The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally Bloody History of Papal Elections

The Conclave

A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally Bloody History of Papal Elections

Michael Walsh

S
HEED
& W
ARD

Lanham • Chicago • New York • Toronto • Oxford

This Sheed & Ward paperback edition of
The Conclave
is 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.

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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 Ponti
   ff
   s 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

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 greater admirer of the Jesuits, I have shamefully said nothing about

viii
Preface

the impact on the papacy of the Chinese Rites a
ff
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 Supreme Ponti
ff
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 without saying 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.

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 subtitle or 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 the same title as his latest o
ff
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

1

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.

The quotation above, from Je
ff
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

2
The Conclave

Latin, Church it was used of bishops from the third century onward, including the Bishop of Rome. From the eighth cen- tury onward the Bishops of Rome began to use it of themselves in o
ffi
cial documents, and in the eleventh century Pope Gregory VII demanded that in the West the term should be applied only to the Bishops of Rome, and to no one else. In the East to this day the Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria is still known as the Pope.

The Pope, then, is the Bishop of Rome. Whoever becomes Bishop of Rome also becomes, by the fact of his election to that o
ffi
ce, the Pope, and head on earth of the Roman Catholic Church

– though exactly what authority the Pope can exercise over the Church by virtue of that o
ffi
ce has changed greatly in the course of the centuries and is still a matter of much debate within Catholicism.

Catholics also believe that the choice of the Pope is inspired by the Holy Spirit. That is something which is quite di
ffi
cult to credit from time to time, given the skulduggery mentioned above which this book will chronicle. But Catholics are, on the whole, laid back about such problems. There is a joke among Catholics that the Trinity – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit – were discussing where to spend their annual holidays. The details vary, except for the punch line, but one version has it that the Father suggested Antarctica because he had heard about the melting ice caps and wanted to see for himself the devastation the human race was wreaking on his creation. The Son, on the other hand, suggested a visit to Latin America, for he knew that Liberation Theologians were giving a new and radical interpreta- tion to the Gospel he had preached, and he wanted to see how their message was being received. God the Holy Spirit clinched the debate, however. He suggested Rome, because he hadn’t been there for two thousand years.