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. 

The Gregorian Reform: Pope Versus Emperor or why Gregory is so Great

Henry IV, Holy Roman
Emperor from 1056-1106

We looked at the imposition of celibacy and the elimination of simony as two of the tree main issues of the Gregorian Reformation; the third issue is called the Investiture Conflict.  Bishops and Abbots of major monasteries were not only religious officials; they were important political officers in the Empire, in France, in England and other Christian states.  As a result, the Emperor or the various kings had a grave concern in who might be bishop or abbot in the various jurisdictions.  In England the bishops and great abbots were ex officio part of the King’s Great Council. (This is before the evolution of Parliament where the bishops and major abbots would sit with the peers.) In the Empire some bishops had a vote in the election of the German King (who in fact was the Emperor).  In all nations, the bishops and abbots controlled vast amounts of lands that belonged to the Church and most had feudal duty to their respective sovereigns to produce knights and soldiers to assist the king in time of war.  Moreover, most sovereigns relied on the leading churchmen to fill key government posts—or rather, named key advisors to lucrative Church positions in order to provide them with income rather than pay them from the often strained royal purse.  And many sovereigns placed junior members of their families, or members of the families of political allies into Church positions to provide these often unemployable folk with a job.  This does not make for good Church administration.  Of course bishops and abbots were technically “elected” by their respective chapters, but an Emperor or King would make some generous gifts of lands and or royal privileges to secure the necessary votes for their candidates to win the prelacy in question.       Once the papacy had freed itself from Imperial control by structuring the papal election to be the sole prerogative of the Cardinal Bishops, Priests, and Deacons of Rome, the popes were anxious to wrest control of the bishoprics from the secular princes.  They knew this would be a long and arduous task  but they also understood the power of symbols and rituals to shape the way people perceive reality.  Gregory VII (pope from 1073-1085) issued a canon (a church law) in 1075 prohibiting secular princes from investing bishops and abbots with the insignia of their office. (Gregory VII is one of the two popes referred to as "Gregory the Great"--the other being Gregory I.)   Up to this time the custom had crept in that the sovereign, Emperor or King as the case may be, gave the new prelate his ring, his miter, and his pastoral staff.  It was a clear sign to all present—prelate, clergy, and people—that the bishop or abbot held his authority from the Sovereign.  By taking away this privilege, the pope was making it clear to all that the Church was independent of the political power.  We Americans do not understand symbols and vastly underrate the power they have on the human consciousness and so it all seems to us like a tempest in a teapot.   Of course, burn a flag and suddenly we get the idea. It is just a piece of cloth, after all, isn’t it?  No.   But to the Emperor, Henry IV, Gregory’s depriving him of the right to bestow the signs of office on prelates was a very clear challenge to his imperial authority.  In fact, Henry was anxious to reassert imperial power not only over the bishops, but over the papacy.  He was not pleased that this system of Cardinals electing the pope had deprived him of the power his father, Henry III, had when he appointed Clement II, Damasus II, and Leo IX (see blog entry for August 13^th).  Henry decided it was time for a showdown in the OK Corral, or in this case, the Forum Romanum.  Henry convoked a synod at Worms which declared Gregory deposed as pope.  To be fair to Henry, as stormy relations had developed over the Emperor’s declared rights to invest bishops (and in fact to name them to their sees) Gregory had threatened to declare the Emperor not only excommunicated but as an excommunicate deposed from Imperial office.  Now we come to the nub of the problem, it was not over investing bishops—that was just the neuralgic point—it was who was in chief in Christendom—pope or emperor.  Neither one was about to back down.  Well, unfortunately for Henry (and ultimately for Gregory, but for the good luck of the Church), the Emperor had to back down.  Henry was young (25) and inexperienced and he had some very rebellious nobles in Germany.  When they rose in revolt Henry realized he couldn’t fight his nobles at home and the pope abroad—and as the nobles were the most pressing threat, he had to make peace with the pope.  So off he went to Italy where he stood barefoot and in a hair-shirt for three days in the courtyard of the Countess Matilda’s castle at Canossa.   Matilda was an immensely power woman, Countess of Tuscany but with lands that bordered France and Germany as well.  She was (at this point) trusted by both Gregory and Henry—though her greater loyalty lay with Gregory as Henry would find out.  Gregory had sought refuge with her at her castle when he heard that Henry was coming down into Italy.  Gregory at first had not realized that Henry was coming as a penitent.  This was not a wrong judgment because Henry was, in fact, anything but penitent.   In the end, Gregory absolved Henry but alas, Henry was not sincere in his penitence.  As soon as he got back to Germany and whipped his nobles into shape and got his empire under control, he came back to Italy with an army and headed right to Rome.  Well, not right to Rome.  First he went after Matilda of Tuscany for her support of Gregory.  He managed to seize much of Tuscany and declare her deposed, but he never managed to defeat her and she and his allies would fight him, finally defeating him at Canossa in 1090.  But that takes us too far from our main story.  Henry arrived in Rome and declared Gregory deposed and arranged for the election of Clement III (whom history regards as an anti-pope).  Gregory ended up fleeing for his life and Robert Guiscard, the Norman conqueror of Naples took him in for refuge.  Gregory died at Salerno in 1085.  This was the beginning of a war relationship that would continue for just under two centuries between the papacy and the Salian and Hohenstaufen Emperors until the tragic death of Conradin in 1268. The Conradin story has always broken my heart.  You're going to have to look it up for yourself as it is not pertinent to our saga, but I would recommend Geoffrey Barraclough's version in The Origins of Modern Germany.
     Gregory lost the battle but the Church won the war.  Emperors still continued to meddle in the election of bishops and abbots, as did the other European sovereigns,  but the power of the Emperor over the Church was effectively broken—not shattered, but broken.  Winning the independence of the Church from the Empire was probably the most successful aspect of the Gregorian Reform—certainly more successful than imposing celibacy or eliminating the buying and selling of Church offices.  Perhaps in our next few postings we can look at some of the current issues of Church and politics and see what might need some reform today.     

The Reform of Papal Elections--part I

Santa Maria in Cosmedin, one of

the seven ancient diaconal Churches

that served as a food distribution

station for Rome's poor in the ealry

and central Middle Ages

Let’s take a look at papal elections as the eleventh century reforms in this procedure are essential to the Gregorian Reform.  You may recall from a wide number of previous entries that one of the chief problems facing the Church in the ninth and tenth centuries was the unstable manner the Romans had of selecting a bishop for themselves.  The process had degenerated into mob violence with the various factions of the Roman mob controlled by any one of several Roman families, most notably the Theophylact clan who were Dukes of Spoleto and Counts of Tusculum and the Crescentii—an ancient Roman family.  For the most part it didn’t matter which family won out in the struggle—the papacy and the Church suffered either way.  The great Roman families all wanted control of the papacy in order to control the vast wealth that had come to the Roman Church and the political power—since the Pope was (usually) not only the spiritual leader of the Roman Diocese but the temporal ruler of much of central Italy. 
     Ever since the earliest days of the Church, not only at Rome but throughout Christendom, bishops were elected by the clergy and faithful of their diocese and then confirmed by the bishops of the surrounding Churches who gathered to consecrate the new bishop through the laying-on-of-hands and the invocation of the Holy Spirit.  As the centuries went on this process often degenerated into mob activity.  One of the most famous examples was the election of a bishop in Milan in 374 when competing factions—one Arian, the other orthodox, were fighting in the streets and the civil magistrate sent to put down the disturbance, a catechumen named Ambrose, ended up being chosen despite the fact that not only was he not a priest but he was not even yet baptized.  It was, of course, a great choice—Saint Ambrose is one of the great bishops of the Church.  Most of the time, and especially in Rome, the outcome was not so fortunate.  Part of this was that the electoral process was out of control.  The clergy numbered in the hundreds and the faithful of the Roman Church was nothing more than a mob. Changes had to be made.
    By the early Middle Ages, the seventh or eighth centuries, in Rome the election devolved on the priests in charge of the principle churches of the city as well as the seven deacons attached to the papal household, and the deacons who headed up the seven diaconal churches.  These diaconal churches were not parish churches, or even primarily worship sites; they were  centers where relief was given to the poor—like Catholic Charities centers today.  One of their most important functions was distribution of grain to the poor—grain from the vast papal estates in Sicily and southern Italy was brought to Rome for poor-relief.  In addition to the principle priests and deacons—there were many more priests and deacons in the city other than these ones who had greater responsibility—the bishops of Rome’s seven suburbican (adjoining) sees formed part of the electoral process.  It fell to them to ordain the new pope if he were not a priest and to consecrate him a bishop if and when he was.  It was very rare in the early Middle Ages for the new pope to be a bishop as there were canons which forbad a bishop to move from one diocese to another—even to Rome and the papacy.  A bishop was considered “married” to the Church of which he was bishop and being consecrated a bishop was a life-long commitment.  This helped avoid some of the ambitious ladder-climbing that too often mars the hierarchy today.  Sometimes, but in those early years, not often, this canon was overlooked.  Election of the Roman bishop by the city’s principal priests, deacons, and the suburbican bishops was not sufficient however.  Before the candidate could be consecrated and enthroned, he had to be presented to the faithful for their acclamation.  This is where the mob violence often came in.   
There had been an attempt in the fifth century to replace the popular election process by having a pope appoint his successor.  Anastasius II who reigned from 496-498 prohibited this practice and insisted that the pope, like other bishops, had to be elected by the clergy and people.  In the seventh an d eighth centuries The Emperors at Constantinople claimed the right to confirm the papal election but this practice fell into disuse after Zachary I in 741.  Emperors also claimed the right to depose popes and while a number were forced to resign,  by the end of the eighth century the actual power of the Byzantine Emperors to enforce their decrees in central or Northern Italy was nil.  (Southern Italy was a different story and remained under Greek control into the tenth century.)  As the Constantinople emperors lost control of Italy and Rome, it created a power vacuum that the Roman mobs filled.  We saw what happened at the end of the ninth and into the early tenth centuries when the papacy went through what was probably its absolute low-point with the “pornacracy” of the Theophylact family controlling the papacy through the machinations of the mother-daughter team of papal mistresses, mothers, grandmothers of Theodora and Marozia. 
     Stephen III was the pope (768-772) who first used the term “cardinal” to describe the priests and deacons who appointment to the principal churches gave them voice in selecting the new pope.  It came from the Latin, cardo, for hinge or pivot—the idea being that the priests of the principal churches and the deacons in charge of the seven diaconal charity stations were the operational pieces of the administrative machinery of the Roman Church that held it together. From the fifth century onwards, Rome had seen a surplus of churches being built as monastic foundations were made inside the city, as prominent citizens decided to build family churches for their special events—especially for burial, and as various civic organizations built churches in which their members could gather for prayers.  Wealthy individuals whose petitions had been answered through the invocation of a particular martyr or saint often built a church as a thank-offering to their heavenly patron.  In the same way, the number of clergy was growing fast as the elaborate papal ceremonial developed and as these various new churches needed clergy to carry on the services.  Many of these clergy came to Rome from all over Europe and had no history with the Roman Church.  Morevover, it became impractical to allow a clergy numbering in the hundreds, between priests and deacons, to have a voice in selecting the papal candidate to present to the faithful for acclamation.   (The lesser clergy—subdeacons, acolytes, exorcists, lectors, etc. never had a voice in the selection process.)  Thus by designating certain churches, the older and more important, as cardinal churches and their clergy as cardinal priests or cardinal deacons to whom the right of nomination was reserved a more manageable system was devised.  But it would still be almost three centuries before the right was exclusively theirs.  It still resided with the Roman faithful—or as we have seen, the Roman mob—to accept the candidate offered.   Further changes were still needed if Rome was to have decent popes. 

A Ghoulish Tale of Popes and Pimps

We will come back to the history of anti-Catholicism in America in a few days but I am anxious to return to the topic of the Pornocracy of the late ninth and tenth centuries—the moral low point of the papacy when two women, Marozia and her mother, Theodora, controlled the papacy, being each the mistress of a pope, and Theodora being the grandmother of, and Marozia the mother of a pope. But it is not the sex scandal I want to talk about today but rather I want to backpedal a bit to a particularly ghoulish episode that predates the rise of Marozia but is still part of the story, a part of the story that is a Halloween sort of tale. Just to alert you to what this will build to, this period provides the backdrop to the Pope Joan story (was there really a lady pope???) as well as the origins of the Holy Roman Empire. And there is some remote—quite remote—background to the issue of Church and State. Stay tuned, but meanwhile…

As I had mentioned in that earlier blog on the pornocracy (January 11, 2011), in the ninth and tenth centuries there was struggle among several Roman factions to gain control of the papacy, not for spiritual reasons—nobody at this point was much interested in spiritual things—but because the papacy controlled vast estates in central Italy and even as far away as Sicily, and whoever controlled the papacy had huge economic and political power not only in Rome but various parts of Italy. Popes were elected at this point by an assembly of bishops and clergy who then would present their candidate to the Roman People for their approval. The approval of the people was essential and were a candidate not to receive it, the clergy would have to choose another candidate whom they would approve. The problem was complex. The clergy could be bought or, failing that, intimidated. The people—well they often degenerated into mob rule, following the lead of whoever controlled the mob. The Dukes of Spoleto often had the upper hand in papal elections, but there was at times some opposition that managed to get another candidate elected. In 891 a distinctly unworthy candidate, Formosus (the name is Latin for “handsome”) was elected pope. He double-crossed the Spoleto faction and supported Arnulf of Carinthia for political power and influence in Italy. he died shortly after he had crowned Arnulf. Arnulf himself died shortly afterwards and before he could crush the House of Spoleto. His successor, Boniface VI, was even more unlucky, reigning only fifteen days. The Spoleto faction then managed to get their candidate, Stephen VI, elected to succeed Boniface. The year was still 896—how time flies when there is intrigue.
Now the challenge was how to make sure that the supporters of Formosus did not engineer a return to power of the anti-Spoleto faction. What the Spoleto partisans needed to do was to get everyone of Formosus’ party out of power. To that end Stephen VI convoked a synod to “try” Formosus for various irregularities including alleged simony. They exhumed the body of Formosus, dead these several months, dressed it in papal robes and seated it on the papal throne with a deacon standing alongside to answer for the now cadaverous pope. The trial was a foregone conclusion, of course. Formosus was posthumously deposed, the fingers with which he gave his blessing were cut off, his body was stripped naked and thrown in the Tiber. Moreover all the acts of his papacy were annulled—including the ordinations he had performed. This meant, of course, that the various priests and deacons and minor clerics who had served in his administration and still held their positions—and the priests and deacons with the right to vote in papal electios—were all degraded from sacred office and their positions in the papal administration. The anti-Spoleto party had been disemboweled. Once Stephen had done the work he patrons wanted him to do and eliminated the opposition, the Spoleto faction had no need of him and arranged for his murder.
Before we go on, it might be worth our while to look at the matter of annulling ordinations or declaring orders invalid. There is a long history of this in the Church going back to the various schisms and heresies of the fourth and fifth centuries when various parties would declare the sacramental system of their opposition “invalid.” There were at the time no criteria for this procedure and it seems to have been more of a polemical tool of one faction to weaken the authority of another. In later times it might have been connected with simony (the buying or selling of ecclesiastical offices), the alleged simony invalidating the ordination because of various canons that declared simoniacs ineligible for office. It was sometimes alleged that heretical opinions of the ordinand, the ordaining prelate, or the community for which the candidate was being ordained, invalidated the Orders, but then the issue is is "what is heresy?" Certainly denial of the Trinity, or of the two natures in the one Person of Christ qualify as heresy, but is all theological difference a matter of heresy? How far does one have to depart from “orthodoxy” to be a heretic? What doctrines are open for difference of opinion, which are not? If this were simply a matter of theology, perhaps the knot could be undone, but history makes it a very complex issue as there has not been consistent practice on this issue over the centuries. To the historian it seems that validity of Orders is usually a question of polemics that disguises its malicious intent as substantive doctrinal points. Perhaps this topic is worth looking at in more detail in the future as the practice of declaring invalid the orders of one faction by another became a very serious issue at the Reformation and indeed remains a serious issue and block to Ecumenism.
In any case, Stephen’s successor, Romanus, was deposed by one or another Roman faction (read: mob) after only three months. His successor, Theodore II—the son of the once-schismatic Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius(and we have a story there) reigned only 20 days, but in those 20 days managed to annul the Cadaver Synod and restore Formosus to the list of popes, reburying his body and re-instating his clergy. His successor, John IX, reigned two years and confirmed Theodore’s restoration of Formosus. Benedict IV reigned three years, 900-903. His successor, Leo V was deposed and murdered by anti-pope Christopher who, in turn, was turn murdered by his successor, Sergius III. Sergius was the gentleman friend of Marozia—and thus we are into the pornacracy. Sergius, by the way, annulled the decisions of Theodore II and John IX and reinstated the decisions of the Cadaver Synod. He was, of course, tied into the Spoleto faction; his mistress, Marozia, was the fifteen-year-old daughter of the leader of the Spoleto party, Theophylact, Count of Tusculum. Sergius was the first pope, if not to wear the triregnum, the papal tiara (which at this point had only a single crown) to be depicted wearing it.
Here we see popes being deposed, exhumed, annulled, murdered, pimped, and almost any combination of the above. As one can image the papacy had no moral credibility at this period and it was a low point not only of papal morals but of papal authority. The papacy has had its ups and its downs; it did not always have the moral authority or actual power it has exercised in the twentieth century under men like Benedict XV, Pius XI or Pius XII. Bishops beyond the reach of papal authority—and that was most bishops in Europe of what was developing into both Eastern and Western Churches—governed their own dioceses without any reference to the papacy except—perhaps—the occasional prayer in the liturgical litanies where his name might be mentioned. There would be other episodes where papal power waned—the fourteenth century, for example—but it never waned as greatly as this period of the ninth and tenth centuries. There would be episodes as lurid—or even worse (just wait until we talk about the Banquet of the Chestnuts and the Borgias)—but not as prolonged and not as fundamentally corrupt. There is more than one lesson here and some of them are very profound, but let’s just take this one from the Cadaver Synod: the Office is only as respectable (I won’t say “holy”) as the man who holds it, and the Church is (historically) only as holy as its members.

the image today is the Jean-Paul Laurens depiction of the Cadaver Synod.