Pope Clement XIII (1693-1769)

The Rezzonico family and Ca' Rezzonico

The Rezzonico were not an old Venetian house, but a family originally from the Como region, established in Venice in 1640 and enriched through commerce and banking.^[10] In 1687, they purchased their inscription in the Venetian patriciate's Golden Book for the considerable sum of one hundred thousand ducats — an ennoblement by money that would long mark the family's reputation.^[11] The future pope's father, Giovanni Battista Rezzonico, completed the purchase and construction of the unfinished palace that still bears the family name, Ca' Rezzonico, one of the finest Baroque palaces on the Grand Canal.^[12][13]

Carlo della Torre di Rezzonico was born into this world of newly ennobled, wealthy, and pious patricians on 7 March 1693, the younger of the two children of Giovanni Battista Rezzonico and Vittoria Barbarigo — a Barbarigo, and therefore connected with the great family that had already given the Church the holy Bishop of Padua Gregory Barbarigo, whom Carlo, once pope, himself beatified in 1761.^{[14][15][16][17]} Family wealth was not irrelevant to his rise: the Catholic Encyclopedia reports, from the testimony — all the more significant as it comes from an adversary — of the Jansenist Abbé Clément, that Rezzonico, despite the immense revenues of his diocese and his private estate, was always without money, so lavish were his alms, giving away even his own linen.^[18]

Jesuit education and curial career

One detail is heavy with meaning for what followed: the future defender of the Society of Jesus had himself been educated by the Jesuits. He studied at the Jesuit college in Bologna from 1703 to 1711, then at the University of Padua, where on 30 September 1713 he received the doctorate in utroque iure — in canon and civil law.^[19][20] He completed his training in Rome at the Pontifical Academy of Ecclesiastical Nobles, the nursery of future diplomats and prelates of the Holy See.^[21]

His curial career was that of a gifted and well-born jurist. A referendary of the two Signatures — rapporteur to the pope's two supreme tribunals — from 1716, he successively served as governor of Rieti and then governor of Fano (1721), before becoming auditor of the Roman Rota for Venice in the late 1720s — appointed in 1728 on the death of Federico Cornelio according to the Treccani, in possession in November 1729 according to Miranda —, one of the most prestigious courts in Christendom.^[22][23] He was ordained priest only late, on 23 December 1731, a sign that his career was first administrative and juridical before becoming pastoral.^[24][25] On 20 December 1737, Pope Clement XII — whose name he would later take in gratitude — created him cardinal-deacon of San Nicola in Carcere.^[26][27]

Bishop of Padua (1743-1758)

It was as Bishop of Padua that Rezzonico revealed the stature of a true pastor. Preconized in 1743, he received episcopal consecration from Pope Benedict XIV himself on 19 March 1743.^[28][29] For fifteen years he governed one of the largest dioceses of the Republic of Venice with a zeal reminiscent of his distant relative Gregory Barbarigo: pastoral visitations, care for the poor, attention to the clergy, and a personal generosity financed by his family fortune.^[30][31]

"The most honest man in the world; a most exemplary ecclesiastic; of the purest morals; pious, firm, learned, diligent." — The Annual Register for the year 1758, a portrait of the new pope^[32]

This reputation for uprightness and gentleness — the London annual spoke of the most honest man in the world, of the purest morals — partly explains his election: in a Europe where Catholic crowns distrusted any pope who seemed too political, a holy and conciliatory bishop appeared a reassuring choice.^[33] The future would show that this gentleness covered an iron firmness on points he judged to touch the faith and the rights of the Church.

A conclave under diplomatic tension

At the death of Benedict XIV on 3 May 1758, a conclave opened under the shadow of the century's great question: what would the new pope do about the Jesuits, already under attack in Portugal? The Catholic powers put their networks into play. The strongest candidate, Cardinal Carlo Alberto Guidobono Cavalchini, was excluded by the French veto (the exclusive) because France judged him too favorable to the Society.^[34][35] The deadlock favored the Venetian Rezzonico, reputed moderate and acceptable to all the courts.

He was elected on 6 July 1758, receiving thirty-one votes — the required two-thirds majority — and was crowned on 16 July 1758 by the protodeacon Cardinal Alessandro Albani.^[36][37][38] He chose the name Clement XIII in homage to Clement XII, who had made him a cardinal.

"It was with tears that he submitted"

Tradition reports that the newly elected pope immediately measured the gravity of the task. The classic biography in the Catholic Encyclopedia expresses it in a famous sentence:

"It was with tears that he submitted to the will of the electors, for he gauged well the force and direction of the storm which was gathering on the political horizon." — The Catholic Encyclopedia, art. Pope Clement XIII^[39]

The storm was the rising coalition of the Bourbon houses — France, Spain, Naples, Parma — joined by Braganza Portugal, all determined, under the influence of regalist and "enlightened" ministers, to break the Society of Jesus. Clement XIII would spend ten and a half years resisting it alone.

Even before the Jesuit crisis reached its climax, Clement XIII had presented himself as a resolute opponent of Enlightenment philosophy. A jurist by training and a theologian by conviction, he saw in the new literature an enterprise of demolition against the faith, and he did not hesitate to use the weapon of the Index of Forbidden Books.

The condemnation of the Encyclopedia

The most resounding act was the condemnation of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedia, the great monument of the Enlightenment spirit. By a brief of September 1759, Clement XIII placed it on the Index and ordered the faithful who owned copies to hand them to a priest to be burned, under pain of excommunication.^[40][41][42] The measure, already difficult to enforce in a Europe where books circulated freely, shows both the pope's doctrinal resolve and the practical limits of Roman censorship in the Enlightenment age.

Helvétius, Rousseau, Mésenguy: censorship of the philosophers

The Encyclopedia was not the only target. Under Clement XIII, Helvétius's De l'esprit, a materialist manifesto that scandalized even some philosophes, was also condemned; so were Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile and its famous Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar; the Jansenist Mésenguy's Exposition of Christian Doctrine; and the Jesuit Berruyer's History of the People of God, a sign that the pope did not spare errors from the Catholic camp either.^[43][44]

Christianae reipublicae salus (1766)

In 1766, Clement XIII gathered his fight against unbelief into a programmatic encyclical, Christianae reipublicae salus, denouncing the spread of impious books and the danger they posed to the "salvation of the Christian commonwealth."^[45] The text measures the breadth of Rome's anxiety: it was no longer only this or that thesis that had to be condemned, but a whole intellectual climate, that of a century claiming to found morality and society without God.

Modesty and the fig leaves

The often-mocked episode of the fig leaves belongs to Clement XIII's pontificate. Concerned for decency, the pope had the nudity of many ancient and Renaissance statues in the Vatican collections covered with fig leaves, made of stucco or metal and produced in series.^[46][47] The anecdote fed the legend of a narrow pope; above all, it reveals the moral sensibility of an age and of a man, and should not make us forget that at the same time Clement XIII was fighting one of the century's heaviest doctrinal and diplomatic battles.

Why Europe wanted the death of the Society

To understand the pontificate, one must grasp why so many Catholic crowns came to hate an order vowed to the pope. Several forces converged. The regalism of absolute monarchies could not tolerate an international, exempt order directly linked to Rome by a fourth vow of obedience to the sovereign pontiff. The "enlightened" ministers — Pombal in Portugal, Choiseul in France, Aranda and Campomanes in Spain, du Tillot in Parma — saw in the Jesuits the rampart of papal authority against the omnipotence of the State.^[48][49] Older resentments were added to this: the reductions of Paraguay, presented by their enemies as a Jesuit "kingdom" escaping the crowns; theological quarrels with the Jansenists; and the supposed wealth of the Society. Anti-Jesuit pamphlets circulated across Europe; expulsion became a fashion of State.

Pombal's Portugal (1759)

The first blow came from Portugal. The all-powerful minister Sebastião de Carvalho, Marquis of Pombal, after implicating the Jesuits in the failed attempt on King Joseph I (1758), had them arrested, despoiled, and expelled from the kingdom in 1759. Many were packed onto ships and landed in the Papal States as an ironic "gift" to the pope, while others languished in Pombal's prisons.^[50][51] Clement XIII protested courteously; Pombal answered by breaking diplomatic relations with Rome in 1760, dismissing the nuncio and recalling the Portuguese ambassador.^[52]

Louis XV's France (1762-1764)

In France, the offensive came from the parlements, strongholds of Jansenism and Gallicanism. Using the commercial bankruptcy of a Jesuit in the Antilles as a pretext, the Parlement of Paris opened proceedings against the Society in 1761, condemned its constitutions, and by a decree of 6 August 1762 pronounced its suppression in France.^[53][54] Clement XIII wrote to the king, protested and, by an allocution of 3 September 1762, declared null the parlements' decrees against the Society^[55], but Louis XV, yielding to Choiseul and to a transformed devout party, finally officially expelled the Jesuits from France in November 1764.^[56][57]

Charles III's Spain (1767), Naples, and Parma

The most brutal blow came from Spain. During the night of 2-3 April 1767, on the secret order of King Charles III inspired by his ministers, every Jesuit house in the kingdom and the Spanish empire was surrounded by troops; the religious, arrested without explanation, were embarked and poured out onto the coasts of the Papal States.^[58][59] Charles III even forbade, under penalty of losing the meager pension given to the exiles, any Jesuit to write in defense of the order.^[60] The same year, his son Ferdinand IV of Naples and the duchy of Parma, both Bourbon, imitated Spain. Within a few months, the Society had been driven out of almost all Bourbon lands.

The table below summarizes the wave of expulsions that swept the Bourbon crowns in less than ten years, almost always at the instigation of a regalist minister more than of the sovereign himself:

Everywhere the scenario repeated itself: an "enlightened" minister decided, the king signed, and the religious were poured onto the papal coasts, at the expense of a pope who was at the same time ordered to disown them.^[61][62]

The bull Apostolicum pascendi munus (1765)

At the heart of the storm, Clement XIII wanted to oppose a solemn and public act. In January 1765, he promulgated the bull Apostolicum pascendi munus, which openly defended the Society of Jesus against the calumnies spread everywhere, confirmed the order in its original constitution, approved its end, methods, and works, and recalled the praise so many bishops gave for its work in the service of dioceses.^[63][64] It was the most complete papal answer to the anti-Jesuit campaign — but, coming after the French expulsion and on the eve of the Spanish one, it remained largely a dead letter before courts determined to finish the matter.^[65]

"Sint ut sunt aut non sint"

To this papal firmness corresponds a famous formula, pronounced when someone proposed, in order to save the Jesuits in France, to give them softened constitutions and a superior independent of Rome:

"Let them be as they are, or let them not be." — Formula attached to the defense of the Society of Jesus^[66]

Tradition most often attributes it to the Jesuit superior general Lorenzo Ricci, who would thus have refused to betray the constitutions entrusted to his care; some historians rather report it as coming from Clement XIII himself, rejecting the proposal of a dismembered and nationalized Society.^[67] The very uncertainty of attribution says something true: the phrase exactly expresses the common position of pope and general — no survival at the price of denaturation.

The monitorium of 30 January 1768

The small duchy of Parma, theoretically a fief of the Holy See but governed by a Bourbon, became the stage of the decisive confrontation. The minister Guillaume du Tillot multiplied regalist measures there: prohibition of appeals to Rome, control of Church goods, expulsion of the Jesuits. Clement XIII saw in this an intolerable attack on the rights of the Church and on papal suzerainty. On 30 January 1768, he published a monitorium — a solemn warning from the pope, the Parma monitorium — which annulled du Tillot's decrees and struck their authors with ecclesiastical censures.^[68][69]

Reprisals: Avignon, Benevento, Pontecorvo

The Bourbon reply was swift and coordinated. In the name of family solidarity, France seized the Comtat Venaissin and the city of Avignon, papal possessions on French soil; the kingdom of Naples occupied the papal enclaves of Benevento and Pontecorvo.^[70][71] The message was clear: any Roman resistance would be paid for in territories. Above all, the united courts raised their demand by one degree: they no longer asked only for national expulsion, but for the universal suppression of the Society of Jesus by the pope himself.

It would be unjust to reduce this reign to its battle dimension. Clement XIII was also a pope of interior piety, attentive to the spiritual movements of his time — and his name remains attached to one of the great modern devotions.

The 1765 decree for Poland

Since the revelations of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque at Paray-le-Monial (1673-1675), devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus had spread, but Rome had twice refused to approve a proper liturgical feast for it — after the 1697 petition brought by Queen Mary of Modena, then again in 1729.^[72] Clement XIII removed the obstacle. At the petition of the bishops of Poland in 1764, the Congregation of Rites issued on 25 January 1765 a decree, approved by the pope on 6 February 1765, granting the liturgical celebration of the feast of the Sacred Heart to the Polish bishops and to the Archconfraternity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Rome.^[73] The decree explained that the Apostolic See acted in order to extend an already flourishing devotion, intended to "renew by this symbol the memory of that divine love" by which Christ had offered himself as victim for the sins of men.^[74]

"To renew by this symbol the memory of that divine love." — Decree of the Congregation of Rites approved by Clement XIII, 6 February 1765^[75]

This first approval broke a dam: the feast of the Sacred Heart spread rapidly across Europe, until Pius IX extended it to the universal Church in 1856. Clement XIII had been its first papal guarantor.

The canonizations of 1767

The jurist pope was also a canonizer. On 16 July 1767, at the height of the Jesuit crisis, he raised to the altars four saints whose diversity shows the balance of his devotion: Jerome Emiliani, founder of the Somaschi and father of orphans; Joseph Calasanz, founder of the Piarists and apostle of the education of the poor; Seraphin of Montegranaro, the humble Capuchin; and above all Joseph of Cupertino, the Franciscan famous for his levitations.^[76][77] He also beatified his distant relative Gregory Barbarigo, the reforming bishop of Padua and Bergamo, in 1761.^[78][79]

Clement XIII further marked his Marian piety by confirming, through the bull Quantum ornamenti of 8 November 1760, the choice of the Immaculate Conception as patroness of Spain and its territories, at the request of Charles III — Saint James the Greater remaining co-patron —, a gesture prior to the rupture, reminding us that the conflict was never properly doctrinal.^[80]

The epilogue was brutal. In January 1769, the ambassadors of France, Spain, and Naples presented successively, on 18, 20, and 22 January, a peremptory and joint demand: the "total and entire suppression of the Society of Jesus throughout the whole world."^[81] Cornered, Clement XIII convoked a consistory for 3 February in order to examine this unprecedented demand — a pope summoned by Catholic kings to destroy with his own hands the most powerful order in the Church.

He never reached it. On 2 February 1769, the feast of the Purification of the Virgin, he was struck down during the night by what doctors described as apoplexy.^[82][83] According to the detailed account taken up by the English-language Wikipedia, he had celebrated the feast with fervor and received his nephew during the day.^[84] The classic biography concludes bluntly:

"It was this that killed him. He expired under the shock on the night of 2-3 February." — The Catholic Encyclopedia, art. Pope Clement XIII^[85]

This same tradition lends him, as he was struck, this cry: "O God, O God, what pain!"^[86] A rumor of poisoning immediately circulated, but no proof has ever supported it.^[87] The pope left the Church at an impasse: the suppression he had refused until death would be signed four years later by Clement XIV, in the brief Dominus ac Redemptor (1773).

Art history reserved for Clement XIII a glory politics had denied him. His nephew, the senator of Rome Abbondio Rezzonico, and his two cardinal brothers commissioned the young Antonio Canova to make a funerary monument for Saint Peter's Basilica.^[88] The sculptor worked on it from 1783 to 1792 and made it one of the masterpieces of European Neoclassicism: the pope kneeling in prayer, the tiara placed near him; to the left of the sarcophagus, Religion standing; to the right, the winged Genius of Death overturning his extinguished torch; and, at the foot of the tomb, two marble lions, one sleeping, the other watching.^[89]

Completed in 1792, this tomb made Canova's reputation and fixed Clement XIII's image for posterity: no longer the pope defeated by the Bourbons, but an old man in prayer, the image of praying fidelity amid collapse. Perhaps this is the fairest judgment on the pontificate: personal holiness and doctrinal firmness powerless to stop the tide of States, yet strong enough to save the honor of the Apostolic See by refusing capitulation.

• Benedict XIV — the learned predecessor from whom Clement XIII inherited the emerging Jesuit crisis.
• Clement XIV — the successor who, in 1773, suppressed the Society of Jesus by the brief Dominus ac Redemptor.
• Pius VII — the pope who restored the Jesuit order in 1814.