Papal Election II

The word conclave comes from the Latin—cum clave—meaning “with a key” denoting the fact that the Cardinals are locked into the place where the election of the pope takes place.  As I mentioned yesterday this is not necessarily the Sistine Chapel and over the centuries the popes have been elected in a variety of places both in the city of Rome and beyond—sometimes far beyond—Rome. 

The Cardinals elect the pope not because they are Cardinals but because as Cardinals they are the pastors or deacons of the principal parishes of Rome.  This is a formality, of course, none of them actually functions as a pastor or deacon, but each one carries the title Cardinal priest of (name of church) or Cardinal deacon of (name of diaconal church).  In addition there are seven Cardinal bishops who hold the title of the seven ancient dioceses neighboring Rome.  These titles too are formalities.  Nevertheless, they represent the suffragen bishops, local pastors, and principal deacons of the Roman Church who for the first thousand years of the Church’s history had the right of election of the bishop of Rome.  The right of the Cardinals to elect comes from their holding title to these churches or dioceses.  There are also four patriarchs of eastern Churches in union with the See of Rome who currently are Cardinals.  Since the days of Paul VI such patriarchs, when they are named Cardinals, rank with the Cardinal bishops but do not carry a title. 

In any event to go back to the conclave and its development in the process of papal elections: in 1216, only two days following the death of Innocent III, the Cardinals meeting in Perugia were locked into the bishop’s palace for the election.  But this was a very peculiar election.  There were seventeen cardinals present and eight who were unable to be there because of the distance.  Among the eight is counted Stephan Langton who upon being named Archbishop of Canterbury in 1207, had resigned his position as Cardinal Priest of San Crisogono and so it is not clear whether or not he was still a cardinal and had a right to vote.  As he was in England and could not have returned in time, the point is moot.   The seventeen Cardinals present chose not to elect a pope.  Instead they elected a committee of two—Cardinal Ugolino de Segni, nephew of Innocent II and future Gregory IX and Guido de Palestrina—to choose the pope.  The two-man committee selected the 68 year old Cardinal Cencio Savelli, known as Camerario (the waiter) who became Honorius III.  Being locked in for the election was an innovation and seems to have been imposed by the cardinals themselves to make them focus on a quick elective process. 
The situation was different in 1241.  The Cardinals were meeting in Rome and there was great pressure on them as the Church had been at war with the Emperor, Frederick II.  The Emperor had Rome surrounded by his army and was blocking the arrival of several cardinals hostile to his interests.  He was keeping two Cardinals prisoner at Tivoli, just outside Rome.  The people of Rome under the leadership of Senator Matteo Orsini, wanting the election to be fast and efficient, forced the Cardinals under guard into the Septizodium, a ruined palace over a thousand years old on the Palatine Hill.  Conditions there were miserable.  The roof leaked—an aggravation increased by the guards stationed there urinating on the roof with their urine leaking down along with rain into the electoral chamber. The cardinals were only allowed two servants each, the food was horrid and still, after three weeks, there was no candidate.  At this point, Orsini locked the doors allowing no one in and no one out.  The situation was so bad that one Cardinal, the Englishman Robert Somercotes, the Cardinal Deacon of Sant’Eustachio, died.  Other Cardinals began to suffer health problems.  Finally on October 25, Cardinal Goffredo di Castiligone was elected as Celestine IV.  It is unknown how old Celestine was at the time of his election but he was among the oldest of the cardinals.  His health was so compromised by the conditions of the conclave that he himself died only two weeks later.  The papacy would be empty for two years until the election of Innocent IV.   Most historians consider this 1241 election the first conclave for while the 1216 election had been conducted in seclusion it was self-imposed whereas in last two weeks of the 1241 election the enclosure had been imposed on them.  Such enclosure did not always insure a quick election however, though it does so these modern days. 
Speaking of quick elections, Cardinal Sean O’Malley said that this will be a “long” conclave.  I agree but, of course, “long” is a relative term.  Five days will be a long conclave and I will be surprised if we do not have a pope by the weekend.  One friend of mine has drawn “nine” on a lottery based on which will be the decisive ballot.  That would be Thursday evening (noon EST) and that sounds about right to me.  But it is all a guess.   In the meantime, prayer is our best way of participating.  These are critical days for the Church and the choice of a chief Shepherd to lead us out of this morass is fundamental to the credibility of the Church

Papal Elections

I first thought of doing a blog on some little known aspects of the the history of the Church while I was living in Rome and after walking home one evening from dinner with some friends.  As I passed the manica lunga of the Quirinale palace it struck me that most people think that papal elections have always taken place in the Sistine Chapel when, in fact, the regular use of the Sistine for papal conclaves is rather recent. The 1800 conclave was held in the Benedictine abbey of San Giorgio in Venice due to the French occupation of Rome. The elections of 1823, 1829, 1831, and 1846 were all held in the Pauline Chapel of the Quirinale Palace, then the principal papal residence in Rome. (At the fall of the Papal States, Pius IX abandoned the Quirinale to take up residence at the Vatican and the Quirinale became the official residence of the Italian Kings and later, with the establishment of the Italian Republic, the Presidents of Italy.
While many of the popes of the sixteenth-through the eighteenth centuries had been elected in conclaves held in the Vatican Palace, the actual elections were not necessarily in the Sistine Chapel. The Pauline Chapel (The Capella Paolina) was also used for conclaves. I have also read that the small chapel frescoed by Fra Angelico, the Chapel of Nicholas V, was used at least for the 1464 and 1534 conclaves but I find this hard to believe as the chapel probably could not hold ten cardinals standing in their underwear much less even the small number of participants (15-25) typical in that period seated in their full regalia. Before the sixteenth century popes had been elected in the Dominican convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, in the Lateran, in Santa Maria Maggiore, in Santa Sabina, in Santa Maria in Cosmedin, San Pietro in Vincoli, San Gregorio Magno, San Marco, San Pancrazio, and a ramshackle palace on the Palatine called the Septizodium. In the High Middle Ages—the 12th, 13, and 14th centuries—when the papacy was notoriously peripatetic, conclaves had been held in Perugia, Viterbo, Naples, Agnani, Bologna, Ferrara, and Pisa. Some conclaves were even outside Italy—the Abbey of Cluny and in Lyon (both in France), along with Konstanz (in Switzerland) and of course Avignon where conclaves were held in 1334, 1342, 1352, 1362, and 1370.
Paul VI had residential facilities constructed for the Cardinals participating in future conclaves rather than the makeshift accommodations that had been arranged ever since the conclaves had been moved to the Vatican from the Quirinale in the conclave of 1878. He also had a potential voting hall incorporated in the Audience Hall which he had designed by Italian architect Pier Luigi Nervi, but in the interregnum after his death, the Cardinals decided that they would prefer to retain the Sistine Chapel as the place for elections.

People are surprised to discover that the Sistine Chapel has not always been the sight of papal elections.  Part of the problem here is that moderns, and especially Americans, have no sense of history. If something has been done twice in the last fifty years, it is a “tradition” and one presumes that it comes directly from Jesus to the Apostles. We need to develop some good historical sense.

Let’s talk today a bit about papal elections because you may be a bit surprised about how that procedure has evolved and also because it ties into the issue of electing bishops which is something else I would really like to explore. When St. Peter was martyred in 64 AD, the Cardinals did not gather and lock themselves into the Sistine Chapel and then proceed to dump their ballots into a golden chalice placed on the altar from which they would then be counted until one had enough votes for white smoke to signal the waiting crowds that “habemus papam” we had a pope. Indeed, there were no cardinals, no Sistine Chapel, probably no golden chalice, and really not even a “pope.” As for the crowds—hey, this was a time of persecution and the small Christian community in Rome was hiding out to protect their lives. In the early centuries, Rome chose its bishop like other local Churches. The clergy met with neighboring bishops and an assembly of the faithful to elect the bishop. They usually elected one of the principle deacons of the Church, or on occasion a priest. The neighboring bishops would then lay hands on the bishop-elect, consecrating him to his new office. They did not elect a bishop to the post as through most of the early history of the Church, once a man was made bishop of a diocese he could not transfer to another diocese. A bishop was considered “married” to his diocese. This prevented the sort of ambition and careerism which has often been a problem in the Church. As American monsignori joke “no one wants to be buried in the Cathedral of Peoria” meaning that many bishops always have their eye on a more important diocese.
It was Pope Nicholas II who at a synod of bishops in 1059 mandated the election of the Pope would be limited to the cardinals. It really wasn’t a departure from the practice of the time when popes were elected by the principal clergy of the diocese of Rome and the bishops of the seven suburbican dioceses. The Cardinal Deacons were the 14 principal deacons of the City of Rome—deacons of churches whose primary function was not a parish but a food distribution point for the needy or, in times of famine, for the general population. The major role of a deacon was not liturgical, but rather care for the poor and the suffering. The Cardinal priests were the parish priests (pastors) of the principal Roman Churches. The Cardinal bishops were (and are) the bishops of those seven sees that surround Rome. Up to this point an important (and actually essential) part of the election of the bishop of Rome was not only the election by the priests and deacons of the diocese, and the confirmation of the surrounding bishops, but the assent of the faithful. The clergy would meet, choose their candidate and receive the approval of the bishops and then present the newly elected bishop for the assent of the faithful. Crowds are fickle, however, and were often manipulated by the various factions—rival family/political groups vying for power—which would sway the election. This left the papacy at the mercy either of the Imperial faction (later called the Ghibellines) or what might be termed the “nationalist” party of the Counts of Tusculum or other local nobility (later called the Guelfs). Nicholas’s reform was primarily to eliminate the influence of the Roman rabble in order to bring stability and good decision making to the process—and it worked. He also wanted, as far as possible, to keep the influence of the Emperor to a minimum. This was part of what historians call the “Gregorian Reform” (after Pope Gregory VII, elected 1073 and the successor but one to Nicholas). By the twelfth century good order had been restored to the papacy and indeed the Gregorian Reform would see some of the best popes in the history of the Church, culminating with Innocent III who, in some respects, may have been the greatest pope in the history of the Church, and certainly one of the most significant.
So not only is the Sistine Chapel a relatively recent innovation in papal elections, but the conclave itself along with the College of Cardinals.  There are many quaint ceremonies and customs that have developed over the centuries, many of which are still functioning, but none of which are essential.  There is, for example, no reason that the College of Cardinals could not include women  Now that’s a thought. 

History of St. Peter's Basilica: neglectful popes

Vlad Dracula, pen pal of Pius II

Yesterday we talked about Nicholas V and his plans to rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica on a vast new scale.  Alas, it never happened—with his death in 1455, the project came to a sudden halt and the old church tottered on—one minor earthquake (and Rome has its share of them) away from becoming a pile of rubble.  The apse of the projected basilica stood behind the Constantinian church to a height of seven feet as a reminder that there was a need to address the problem of the structural instability of the 1100 year old structure. (Think about it: have you ever seen a building that is 1100 years old?) but the succession of fifteenth century popes never addressed the issue.  O they built a buttress here, a loggia there and put up a tomb or two, but there was no progress on what to do with the basilica itself.  Sixtus IV della Rovere built the Sistine Chapel—but that was connected with the Vatican Palace, not the Basilica.  (The Sistine Chapel is not part of the basilica, but is one of the chapels of the adjoining Vatican Palace.)  In fact, the palace was growing expedientially  as various popes added apartments for their use, preferring not to live in the suites of their predecessors.  Popes were busy people.  Nicholas had made the basilica a priority, but his successor Callistus III was busy writing bulls authorizing the Portuguese to enslave Africans and giving the impetus to the West African Slave Trade.  (Actually Nicholas had found time away from his basilica project to do the same.)  Callistus also was trying—unsuccessfully—to organize a crusade against the Turks who had captured Constantinople in 1453.  To his credit he ordered a retrial of Joan of Arc in which she was found innocent of all charges—a bit too late, however, to be of much help.  Callistus was succeeded as pope by Pius II who, under the name Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini had been a brilliant Renaissance scholar.  As pope he busied himself writing Count Dracula (the real one—Vlad III of Wallachia, aka Vlad the Impaler) encouraging him to fight against the Turks; Vlad was only too happy to find some Turks or anyone else who might help him earn his moniker.   Pius—who would have rather sat down with a glass of wine and some ancient Roman inscriptions, found himself very busy trying to organize the crusade envisioned by Callistus.  He called a Council for Mantua to get a Crusade going and in the end determined to lead it himself, but died before he could set out.  He did rebuild his home town, renamed in his honor (and well worth the visit, especially if you like Italian delis) renamed after him: Pienza (in the province of Siena in Tuscany).  And he was anxious for Church Reform, employing Nicholas of Cusa, as had Nicholas V, in making significant progress in addressing problems in the Church in the Netherlands and Rhineland.  The Basilica remained overlooked.  Nicholas of Cusa should have tried to clean up problems closer to home: just wait and see how    bad things get,  After Pius II, the next pope was Paul II—a paranoid Venetian who used excommunication of opponents—political, religious, or administrative—like other people send Christmas cards. Furthermore, he reveled in ignorance and as much a humanist as had been Pius II, Paul II was opposed to the Renaissance and its scholarship.  He much preferred eating melon and being sodomized by papal pages, one or the other (depending on whom you read) caused a fatal heart attack.  (Of course, it might have been both/and rather than either/or.)  No progress on the Basilica.  His successor, Sixtus IV, spent his time trying to murder the Medici and making his nephews cardinals.  He also had a reputation for making handsome young men cardinals (fact), supposedly in return for certain, hmmm, “favors” (allegation).  Well, I suppose it is better than pages and at least today a requisite for membership in the Sacred College is somewhat advanced age and withered looks.  Basilica status: unchanged.  But he did build the Sistine Chapel.  Sixtus was succeeded by Innocent VIII.  He was preoccupied by the problem of witches and magicians in Germany. 

"It has recently come to our attention—and not without great pain—that in some parts of Germany…Mainz, Koln, Trier, Salzburg and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, heedless of their own salvation and forsaking the Catholic faith, give themselves over to devils male and female, and by their incantations, charms, spells, and other abominable superstitions, foolish beliefs, offences, crimes, and misdeed cause the ruin and loss of offspring of women, the offspring of animals, the fruits of the earth, the grapes on the vine, the fruit of tress, as well as men and women, oxen, sheep, goats and cattle  and render men sterile."   ok--maybe there was a problem with witches in Germany but it sure sounds to me like this guy's reality coordinates could have used some realigning.  Also, I think he could have taken a bit better care of his own issues rather than worry about what was happening north of the Alps.   Innocent, (rather unusual name for such a man) himself had as many as sixteen illegitimate children.  He like hunting.  He built the “Belvedere” in the Vatican as a summer house.  He appointed Tomas de Torquemada as the Grand Inquisitor of Spain and gave Ferdinand of Aragon the sobriquet of “Catholic Majesty” long used by the Spanish Monarchs. He introduced simony in the Curia by putting up Church offices for auction.  He called for a Crusade against the Waldensians (Italian proto-Protestants in the Italian Piedmont.)  Pope Innocent was a busy boy—but as for the Basilica, well, he obviously had other things to do. 

To be continued with even worse popes.  Where did we find these guys?   

How the Vatican came to be the Pope's home

When the papacy left Avignon and returned to Rome in 1377 the papal court found the old Lateran palace which had been the official papal residence adjoining the pope’s cathedral, the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, in such ruin that it was not habitable so they took up residence in a warren of buildings adjoining the basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican. You may remember from earlier blogs (January 17 and 18) that Constantine had built basilicas over the tombs of the Apostle Paul (on the Via Ostia) and the Apostle Peter (on the Vatican hill) and that the popes kept a residence at the Vatican for those occasions when they were presiding at ceremonies in that church so that they did not have to journey from the Lateran to the Vatican or return to the Lateran the same day. Innocent III had modernized (well, "modern" for the thirteenth century) the buildings to the north of the basilica and it was here that the popes settled. Well, some of the popes settled, others preferred a variety of palaces around Rome. Paul II Barbo, for example, had rebuilt the residence of the Cardinal Priest of the Basilica of Saint Mark just north of the Capitoline Hill and made it into a splendid renaissance palace. When he was elected pope in 1474, he preferred to remain in his Palazzo Venezia than live in the Vatican and so it served as a papal residence for a number of years, (It also later served as Mussolini’s official headquarters.) Allesandro Farnese, a man who owed his cardinal’s hat to his sister (the so-called Giulia Bella –beautiful Giulia) being the mistress of Pope Alexander VI Borgia, built a magnificent palace –to my mind the most beautiful building in Rome—called the Palazzo Farnese and when he was elected Paul III he too opted to live in this palace even though it was still undergoing its “finishing touches.” This doesn’t mean that the Vatican Palace was being neglected Nicholas V (1447-1455) did a substantial renovation of the older buildings and Alexander VI Borgia constructed new apartments for himself during his reign (1492-1503). Nicholas V’s private chapel was frescoed by Fra Angelico with scenes of the lives of Saints Stephen and Laurence and is—to my mind—the most exquisitely beautiful room in the Vatican Palace—or at least those parts of the palace that we mere mortals get to see. It is a small room that can hold probably no more than ten or twelve people, but the aforementioned frescoes are windows into another world. The Borgia apartment, on the other hand, is a heavy construction—massive and powerful and today houses the Paul VI collection of contemporary (20th century) art. Alexander VI Borgia’s successor, Julius II, despised Alexander and would not live in his apartments so he had apartments of his own constructed directly over them and decorated by Raphael. Like the Borgia apartments, they are today part of the Vatican Museums.
Julius’s uncle, Sixtus IV, (pope 1471-1484) had built the Sistine (named after Sixtus) Chapel between 1473 and 1482. This chapel was built on the site of and to replace an earlier Cappella maggiore (Greater Chapel) which was used for the semi-public papal ceremonies. It apparently was built to the same dimensions of this earlier chapel 134’ by 44’—said to be the dimensions of the temple of Solomon. It would be Julius who would see the decoration of the chapel however, hiring Michelangelo to paint the vault.
Although Paul III Farnese preferred his family palace, he did not ignore his official residence and had the architect Antonio Sangallo the younger—who at the time was serving as the architect of the new Saint Peter’s Basilica that was being built— build the greast reception room—the Sala Regia—and the Pauline chapel in the Vatican Palace. Sangallo also built the Scala Regia to connect the papal apartments with St. Peter’s Basilica. This staircase would later be restored into today’s majestic staircase by Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini. (You really do need to go and see all this beauty for yourself.) in the last of the sixteenth century Gregory XIII (reigned 1572-1585) and his successor, Sixtus V (reigned 1585-1590 and one of my favorite popes) built the block of the palace overlooking Saint Peter’s Square where the actual papal apartments are located. This is ironic in as that Gregory had another building project which would result in those apartments sitting empty most nights for several centuries. But more on that in a few weeks. Enough of papal residences. I want to get back to Anti-Catholicism in America, the building of the Vatican Basilica, and those troublesome American nuns that the Vatican wants to “investigate.” Maybe somebody needs to investigate the Vatican. Hmmm.

Today's image is the Diaconal Ordination of Saint Laurence by Fra Angelico, Chapel of Nicholas V

Papal Conclaves

I was walking home last evening after dinner with some friends and as I passed the manica lunga of the Quirinale palace it struck me that most people think that papal elections have always taken place in the Sistine Chapel when, in fact, the regular use of the Sistine for papal conclaves is rather recent. The 1800 conclave was held in the Benedictine abbey of San Giorgio in Venice due to the French occupation of Rome. The elections of 1823, 1829, 1831, and 1846 were all held in the Pauline Chapel of the Quirinale Palace, then the principal papal residence in Rome. (At the fall of the Papal States, Pius IX abandoned the Quirinale to take up residence at the Vatican and the Quirinale became the official residence of the Italian Kings and later, with the establishment of the Italian Republic, the Presidents of Italy.
While many of the popes of the sixteenth-through the eighteenth centuries had been elected in conclaves held in the Vatican Palace, the actual elections were not necessarily in the Sistine Chapel. The Pauline Chapel (The Capella Paolina) was also used for conclaves. I have also read that the small chapel frescoed by Fra Angelico, the Chapel of Nicholas V, was used at least for the 1464 and 1534 conclaves but I find this hard to believe as the chapel probably could not hold ten cardinals standing in their underwear much less even the small number of participants (15-25) typical in that period seated in their full regalia. Before the sixteenth century popes had been elected in the Dominican convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, in the Lateran, in Santa Maria Maggiore, in Santa Sabina, in Santa Maria in Cosmedin, San Pietro in Vincoli, San Gregorio Magno, San Marco, San Pancrazio, and a ramshackle palace on the Palatine called the Septizodium. In the High Middle Ages—the 12th, 13, and 14th centuries—when the papacy was notoriously peripatetic, conclaves had been held in Perugia, Viterbo, Naples, Agnani, Bologna, Ferrara, and Pisa. Some conclaves were even outside Italy—the Abbey of Cluny and in Lyon (both in France), along with Konstanz (in Switzerland) and of course Avignon where conclaves were held in 1334, 1342, 1352, 1362, and 1370.
Paul VI had residential facilities constructed for the Cardinals participating in future conclaves rather than the makeshift accommodations that had been arranged ever since the conclaves had been moved to the Vatican from the Quirinale in the conclave of 1878. He also had a potential voting hall incorporated in the Audience Hall which he had designed by Italian architect Pier Luigi Nervi, but in the interregnum after his death, the Cardinals decided that they would prefer to retain the Sistine Chapel as the place for elections.

The photo is the Quirinale Palace taken from the Castle San Angelo. From this perspective it bears an uncanny resemblance to the Potala