The conclave : a sometimes secret and occasionally bloody history of papal elections

189 Pages·2003·0.538 MB·English

by  Michael J. Walsh

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The Conclave
A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally
Bloody History of Papal Elections
Michael Walsh
SHEED& WARD
Lanham • Chicago • New York • Toronto • Oxford
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This Sheed & Ward paperback edition of The Conclaveis an edited republication
of the edition first published in Norwich, Norfolk, U.K., in 2003. It is reprinted by
arrangement with Canterbury Press Norwich and the author.
Copyright © 2003 by Canterbury Press Norwich
First Sheed & Ward paperback edition 2003
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
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Contents
Preface vii
1 In Times of Persecution 1
2 The End of Empire 16
3 Descent into Chaos 36
4 Attempting Reform 56
5 The Invention of the Conclave 73
6 Princely Pontiffs 94
7 The Great Powers Take a Hand 114
8 Modern Times 137
Afterword: How to Spot a Pope 159
Appendix: Chronological List of the Popes 167
Bibliography 179
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Preface
When suggesting a book to a publisher it is not a good idea to say
that no one has ever before written on the proposed theme. The
publisher will invariably answer that there is a good reason why
they haven’t. Luckily, Canterbury Press in England and Sheed &
Ward in the United States did not respond in that manner to my
suggestion of a book on the history of papal elections. So here it is.
It rapidly became clear, however, that there is a good reason why
no such book had hitherto existed: it proved to be practically
impossible to write.
The idea I presented to the publisher was to produce a fairly
straightforward book, one which kept the story simple. That was
not at all as easy as it sounds. The factors deciding who was chosen
for Bishop of Rome – as pope, in other words, for the two terms are
interchangeable – were often distinctly complex. Not infrequently,
for instance, they entailed attitudes to heresies which, had I
attempted to explain them (even were I able), would have made
what was intended to be a fairly short book a mammoth tome. I
may have said in the course of the text a tiny bit about Arianism,
but there is next to nothing about Monophysitism or Monothelit-
ism, and I have never dared engage in the Three Chapters contro-
versy (I am not alone in this). I have avoided talking of the theories
of the Franciscan Spirituals, have said nothing about the nature of
grace, Jansenism or Quietism – though there is a word or two on
Gallicanism because I could not get around it. Though I am a
greateradmirer of the Jesuits, I have shamefully said nothing about
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viii Preface
ff
the impact on the papacy of the Chinese Rites a air. And so on.
Even the Protestant Reformation gets only a passing mention.
But there are also other things I have not been able to say for
reasons of space. Some of them I even knew about, such as the
holiness or otherwise of some of the candidates for the papacy,
or family feuds and the dynastic ambitions of not a few of the
ff
Supreme Ponti s, which seem so wholly inappropriate to our
twenty-first-century reckoning. I would most certainly have liked to
write more about the cardinals, the Sacred College of Cardinals as it
is sometimes called, and about legislation governing the sede
vacante (“vacant see” or “seat” – the period between the death of
one pope and the election of the next). Perhaps someday I will do so.
My interest in the legislation was aroused by an extremely useful
website which I discovered and have since been recommending to
all and sundry. It is put together by Professor Salvador Miranda,
and is to be found at http://www.fiu.edu/~mirandas/cardinals.htm.
I would have been lost without it. It tells you, among other things,
who attended each conclave and who did not – though not, alas,
how each one voted. There are likewise a number of books upon
which I particularly depended.All details are to be found in the bib-
liography, but it goes withoutsaying that writing this would have
been a great deal more problematic without J. N. D. Kelly’s The
Oxford Dictionary of Popes, Philippe Levillain’s three-volume The
Papacy: An Encyclopedia, Giancarlo Zizola’s Il Conclave, and a fas-
cinating study by Francis Burkle-Young, Passing the Keys. I am lost
in admiration at Professor Burkle-Young’s sleuthing. Such mis-
interpretations as there are, and in almost two thousand years of
history you can scarcely avoid a few, are definitely my own.
I should like to thank the editor of The Tablet for permission
to quote in the afterword parts of an article that originally
appeared in his excellent weekly. I am grateful, too, to Dr. Richard
Price of Heythrop College, University of London, for texts on
elections in the early Church.
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Preface ix
I am conscious that, just at this moment, there are a number of
books appearing with the same title as this one, or something
similar. None of them, as far as I am aware, has the same subtitleor
quite the same theme, because they are mainly concerned with
who is to be the next pope. This book says nothing about that
specific, and rather risky, topic, partly at least because I did not
want it to date too quickly. I have bent this principle as far as
providing a final section that gives the reader, I hope, something to
gossip about as the next papal election looms.
Still, there is no escaping the fact that there is a string of books
already in the shops or loitering in publishers’ catalogs with
“Conclave” in the title. I am reminded of P. G. Wodehouse’s
preface to one of his novels. He had, he said, discovered that several
other volumes had already appeared or were about to appear with
ff
the same title as his latest o ering. But he hoped his own volume
might nevertheless be included in a list of the ten best books to
appear that year called Summer Lightning.
Mutatis mutandis, I echo the sentiment.
Michael Walsh
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1
In Times of Persecution
Nowhere is the blend of political, religious and social elements
more apparent than in the papal elections. In their intensity and
passion, they matched, and in some cases even surpassed, the
turbulence surrounding imperial elections. Many papal elections
involved violence, chicanery and corruption on a grand scale.
Blood ran in the streets of Rome, gold changed hands in the
corridors of power, rival factions pumped out propaganda and
ambitious men caballed around the deathbeds of the popes. The
high passions and low intrigues that this involved have a
familiar, almost contemporary ring. The fire and spice of those
times comes through to us in the surviving documents of the
period. This is the raw red meat of papal history, this is not the
desiccated, pre-packed portions often served up in the guise of
papal history.
ff
The quotation above, from Je rey Richards’s book The Popes and
the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages, refers to the shenanigans of
papal history between the end of the fifth century and the middle
of the eighth, but it could be said of almost any period, at least
down to relatively modern times, in the story of the Popes of
Rome.
“Pope” simply means “father.” It comes from the Greek “pap-
pas” and is still used in Greece of parish priests. In the Western, or