On Papal Conclaves/Chapter 8
VIII.
IN the controversy waged as to what Pius IX. should have done in regard to recent events, the advocates of a policy of acquiescence in what befell his temporal estate, have been freely met by the assertion that as Pope he was bound by oaths which absolutely interdicted his doing so. On looking into the matter it will appear, however, that this is not correct. Whatever oaths Pius IX. took were sworn to by him freely, and of his own accord, in the plenitude of his authority, and not at all as conditional to his acquisition thereof. Cardinals are invested with the berretta only, after having repeated a prescribed oath, but no Pope is subjected to any oath whatever, on being elevated to his supreme dignity, and if, at a later moment, it has been customary for Popes to swear the observance of certain ancient Constitutions, there is nothing to distinguish between the binding force of these oaths, and those which Popes are not only universally held to be able to absolve themselves from, but from which, in regard to the particular points under discussion, they have actually on several occasions dispensed themselves.
It is a received custom for Popes to swear the observance of certain Bulls and Constitutions—amongst which is one having special reference to the preservation free from waste of the endowments of the Church,—but these oaths are taken of their own free will, and in the exercise of their absolute powers, and by no means as indispensably conditional to their legitimate acquisition of full Pontifical authority. Soon after election the Pope holds habitually a Consistory, but there is no fixed period within which it must meet. Its convocation depends on his pleasure, and generally happens not more than two months after accession. On this occasion the new Pope has been in the habit to record his solemn adherence to divers regulations and instructions that have emanated from various predecessors, amongst which are to be particularly named a Bull by Julius II. declaring ipso facto void a Papal election due to simoniacal practices, and a Bull by Alexander VII. against the alienation of Church property. This is the instrument that has been invoked with so much pertinacity by those who affirm that, in the matter of his temporal estate, the Pope is bound by ties that absolutely deprive him of all power to make any surrender of dominions he has succeeded to. We believe that it requires only to look a little into the history of this celebrated Bull to he convinced that there is no foundation for the exceptional sacredness thus ascribed to it, and which, if real, would at once limit the Pope's avowedly unbounded dispensing power.
The Bull of Alexander VII. does not profess to be an original statute, but merely a revival and confirmation of enactments by former Popes that had been either repealed or lost sight of, and the texts whereof are incorporated at length in this deed. The first of these instruments, and therefore the groundwork of the whole Bull, is one issued by Pius V. in 1567, which begins by expressing grief that 'divers persons too ambitious and covetous of rule' should have ventured to inveigle several Popes by false suggestions of policy into the step of infeoffing, under various titles, possessions belonging to the Church, whereby these had become virtually alienated, to the signal impoverishment of that institution. Desirous to remedy this state of things, Pius V., as he goes on to say, had taken counsel with the Cardinals, who unanimously had sworn not only to observe the present Constitution, but also neither to assent to any Pope attempting alienations contrary to its tenor, nor to seek or accept any dispensation from the oath they themselves had sworn thereto.' Accordingly he proceeded to declare and pronounce all such infeoffments, grants, or alienations of Church possessions null and void, any persons guilty of counselling such hereafter, on any pretext, even of 'necessity or manifest utility,' incurring pain of excommunication by that fact; and to invest this Bull with the highest character of sacredness, the Cardinals present in Consistory swore to it by proxy for their absent brethren, while it was also expressly ordered that this same oath should be administered to all future Cardinals before receiving the hat, and that it should be added to those taken by the Sacred College before entering a Conclave. Moreover, it was enjoined that a new Pope, 'after his accession, should promise and swear the same, and after his coronation reiterate his promise and oath by special confirmatory rescripts, and that if this, which cannot be believed, were to be refused or postponed by the Pope, then, in the first secret Consistory, the Cardinals, and specially their Dean, and with him the Capi d'Ordine, should incessantly and most pressingly with every instance ask, pray, and implore the observance of these presents, and take most diligent care that this should happen.' These very elaborate prescriptions received solemn confirmation in full from various subsequent Popes, until Gregory XIV. modified the binding force of the engagements he had himself sworn on accession, in conformity to custom, by the issue of a rescript highly illustrative of the absolute nature of Papal authority. This Pope, who reigned only a few months, was a vehement partisan of Spain in the war of the League, and was probably actuated in his relaxation of stringent obstacles in the way of turning property into money by his desire to assist Philip II. in his undertakings. The changes he wrought in the letter of the law were however shortlived, for his immediate successor, Clement VIII., abrogated them by a Consistorial decree of the 26th June 1592, admitted into the body of Alexander VII.'s Bull, in which the very remarkable circumstances are recounted that marked Gregory's act of legislation. Pope Clement tells the world that at 'a secret Consistory held at St. Mark's, on Friday the 13th September 1591, in which the opinions of the Cardinals present, amongst whom was His Holiness (Pope Clement himself), had been not at all asked for, and in spite of many distinctly speaking against, his predecessor nevertheless had declared and decreed that by the Constitution of Pius it was not forbidden to infeoff anew a fief not yet lapsed, when necessity or the manifest and true advantage of the Church demanded this,—that the oath taken to it did not comprehend such a case,—that no one could lawfully swear thus, because it would he contrary to the requirements and manifest advantage of the Church, and that he therefore adjudged and ruled the aforesaid Constitution to he thus understood, that it would be unlawful for anyone hereafter to speak or write thereof otherwise than as was then declared by him, in accordance with the contents of this decree and declaration.' The whole of this saving clause by his predecessor Pope Clement then cancelled, on the ground that the plea of requirement and advantage would only serve to leave a door open to alienations injurious to the Church, and this severe sentence against the personal disposition of Popes to enrich favourites at the expense of the institution they were elected to preside over was indorsed by Alexander VII., when he especially included the whole text of Clement's rescript in his elaborate confirmatory Bull of every stringent enactment by predecessors on this subject.
From these facts, it results clearly that however great the solemnity which successive Popes sought to attach to these prohibitory declarations against alienations of Church properties, it yet never amounted to a sacredness inviolable even for pontifical authority. The very circumstance of so many repeated confirmations by spontaneous Papal edicts would of itself be sufficient to set aside such a hypothesis. A dogma is not reaffirmed by successive Popes, but takes care of itself when once promulgated for all time, because its nature is assumed to represent an eternal principle, which, once recognised, stands for ever an indelible member in the organism of the Church's doctrine. Moreover, the instance of Gregory XIV.'s declaration, and the terms of the sentence of reversal pronounced thereon by his successor, conclusively establish that there is no exceptional force for a Pope in the obligations attaching to this particular engagement. For Gregory XIV. himself, in accordance with the original prescription of Pius V., had confirmed on his accession the terms of the original Bull, and yet in spite of this solemn act of adhesion he considered himself at liberty to issue a qualifying declaration of its meaning; while Clement VIII., who made no effort to disguise irritation at his predecessor's action, never introduced a word in the unfriendly language with which he reproved the proceedings that implied a charge against Gregory of having exceeded the hounds of his lawful privileges—of having violated a fundamental vow—by those modifying declarations which he solemnly repealed in virtue of an identical authority.
But even if it he granted that there is aught in the oath so taken which puts it beyond the range of the Pope's dispensing power to absolve himself therefrom, we must consider it a quite false reading of its obligations to refer them to a limitation of the Pope's sovereign authority for surrendering territory in deference to dictates of policy and expediency. The whole scope of the Constitution was to set a check upon a prevailing system of scandalous favouritism by which habitually Popes enriched their relatives with possessions diverted, it might he said fraudulently, from their legitimate purport. The monstrous custom of Nepotism, which attained proportions that scorned all pretence to clandestineness, and stood forth in shameless nakedness, was the object aimed at in the stringent provisions of these pontifical decrees, as results conclusively from the text for everyone who is not actuated with a sense of special pleading. It is impossible for a candid mind to mistake the plain meaning of the very explicit and precise prohibitions levelled against making grants of Church property for the benefit of individuals, and against nothing else. The limitation of the sense attached to these decrees is so absolute, and so distinctly expressed, that only a deliberate spirit of perversion could venture on pretending to misunderstand its scope. The groundlessness of the interpretations which it has been sought to set on the oath taken by the Pope is rendered still more clear by a second Bull he swears along 'with the other, and which is coupled therewith as a sort of commentary and supplementary illustration. This Bull, issued in 1692 by Alexander VII., and known by the title of 'Constitutio Moderatoria Donationum,' is so directly levelled against the immoderate grants made by Popes to their kinsmen as to name these without disguise, and to have put it beyond the stretch of the most wilful casuistry to attempt to twist the plain meaning of the text. A more confounding illustration does not exist of the practice once recognised in the Court of Rome than is here indelibly afforded by a Pope writing with all the weight of authority and the studied solemnity of a clearness of speech to baffle the powers of misapprehension, or extenuation. The preamble states that the Constitution is promulgated for 'the moderating of gifts and the distribution of ecclesiastical revenues to the kinsmen and connexions of the Pope, or to those adopted as such, and for the prescribing of safeguards to be observed in the assignment of favours which are said to have been at times granted by deputation, per concessum, during a Pope's sickness.' Accordingly it is ruled that a Pope may lawfully assist, should they be in want, his brothers, nephews, relatives, and connexions (consanguinei et affines), as also those whom he may have adopted as such, but only in the degree in which he habitually administers to the destitution of the poor who stand in no particular relation to him. Should any of the before-mentioned relatives enter the Church, it is enjoined that they shall be endowed with but moderate preferments; and in the event of any attaining the Cardinalate, that they shall not be allowed to accumulate benefices exceeding in value 12,000 crowns a year, it being expressly conceded that such income shall proceed from holdings for life,—any additional but insecure income from preferments held at the Pope's pleasure not being included in this estimate of the portion due to Papal kinsmen. Furthermore, to obviate the recurrence of what has happened in the case of favours granted by deputation during a Pope's sickness, in excess of what he would have sanctioned if acting himself, Alexander VII. ordered that those invested with powers of deputation, even though by a Chirograph signed by the Pope's own hand, under no circumstances should be capable henceforth of granting any favour, except with the assent of two Cardinals, subscribing, in the Pope's presence, the deed of concession, which, without their signatures, shall be null and void. This Bull, issued in the first instance to restrain the arts and practices by which the spirit of the former prohibitions against Nepotism was evaded, determines, beyond all controversy, the scope of those earlier Papal decrees with which it stands connected, and in conjunction with which subsequent Popes have sworn to it. The assertion, therefore, that the Pope (who, in every other respect, is invested with absolute powers exceeding those of every other Prince) holds his temporal sovereignty by ties involving a limitation on his executive, for which there is no precedent in the conditions attached to the tenure of any other Crown,—ties that would reduce him to the condition of a helpless bondsman in a matter recognised to lie within the province of every sovereign's individual discretion by the fundamental principles of monarchical government,—may be fearlessly pronounced to be as unfounded an allegation as the fact would be a glaring and unparalleled paradox.