OF PAPAL CONCLAVES.
145
permission to lay hands on the Cardinal; and he was accordingly arrested and lodged in St. Angelo. Here he still sat, when the Pope came hack and instructed his Secretary of State, Pacca, to take the necessary steps to proceed criminally against the seditious Cardinal. For this purpose a special Congregation was appointed, and began to investigate the case, when suddenly the proceedings dropped by sovereign injunction, and the prisoner left the castle restored to all the privileges of his rank, and admitted to take part in those consistorial and other duties from which he had before been steadily excluded.[1] He died in 1817—that is, before another Conclave.[2]
With such precedents, it might have been
- ↑ It is evident that we do not know the secret motives which brought about this mysterious change. Moroni would seem to hint at some action of Consalvi in the cessation of all proceedings. See the Dizionario Storico Ecclesiastico, sub voce Maury. This bulky Encyclopædia (103 volumes) is a crude jumble of good, bad, and indifferent matter; but it is of value in so far as it may be regarded to express what are considered in Rome to be orthodox views on the topics treated.
- ↑ The latest case of a Cardinal divesting himself of the purple occurred in 1838, when Cardinal Odescalchi insisted on entering the Society of Jesus, and would not be content until the Pope in Consistory had acquiesced in his ascetic desire to abandon the purple.
