If this first detestable step is tolerated, the Roman Court, led by a man that knows no bounds, will stop at nothing. The dignity of the monarchs and the Family Compact demand that we allow no prince of this House to be insulted with impunity.
The best way to resolve the crisis, he believed, was for the House of Bourbon—France, Spain, and Naples—to send a joint memorandum to the pope, expressing its astonishment that he should have addressed such a missive, as insulting as it was unjust, to the Duke of Parma. The Holy See must now formally countermand its brief. If the pope were to refuse, diplomatic relations with Rome would be broken off for the remainder of his pontificate. Predictably, he did refuse, and in June 1768 a French army reoccupied Avignon and the Venaissin, together with Neapolitan Benevento, which had been a papal fief since the eleventh century.
Meanwhile there was another problem that refused to go away: what was to be done with the luckless exiles? It had been vaguely assumed that they would all be accommodated in Rome, but a special congregation of cardinals decided, by a majority of six to two, to deny them admission. These exiles were numbered in their thousands; the Society’s houses had no spare capacity, nor any spare funds to pay for their lodging elsewhere. An attempt was made to land some three thousand Spanish Jesuits on the island of Corsica, but this proved disastrous. For nearly forty years the island had been in revolt against its Genoese overlords; there was fighting all over, and the inhabitants had barely enough food for themselves. The new arrivals were not permitted even to disembark for well over a month, and then they were obliged to forage for themselves among a resentful and often openly hostile peasantry. Within five months sixteen members of the Castilian Province were dead.
Then, on May 15, 1768, Corsica was purchased by France. Having expelled all Jesuits from his territory four years earlier, King Louis was certainly not going to allow them to overrun his new island. They were collected up again, embarked on French ships, and dropped off at Sestri Levante, between Genoa and La Spezia, from which it was hoped that they would gradually and secretly make their way, in small parties, into the Papal States. But from the moment of their arrival on Italian soil, the attitude toward them changed. The more compassionate Italians were horrified to see these hundreds of homeless and penniless men of God, tattered and emaciated, physically and emotionally exhausted, wandering without even a definite destination in view. Clement could no longer close his doors against them. At long last they were allowed entry into papal territory, though they were forbidden to come to Rome without special permission from the Society’s general.
No similar degree of pity, however, was shown by the Bourbon powers. Nothing would now satisfy them but the universal suppression of the Jesuit order; and on Monday, January 16, the Spanish envoy in Rome handed the pope a communication from his government. Clement took it and dismissed the envoy with his blessing; only then did he open it—and he canceled all his audiences for the next two days. The shock and humiliation were too much for him, and he never properly recovered. He summoned a special consistory for February 3, but the night before suffered a massive heart attack. He was dead by morning.
His had been a sad pontificate, poisoned by the implacable hatred of the House of Bourbon for the Society of Jesus, for which he could hardly be blamed. He was, however, unimaginative and—for a Venetian—surprisingly narrow-minded.3 Perhaps, had he been a greater pope than he was, more self-confident and more decisive, he might have been able to defend the Society rather more effectively—but even then he would have been unlikely to make much difference. The fault was in the age; the Enlightenment approved of the pope as little as the pope approved of the Enlightenment. The Papacy had lost its prestige, and with it much of its power. Christian Europe might pay it lip service but very little more.
CLEMENT XIII DIED fighting to save the Jesuit order; Clement XIV killed it. Lorenzo Ganganelli was a Franciscan of humble origins who, in 1743, had, ironically enough, dedicated a book to the founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius Loyola. The conclave which, after three and a half months, elected him pope was from the very beginning dominated by the Jesuit question. It also had the distinction of being visited by Joseph II of Austria. Joseph had been emperor since the death of his father, Francis I, but exerted little real power, his mother, Maria Theresa, being still alive and very much in control. In answer to polite questioning, he gave it as his opinion that she was too pious to do anything to bring about the suppression of the order; neither, however, would she do anything to oppose that suppression, and she would on the whole be happy if it occurred. He himself felt much the same way.
It was plain from the start of the conclave that any candidate who openly favored the Jesuits would be vetoed by one or all of the Catholic powers; on the other hand, to win the election on the strength of a previous promise to abolish them would smack of simony. Ganganelli was therefore careful to tread a middle path. He let it be known that he considered the complete suppression of the order to be a possibility, no more. He probably had no very strong views one way or the other; but he was an ambitious man and he was determined to play the Jesuit card quietly—but only very quietly—to his advantage. On May 19, 1769, at the age of sixty-three, he was elected pope.
Clement XIV possessed many admirable qualities. He was highly intelligent, friendly and unassuming, and totally incorruptible, with a fine sense of humor. When, on November 26, 1769, he was taking part in the possesso—the immense procession preceding the ceremonial to take possession of the Lateran—his horse, terrified by the cheering of the vast crowd, reared up and threw him. He remarked later that he hoped that when he was on his way up to the Capitol he looked like St. Peter, but hoped even more that when he fell he looked like St. Paul. He was handicapped by a sad lack of political experience: he had never been out of Italy and had never held a diplomatic post abroad. It was perhaps his consciousness of this disadvantage that sapped his confidence. In the words of an anonymous contemporary who knew him well:
he lacks courage and stability; he is unbelievably slow in taking any decision. He deceives people with fine words and promises, weaves his web around them and enchants them. He begins by promising them the world but then makes difficulties and in true Roman fashion withholds a decision.… Anyone who seeks a favor should endeavor to obtain it at his first audience.
Cardinal François de Bernis, the French ambassador to Rome, wrote:
Clement XIV is intelligent, but his knowledge is confined to theology, church history, and a few anecdotes of court life. He is a stranger to politics, and his love of secrecy is more than his mastery of it; he takes a delight in friendly intercourse, and in the process he lays bare his inmost thoughts. He has a pleasant manner. He wants to please and is in mortal fear of displeasing. In vain he arms himself with courage; timidity is the fundamental feature of his character. In his government he will show more kindness than firmness; to the church finances he will bring order and thrift. He is frugal and active, though not a quick worker. He is cheerful, and he wants to be at peace with everyone and to live long.
That love of secrecy would cause him serious difficulties with the Sacred College. His cardinals were never confided in, nor even asked for their opinions. They began to complain and when their complaints went unheeded took matters into their own hands, boycotting the great ceremonies of the Church and leaving the pope to officiate virtually unattended. Moreover, Clement’s habit of surrounding himself with men of low degree put a severe strain on his relations with the Roman nobility, to the point where, only four months after his accession, they refused to give the ceremonial attendance that was their traditional duty. A particular irritation to them was the pope’s private secretary and favorite, a fellow F
ranciscan named Bontempi, son of a cook in Pesaro. It was to Bontempi, far more than to the papal secretary of state, Cardinal Opizio Pallavicini, that he confided his innermost thoughts and secrets.
The pope’s instinctive wish to conciliate led him, immediately on his accession, to open up discussions with Portugal and the Bourbon powers. Portugal was easily dealt with. After ten years of severed relations, virtually every Portuguese from the king down wished heartily to end the quarrel. The only exception was Pombal; but after Clement had confirmed all his nominees in various bishoprics and offered a red hat to his brother, even the dread marquis was persuaded to relent. Then, in 1770, the pope took another major step. He discontinued the annual reading of the bull In Coena Domini, in which the inclusion of Parma two years before had precipitated the Bourbon ultimatum—thereby ending forever a tradition which had continued since at least the early thirteenth century.
These gestures and others like them did something to improve relations between the two sides, but Clement was still under constant pressure and was well aware that the breach could never be healed until the Society of Jesus was dissolved once and for all. He delayed action for as long as he could, but then, in 1773, came the news that the Bourbon states were preparing for a showdown, which would almost certainly result in a complete rupture: nothing less than the secession of the most powerful Catholic states of Europe from the authority of the Holy See. Some doubts remained over Habsburg Austria, since Maria Theresa had formerly favored the Jesuits, entrusting them with the education of her children, but in April the empress, who had high hopes of marrying off her daughter Marie Antoinette to the French dauphin, the future Louis XVI, wrote to Charles III of Spain confirming that, despite the high esteem in which she held the Society, she would put no obstacle in the way of its suppression if the pope considered it expedient in the interests of Catholic unity. We have the evidence of several of those closest to her that she regretted this letter for the rest of her life; her remorse would have been greater still had she known the ultimate fate of her daughter, for whose sake she had sacrificed the Jesuit order.
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