Clement XI
The eighteenth century began with a young and hesitant pope, fifty-one-year-old Cardinal Giovanni Francesco Albani who took the name of Pope Clement XI. Almost immediately into his reign, Europe was engulfed in the War of Spanish Succession after Philip of Anjou became King Philip V of Spain, and French troops occupied the Spanish Netherlands. Now, a grand alliance was born between the mutual enemies of France –a union of England, Holland, and Spain as the “Grand Alliance.” In this case, “the pope feared the power, the boldness, and the pride of the Hapsburgs and the frivolity, presumption, and violence of the Bourbons… His greatest weakness had always been indecision; now he vacillated, desperately trying to gain time and thus successfully antagonizing both parties” (352). Regardless of the frivolous pope, the conflict was not resolved until eleven years later on New Year’s Day 1712 in the Dutch city of Utrecht in which a whole series of treaties were signed, collectively known as the Treaty of Utrecht. Increasingly in these global conflicts, the pope found himself disregarded and abandoned, and even much of the former papal lands in Italy were simply disbursed without care or consultation of the pontiff.
“The political and diplomatic prestige of the Holy See was indeed in sorrowful decline; only in doctrinal matters was the pope still listened to –up, at least, to a point” (353).
Like his predecessor, Pope Clement continued to wrestle with Jansenism in France, but most of his efforts and papal bulls backfired; they often did “more and more to destroy the rapidly waning prestige of the Papacy in France” and the dispute only continued when the pope fell ill and died in March 1721 at age seventy-one. During his twenty year reign as pope, Rome had suffered two catastrophic floods, a hurricane so fierce it caused the church bells to ring of their own accord, and a series of earthquakes that destroyed the three arches on the second tier of the Colosseum.
“Clement XI was a man of many virtues. He was deeply devout, hard-working, incorruptible, and a generous patron of the arts. His besetting fault was indecision. He lacked the instinctive political sense which guides a natural leader and was consequently unable to impose his prestige –let alone his will—upon his foreign flock. He had been genuinely reluctant to accept his elevation to the Papacy, and he never deluded himself that he had been a success” (354).
Innocent XIII, Benedict XIII, & Clement XII
“As the eighteenth century continued, it gradually became clear that the Papacy had a new enemy with which to contend, an enemy a good deal more insidious than the doctrinal differences that had plagued Christendom for well over a millennium. For this was the Age of Reason. For many churchmen, even heretics were preferable to skeptics, agnostics –relatively few people dared call themselves atheists—or anti-clerics” (354).
The first two successors to Clement XI were pious enough but did not reign for very long –Innocent XIII who was already an ill and morbidly obese, lasted for three years; and Benedict XIII, who was elected against his will, was pope for less than six years. Despite the fact that Clement XI officially abolished nepotism, the church at this time “had all the evils of nepotism without the nephews” (according to Duffy’s Saints and Sinners). “It was somehow typical of Benedict that when he did show firmness he usually did so on the wrong occasion and at the wrong time” (355). In addition to declining political prestige, the papacy also suffered significant financial setbacks during this period. Most of the papal business was entrusted to a Niccolo Coscia, a greedy scoundrel who was deeply corrupt. Naturally, he was elevated to the Sacred College where he focused his time on self-enrichment, selling off church offices, accepting bribes, populating the Curia with his own cronies, an leaving the papal coffers mostly bare. The continuing theme of corruption and incompetence characterized the history of much of the Christian church. But “The pope was too old to learn the arts of statesmanship and good government and too innocent to see the corruption and duplicity of those in whom he put his trust. He died, more of old age than anything else, on February 21, 1730 –not a moment too soon” (356).
Clement XII & Benedict XIV
The doddering old Benedict XIII was succeeded by another seventy-eight-year-old man –a wealthy Florentine named Clement XII who suffered from constant pain due to gout and was nearly blind. With his pontificate, he left behind a legacy of lost papal states and deep indebtedness when he finally died a miserable death of painful hernias and bladder trouble. Although, his personal wealth created some magnificent commissioned public works of art, such as the Trevi Fountain (by Nicola Salvi).
The conclave that followed was the longest since the Great Schism (lasting six months) before resulting in an eventual compromise candidate: Bolognese Cardinal Prospereo Lorenzo Lambertini who took the papal name of Benedict XIV. He was an amiable, charming man with a scholarly mind and a deep love of theology. He loved nothing more than roaming through the streets and chatting with passers-by. He saw his task as needing to claw back a modicum of the papacy’s reputation, with hopes of steadying the pope’s out-of-control finances. However, the War of the Austrian Succession struck and the pope dithered, bowed before public pressures, and soon saw the former papal states overwhelmed by Spanish, French, and Neapolitan soldiers. After eight years, the war ended with Frederick “The Great” of Prussia –it was the end of a war that many people, no doubt, felt was hardly worth fighting.
Turning our attention for a moment, by now the Jesuits had begun to grow increasingly unpopular. Initially founded in 1534 as an order of missionaries, they were now seen as a vast, intellectually arrogant, power-hungry, overly ambitious organization, enmeshed in international intrigue and totally unscrupulous in their operations. For years, the Jesuits had been pilloried in pamphlets from the likes of Blaise Pascal who accused the Jesuits of being shameless hypocrites. Indeed the Jesuits were blamed for nearly every atrocity across Europe: the assassinations of Henry III and Henry IV of France, the attempted killings of Queen Elizabeth and James I of England, and even the entirety of the English Civil War. Earthquakes, like the one that struck Lisbon in 1755 (as famously mentioned in Voltaire’s Candide), were blamed on the Jesuits. This led to uneasy tensions between the pope and the countries of Europe, not least of which Prussia.
While crushing debts continued to linger around the pope’s neck, at least a few positive reforms were made during this period: “mixed-marriages” between non-Christians and Christians were now tolerated by the church (at least they were not criminalized), and punishment for violating the Catholic censorship regime under the Index of banned books was marginally tamped down. Upon Benedict’s death, Horace Walpole summed up the pope’s reign as follows: “A priest without insolence or interest, a prince without favourites, a pope without nephews.” However, the pope was adored by his Roman flock, as by this point in time Rome had grown into a refuge for the faithful. Upon Benedict’s death on May 3, 1758, the whole city went into mourning.
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s 2011 single volume history of the papacy Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy.