Pope Clement XIV

• 1. Introduction

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  Pope Clement XIV was born Giovanni Vincenzo Antonio Ganganelli on the 31st of October 1705 in Santarcangelo di Romagna, the son of a physician and a noblewoman. He rose from a small town in the Papal States to become the head of the Catholic Church, reigning from 1769 until his death in 1774. His five-year pontificate produced one of the most consequential acts in the modern history of the Church: the total suppression of the Society of Jesus. How did a Franciscan friar, the only one in the entire College of Cardinals, end up making that decision? And what did it cost him?

• 2. From Santarcangelo to Rome

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  Ganganelli was baptised on the 2nd of November 1705 at the parish church of Sant'Agata, just days after his birth. His father Lorenzo, born in 1647, had come from Borgo Pace in the Duchy of Urbino; his mother Angela Serafina Maria Mazzi was a noblewoman from Pesaro. That mix of provincial origins and educated family connections set the tone for the life ahead.

  His early schooling was at Verucchio, but from 1717 he received his education from the Society of Jesus at Rimini, the very order he would later dissolve. He also studied with the Piarists of Urbino. On the 15th of May 1723 he entered the Order of Friars Minor Conventual in Forlì, taking the name Lorenzo Francesco. His novitiate was done in Urbino, where his cousin Vincenzo was already a friar. He was professed as a full member of that order on the 18th of May 1724.

  From 1724 to 1728 he was sent to the convents of Pesaro, Fano, and Recanati for his theological studies, then continued in Rome under Antonio Lucci. He obtained his doctorate in theology in 1731, and in the years following taught philosophy and theology for nearly a decade across Ascoli, Bologna, and Milan.

  Back in Rome, he became regent of the college where he had studied. The general chapters of his order in 1753 and 1756 offered him the generalship, which he declined both times. Rumour had it that he had his eye on something higher.

• 3. The Cardinal and the Blood Libel

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  Pope Benedict XIV made Ganganelli a friend and, in 1758, gave him a particularly charged assignment: investigate the traditional blood libel charge that had long been levelled against Jews. Ganganelli concluded that the accusation was untrue.

  In a memorandum issued on the 21st of March 1758, he declared Jews innocent of the slanderous accusation. His investigation went further than the immediate case assigned to him, which involved Jews in Yanopol, Poland. He showed that most of the similar claims stretching back to the thirteenth century were groundless. On the already-beatified Simon of Trent from 1475, and on Andreas of Rinn, he hedged somewhat, but he pointed to the length of time before those beatifications as evidence that doubts about their veracity had always existed.

  The Jewish community would later welcome his election to the papacy, trusting the man who had already defended them in print. That trust was rooted in an observable record, not in hope.

  Pope Clement XIII elevated Ganganelli to the cardinalate on the 24th of September 1759 and appointed him Cardinal-Priest of San Lorenzo in Panisperna. The elevation came at the insistence of Lorenzo Ricci, who was Superior-General of the very Society of Jesus Ganganelli would one day suppress. In 1762, Ganganelli opted to become Cardinal-Priest of Santi Apostoli, the same church where his Neoclassical tomb would eventually be placed.

• 4. The Conclave of 1769

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  Clement XIII died on the 2nd of February 1769, the night before a consistory he had planned to address the Jesuit question. That timing meant the conclave that followed was consumed by a single political problem: what to do with the Society of Jesus.

  The Jesuits had already been expelled from Portugal, from France, from Spain and its colonies, from Naples and Sicily, and from Parma. In January 1769 the Bourbon powers made a formal demand for the Society's total dissolution. At the conclave, the "court cardinals" who favoured suppression faced off against the Zelanti, a pro-Jesuit faction generally resistant to the secularism of the Enlightenment. The conclave had been sitting since the 15th of February 1769, with ambassadors of Catholic sovereigns exerting constant pressure.

  Some of that pressure was theatrical. On the 15th of March, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II visited Rome to meet his brother Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had arrived on the 6th of March. The day after touring St. Peter's Basilica, the two took advantage of the conclave doors being opened for a cardinal to slip inside. The Emperor asked to be shown the ballots, the chalice, and the burning place. That evening Gaetano Duca Cesarini hosted a party. It was the middle of Passion Week.

  The French minister the duc de Choiseul, who had served as ambassador to the Holy See, was considered Europe's most skilled diplomat. He left behind a note on papal negotiation: when one has a favour to ask of a Pope and is determined to obtain it, one must ask for two. His strategy was to pile territorial claims on top of the Jesuit demand, including the return of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin to France, the duchies of Benevento and Pontecorvo to Spain, and an extension of territory adjoining the Papal States to Naples.

  By the 18th of May the coalition had begun to fracture. On that same day, Cardinal Ganganelli was elected as a compromise candidate. He had been educated by Jesuits, gave no written commitment, but indicated he thought dissolution was possible. He took the name Clement XIV.

• 5. Ruling the Papal States

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  Clement XIV was crowned on the 4th of June 1769 by cardinal protodeacon Alessandro Albani, having received episcopal consecration on the 28th of May from Cardinal Federico Marcello Lante. He took possession of the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran on the 26th of November 1769.

  His approach from the outset was to repair the fractures that had opened between the papacy and the Catholic crowns during the previous pontificate. By yielding the papal claim to Parma, he obtained the restitution of Avignon and Benevento and managed to place relations between spiritual and temporal authorities on a friendlier basis.

  The 1876 Encyclopaedia Britannica summed up his character in sweeping terms, saying no pope had better merited the title of a virtuous man or given a more perfect example of integrity, unselfishness, and aversion to nepotism.

• 6. Suppressing the Jesuits

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  The Jesuits had been expelled from Brazil in 1754, from Portugal in 1759, from France in 1764, from Spain and its colonies in 1767, and from Parma in 1768. When Clement XIV came to power, the Bourbon monarchs pressed for total suppression of the order.

  Clement XIV tried first to placate the Society's enemies through visible unfriendly treatment: he refused to meet the superior general Lorenzo Ricci, removed the order from the administration of the Irish and Roman Colleges, and ordered them not to receive novices. The pressure kept building. Catholic countries were threatening to break away from Rome entirely.

  In November 1772 Clement wrote the suppression decree. He signed it on the 21st of July 1773 as the brief Dominus ac Redemptor. The official stated reason was the peace of the Church and to avoid a secession in Europe. In Protestant Prussia and in Russia, where papal authority was not recognised, the order simply continued as before. The suppression was, as commentators noted at the time, the result of a series of political moves rather than a theological controversy.

  Lorenzo Ricci, the superior general whose insistence had helped elevate Ganganelli to the cardinalate in 1759, was imprisoned by Clement XIV after the suppression and died in custody. The irony was not lost on observers then or since.

• 7. Mozart and the Miserere

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  In April and May 1770, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his father Leopold passed through Rome during their Italian tour. Their letters describe Clement XIV and the customs of the Catholic Church in Rome at that moment. Leopold found the upper clergy offensively haughty, but he and his fourteen-year-old son were received by the pope.

  The papal chapel was famous for performing the Miserere mei, Deus by the seventeenth-century composer Gregorio Allegri. The music was not to be copied outside the chapel on pain of excommunication. Young Mozart attended a single performance and then transcribed the entire composition from memory. Clement made him a knight of the Order of the Golden Spur.

  In 1774, German composer Georg Joseph Vogler was also made a Knight of the Order of the Golden Spur by the same pope. Clement's willingness to honour musicians across national origins reflected something of the breadth the Encyclopaedia Britannica later called his accomplished worldliness.

• 8. Death and Legacy

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  The last months of Clement XIV's life were marked by visible sorrow. He seemed to be in constant distress over his failures, even as his usual constitution had been quite vigorous. A lingering illness took hold, and rumours spread that he had been poisoned, a theory often attached to Jesuit revenge. No conclusive evidence of poisoning was ever produced. Those closest to him denied the claims, and a contemporary publication, The Annual Register for 1774, noted that he was over seventy and had been in poor health for some time.

  On the 10th of September 1774 he was bedridden. He received Extreme Unction on the 21st of September. There is a tradition that St. Alphonsus Liguori assisted him in his last hours through the gift of bilocation, remaining in extasis for two days at his bishopric in Arienzo. Clement XIV died on the 22nd of September 1774.

  The autopsy attributed his death to scorbutic and hemorrhoidal conditions of long standing, aggravated by excessive work and the habit of inducing artificial perspiration even in the greatest heat. He died execrated by the Ultramontane party but widely mourned by the people of the Papal States for his popular administration.

  His tomb in the church of Santi Apostoli in Rome was designed and sculpted by Antonio Canova in the Neoclassical style. The 1786 English Review, examining a biography of the pope, described him as a liberal, affable, ingenious man, a politician enlarged in his views, and equally bold and dexterous in the means by which he executed his designs. The review's editors believed the biography had been written by a former Jesuit, which coloured its characterisation.