The Church has on several occasions seen “a year of three Popes”, when a Pope died shortly after his election, and another was then chosen. The most recent such year was 1978, when John Paul I died on the 33rd day of his papacy, making him the twelfth shortest-reigning Pope in history. There has also been one “year of four Popes”, 1276, when two Popes died after very brief reigns, the first of them on June 22.
Gregory X was elected on September 1, 1271, at the end of the longest papal conclave in history, which lasted for 33 months. His reign was brief, though not unusually so for his era, less than four and half years, but highly important. In 1272, he convened the Fourteenth Ecumenical Council, the second to be held in the French city of Lyon, which took place in six sessions in the summer of 1274. This council brought about a reunion of the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches, although sadly, this only lasted for a short time. Plans were also put forth for a renewal of the Crusades, and, in the wake of the absurdly long recent conclave, a new set of rules for the Papal elections was promulgated. These rules were made definitive in 1298; the constitutions that govern Papal elections have been modified in many ways since then, but the basic principles given in Gregory X’s bull Ubi periculum are still essentially in force to this day.
Following his death on January 10, 1276, a cardinal who had been one of his close collaborators, Peter of Tarantaise, was unanimously elected to succeed him on the first ballot, taking the name Innocent V. Born ca. 1225, he joined the Dominican Order as a teenager, and became one of its most prominent members. (He is the first of four Dominican Popes.) Together with Ss Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great, he helped to establish the Dominican “ratio studiorum – program of study”, which would build the Order’s well-deserved reputation for learning. He also held one of the two chairs of theology that were reserved for Dominicans at the University of Paris, the most important center for theological study in the later Middle Ages. Gregory X appointed him archbishop of Lyon and made him a cardinal; as such, he became the host of the ecumenical council. When St Bonaventure, the first Franciscan cardinal and also a well-respected theologian, died during the council, it was Peter who celebrated his funeral.
St Bonaventure Lying in State at the Second Council of Lyon, 1629, by the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664). Bl. Gregory X is speaking to King James I of Aragon; Peter of Tarantaise is standing behind him.
By the time of Innocent’s election, Gregory X had been so taken up with the affairs of the council that he had not been to Rome for 3½ years. Innocent therefore decided to be crowned there; after a month’s travel from France, the ceremony took place on February 22, the feast of St Peter’s Chair, in the Lateran basilica. However, he died almost exactly 5 months into his reign. The Church now honors both him and Gregory X as Blesseds.
A fresco of Bl Pope Innocent V, painted ca. 1350 by Tommaso da Modena in the chapter room of the former Dominican convent of St Nicholas in Treviso, Italy. Image from Wikimedia Commons by Risorto Celebrano, CC BY 3.0.
Three weeks later, the Cardinals elected Ottobuono de’ Fieschi, who was roughly seventy years old, a member of an old noble Genovese family. His uncle, Pope Innocent IV (1243-54), had made him cardinal deacon of the Roman church of St Adrian in 1251; in that role, he had done several important jobs for the Church, and participated in five previous conclaves. In the 1260s, he served as Papal legate to England, and had great success in bringing peace between King Henry III and his rebellious barons. On his election, he chose the name Adrian in honor of Adrian IV, the only English Pope (1154-59), and in honor of the Saint of his cardinalitial church.
This conclave took place with much duress inflicted upon the cardinals by its “guardian”, the powerful king of Naples, Charles of Anjou, who was trying to force the election of a Pope favorable to his interests. (Many of the later changes to the papal election rules were designed to exclude this kind of undue external influence.) Adrian was deliberately chosen as a transitional Pope, so that the cardinals could leave the conclave and escape from both Charles’ control and the Roman summer heat. It is not clear if they understood just how transitional he would prove to be; after moving the court to the city of Viterbo, about 50 miles north of Rome, he died on the 39th day of his papacy, August 18th, without being crowned, or even ordained a priest.
The third conclave of the year was held three weeks later, and elected the one and only Portuguese Pope. By a strange error, Cardinal Pedro Julião Rebolo chose the name “John XXI”, even though there was never a John XX. Like many of his recent predecessors, he spent most of his reign in Viterbo. He added a large studio and bedroom to the papal palace in that city. Eight months after his election, the ceiling of this room collapsed in the middle of the night, severely injuring him; he died ten days later.
The cathedral of St Lawrence in Viterbo, seen from the loggia of the former Papal palace. Four Popes of the 13th century are buried in the city, two in the cathedral (Alexander IV (1254-61) and John XXI), and two in the basilica of St Francis, (Clement IV (1265-68) and Adrian V). Image from Wikimedia Commons by Jean-Pierra Dalbéra, CC BY 2.0.)
Since today is the anniversary of the death of Pope St Leo I in 461, and his feast day in the post-Conciliar Rite, it seems like a good day for the seventh and final installment of this series on the thirteen papal namesakes of our new Holy Father Leo XIV; click these links to read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6.
Before the reign of Bl. Pius IX (1846-78), nine among the successors of St Peter (numbering 254 at that point) had reigned for more than 20 years, but none had ever reached the 25 years traditionally ascribed to Peter himself. For many centuries, therefore, it had been part of the papal coronation ritual that as soon as the cardinal archbishop of Ostia placed the crown on a new pope’s head, he would say to him, “Numquam videbis annos Petri. – Thou shalt never see the years of Peter”: a way of reminding him, amid the glories of the Church’s highest office, that like all popes, he is the steward of Another.
But Pius IX did in fact live to see the years of Peter, surpassing the 25-year mark in 1871, and living for more than 6½ years beyond that. This custom was then removed from the coronation rite, and his successor, Leo XIII, reigned for exactly 25 years and 4 months. (St John Paul II, who beatified Pius IX in 2003, also surpassed it, reigning for a bit less than 26½ years.) Pope Leo was over 93 at the time of his death, and had been in the service of the Church since he was in his 20s, making any attempt at a convenient summary of his career a difficult prospect.
He was born Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci on March 2, 1810, the sixth of seven children, in a small town called Carpineto, about 40 miles to the southeast of Rome. He was usually called by his middle name, which is Italian for “Joachim”. His mother’s name was Anna; as pope, Leo would raise the grade of the feasts of both of Our Lady’s parents. When he was eight, he and the brother right before him, Giuseppe, were sent to the Jesuit school in Viterbo, where he excelled especially in Latin; throughout his life, he was known for the high quality of his compositions in both prose and poetry in that language. Like most educated Italians of his era, he was also deeply interested in the works of Dante Alighieri. Giuseppe would go on to enter the Jesuit order, and become a well-respected theology professor; at his brother’s first consistory, in May of 1879, he was elevated to the cardinalate, the last man to receive that honor from a member of his immediate family.
A photograph of Cardinal Giuseppe Pecci taken in 1887.
Gioacchino completed a doctorate in theology in 1832, after which he entered the diplomatic academy, and studied canon and civil law at the University of Rome. His evident talents brought him to the attention of officials in the Curia, leading to his appointment in 1837 to various offices. Now on the track for greater promotions still, he was ordained at the very end of the year to the subdeaconate, deaconate and priesthood, all within a fortnight.
Fr Pecci’s first major responsibility was as delegate to Benevento, an exclave of the Papal State within the territory of the kingdom of Naples. The Napoleonic wars had left the south of Italy in a very disturbed state, but Fr Pecci proved himself a skilled administrator, particularly in dealing with the problem of the gangs of brigands, many of them former soldiers, who plagued the area. In the wake of this success, he was transferred to Perugia, and he did equally well there, despite strong revolutionary sentiment against the papal government. In January of 1843, he was made nuncio to Belgium, then a very new state, (founded in 1830, but only generally recognized since 1839; Pecci was only the third nuncio), where the Catholic majority was ruled by a Lutheran monarch who strongly favored the policies of the anti-Catholic Liberal party. After receiving episcopal consecration, he went to Brussels, and over the following three years, was highly effective in defending the Catholic interest, even earning the king’s good will, despite their strong political differences.
Three years later, however, on the death of the bishop of Perugia, Pope Gregory XVI, at the request of the populace, decided to appoint Mgr. Pecci as his successor. He arrived in Rome very shortly before the pope’s death on June 1, 1846, and took possession of his see, where he would remain for the next 32 years, about two months later.
The church of St Constantius (‘Costanzo’ in Italian), the first bishop of Perugia, traditionally said to have died as a martyr in the persecution of Marcus Aurelius, ca. 170. The construction was begun by Bp Pecci, but the decoration was not concluded until some time after his papal election. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Lumen roma, CC BY-SA 3.0)
The diocese of Perugia flourished under his long episcopacy, despite the many difficulties visited upon it by the anti-clericalism and thievery of the Italian government during the so-called Risorgimento. He took close interest in his seminary, occasionally teaching and examining there in person, and in the other educational institutions under his jurisdiction, and built more than fifty new churches. Although he did not waver in his support of the Holy See and the Papal State, he managed to do so with great tact, and was not disturbed in the possession of his see by the government, even after Perugia was occupied in 1859. (For comparison, the much more important see of Bologna, once the second city of the Papal State, remained vacant for three years after the city was occupied by the anticlerical government.)
Pius IX had made Pecci a cardinal in 1853; in 1877, he appointed him chamberlain of the Apostolic See, a position which required him to live in Rome. Pius died less than five months later, on February 7, and Cardinal Pecci, now close to 68, was elected pope on February 20, taking the name Leo XIII partly in honor of Leo XII, who had been pope when he was beginning his ecclesiastical career.
The cheaper and more facile sorts of histories that abound in our era, and especially within the Church, have been wont to cast Pius IX as a hopeless reactionary, determined to keep the Church stuck in a world that had passed away, and Leo XIII as the forward-thinking progressive who finally embraced the modern world in all its glory. Even Italian Wikipedia, which is generally quite good on Church history, says that Leo’s choice of name was intended as a deliberate sign of change, without mentioning that it had long been customary for popes to not repeat the name of their predecessors (only six have done so in the last 1000 years), and that if there was ever a modern pope who deserved the title of reactionary, it was Leo XII.
A contemporary engraving of the moment of Leo XIII’s papal coronation. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)
One of my teachers, the late Fr Reginald Foster OCD, who worked as a Latin secretary in the Vatican for 41 years, was a great admirer of his fellow Latinist Leo XIII, and one of his favorite anecdotes about him perfectly illustrates this classic misrepresentation of him. The title of Leo’s famous encyclical on the condition of laborers, “Rerum novarum”, seems to mean “of new things”, until, as Fr Foster would say, “you look in your dictionary and see that ‘res novae’ means ‘revolution’. Then you need to look at the words that follow, ‘semel excitata cupidine’, and what you have there means, ‘Once the lust for revolution has been stirred up...’ He wasn’t in favor of it, my friends!”
Despite the many successes of Pius’ reign, when Leo XIII took the throne, anti-clericalism was very much on the ascendant throughout the formerly Catholic world, not just in Italy. In 1870, the kingdom of Italy had seized the remains of the Papal State, where it continued its policy of stealing from the Church as much as it dared. Pius IX had withdrawn into the Vatican and refused to cooperate with the existence of this government of brigands by setting foot on the soil which it illegally occupied. Like him, Leo XIII would remain a “prisoner in the Vatican” for the rest of his life, as would Pius X and Benedict XV after him. He is buried in the Lateran basilica, in fact, because he was the first pope in centuries who was never able to visit the building, his own cathedral, as pope.
He also continued Pius IX’s policy of prohibiting Catholics from participating in the political life of the Italian state, an extension of this standing protest. This policy ultimately failed, and was gradually walked back by his successors; I make note of it here because it gives the lie to the overly simplistic view of his papacy as a drastic volte face from that of Pius.
The heart of European anti-clericalism was in France; Leo’s attempts to persuade the Catholic monarchists to accept the Republic fell flat, but the crisis which led to yet another wave of persecution, and concomitant massive theft of the Church’s property, did not hit until early in the reign of Pius X. In Germany, the ludicrous spectacle of Bismark’s Kulturkampf fell apart under its own weight, the position of Catholics became much more favorable, and the pope received the Lutheran Kaiser Wilhelm II in the Vatican three times, on very cordial terms. Concordats were established with various states that protected the interests of Catholics and the Church.
Leo took great interest in the Eastern Catholic Churches, and is remembered as a good friend to them, and as the pope who initiated the process by which their rites and customs were purged of Romanizations. A schism among the Armenian Catholics was ended, and a college for them was established in Rome, along with another for the Ruthenians. Unfortunately, if there was ever a monarch who could be called a reactionary, it was the Russian Tsar Alexander III, who came to the throne in 1881. The barbaric persecution of Ruthenian Catholics in the Russian Empire worsened, and diplomatic relations with the Holy See were not restored until shortly before the Alexander’s death in 1894. The first impetus towards the foundation of a Russian Catholic Church began in Leo’s reign, led by the philosopher Volodymyr Soloviov.
The famous portrait of Cardinal Newman made in 1881 by Sir John Everett Millais. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons)
Catholicism continued to grow during Leo’s papacy in both England and the United States, both of which also were of special interest to him. As Pius IX had restored the Catholic hierarchy in England, so Leo did in Scotland in the very first year of his papacy, and established it in British India in 1886. At his very first consistory, held in 1879, he made St John Henry Newman, the most prominent convert in England, a cardinal. The building of Westminster Cathedral was begun, and the church was opened for services very shortly before his death. Leo also issued the encyclical Apostolic Curae, recognizing the non-validity of Anglican sacramental orders.
In 1886, he made the archbishop of Baltimore, James Gibbons, a cardinal, only the second American to receive that honor. (Over 25 years and four months, Leo held 27 consistories, at which a total of 147 cardinals were appointed. The number of cardinals was then fixed at 70, which means he fully remade the College twice.) Cardinal Gibbons would later receive the letter Testem Benevolentiae against “Americanism”, one expression among many of the idea that the conditions of modern life required changes to the deposit of Faith, anticipating the general condemnation of modernism later made by Pius X.
Over the course of his 25-year papacy, he issued 85 encyclicals. Comparing this to Pius IX’s 36, issued over 31 years, it is fair to see here an overinflation, and consequent devalution, of the papal magisterium, not the first in its long history. This is balanced somewhat by their comparative brevity; all 11 of his encyclicals on the rosary together are shorter than St John Paul II’s one. Among the most notable of these, apart from those previously mentioned, are Aeterni Patris, which reestablished the preeminence of Scholastic and Thomistic philosophy, and Providentissimus Deus, on Biblical studies.
There are many anecdotes one could tell about such a long pontificate; I include here one which I had the pleasure of sharing with the late Fr John Hunwicke, himself also a great scholar of classical languages and literature. On one occasion, Pope Leo woke up in the middle of the night, and began ringing the bell for his servants, shouting “Il piede! Il piede!”, Italian for “the foot!” They assumed he had hurt his foot and wanted a doctor, but what he wanted was pen and paper. He had just solved, in his sleep (as one does) the problem of a metrical foot in a poem he was working on, and waking up with the solution in his head, he wanted to jot it down before he forgot it.
He also has the interesting distinction of being not just the first pope to be filmed, but the earliest born person ever to be filmed, and the first pope to have his voice recorded. In this video, the sound recording, made in 1903, of the Pope singing the Ave, Maria, is imposed on the film made in 1896.
At the time of his election, he seemed to many to be in rather poor health, and like Leo XII, he predicted that his own reign would be brief; unlike Leo XII’s, his prediction proved false. Not only did he become the second pope in a row to surpass the years of Peter, as noted at the beginning of this article; at 93, he died as the oldest pope in all of history. (This should be qualified by noting that Pope St Agatho, who died in 681, is traditionally said to have been 107 at the time of his decease, but this cannot be verified. Benedict XVI was 95 at the time of his death, but, of course, not pope.) In the later years of his papacy, there was a popular joke in Italy that the cardinals had tried to elect a Holy Father, but had elected an Eternal Father instead.
This is the sixth installment of a series on the thirteen papal namesakes of our new Holy Father Leo XIV; click these links to read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5. Let’s pretend that the long delay since the last installment was deliberately made so that this could be published on the anniversary of Leo XII’s election.
On this day in the year 1823, Cardinal Annibale della Genga was elected Pope, and took the name Leo XII in honor of the previous Leo, who had somehow found the time during his very brief papacy to ennoble the della Genga family. His predecessor, Pius VII, was then the fourth longest reigning pope of all time, at over 23 years and 5 months. (He has since been surpassed by three more, Bl. Pius IX, Leo XIII, and St John Paul II, and dropped back to seventh). Cardinal della Genga had long been in poor health, and was chosen to be a transitional pope; during the conclave, he even said to the cardinals, “You are electing a dead man.” But as happens so often with transitional popes, he recovered his health enough to live longer than expected, dying nearly 5½ years later on February 10, 1829.
A portrait of Pope Leo XII, 1828, by the Belgian artist Charles Picqué (1799-1869).
He was born in 1760, the sixth of ten children, and embarked on an ecclesiastical career from a very early age, enrolling in the diplomatic academy in Rome when he was only 18; he was ordained a priest by special dispensation at 22. In 1793, he was consecrated bishop and sent as a nuncio first to Switzerland, then to Cologne. In the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, all of Europe was in a state of constant upheaval; relations between Church and state were very difficult, not least because of the gigantic theft of ecclesiastical property taking place everywhere, and the suppression of countless Catholic institutions of every sort. Bishop della Genga served the Church well in these turbulent times, but was disliked by Napoleon; he therefore returned to Italy, and went into a quiet early retirement at an abbey near his native place, a rural area within the Papal State, about 140 miles north north-east of Rome.
A portrait of Ercole Cardinal Consalvi, 1819, by the English painter Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830).
With the sudden fall of Napoleon in 1814, and the restoration of the French monarchy, it seemed that his career might be revived, as he was chosen to go to France and deliver the pope’s message of congratulations to King Louis XVIII. However, this did not please Pius VII’s Secretary of State, Ercole Cardinal Consalvi, and he was swiftly sent back to his retirement. Pius VII granted him the cardinalate, with his title at Santa Maria in Trastevere, and appointed him bishop of Senigallia, a town on the Adriatic Coast close to the della Genga’s land (and the birthplace of Bl. Pius IX), but due to his poor health, he never took possession of the diocese, and resigned it after about six months. Two years later, his health had improved enough that he was made Vicar of Rome, and archpriest of St Mary Major; he received the latter title on February 10, 1818, the same date upon which he would die 11 years later. He also served as prefect of various congregations.
When Pius VII died in 1823, attitudes within the Church were sharply divided. One party, known as the “moderati” in Italian, believed in finding and maintaining accommodations between the Church and the new secularized states of post-Napoleonic Europe, which had been very much the policy of Pius VII and Cardinal Consalvi. The other, known as the “zelanti – the zealous”, sought to retrench upon the old ways of the pre-revolutionary world. (Like all such characterizations, this is probably an oversimplification; this is a part of history in which I claim no expertise.)
Leo XII was elected as a representative of the zelanti, after the Austrian emperor had interposed a veto on their preferred candidate, a cardinal named Severoli. He himself predicted almost at once to the candidate of the moderati, the one much preferred by the major European powers, Cardinal Castiglioni, that he would be elected next. This did indeed happen, and Castiglioni’s choice of papal name, Pius VIII, was a deliberate sign of return to the policies and ideas of the moderati.
Pius VIII being carried into St Peter’s Basilica on the sedes gestatoria, 1829, by the French artist Horace Vernet (1789-1863).
Ercole Consalvi was immediately replaced as secretary of state by Cardinal Giulio Maria della Somaglia, who was then almost 80 (16 years older than Leo himself), a choice that was perhaps emblematic of this desire of the zelanti to return to an old world that had passed away. However, in the management of the Church’s affairs, Leo did in fact quite prove successful, and nothing like the fanatic he is often misrepresented as. He had the wisdom to take Consalvi into his counsels, and the latter had the wisdom to let bygones be bygones and offer the pope whatever advice he could. In 1800, amid the universal chaos wrought by Napoleon, no jubilee was held in Rome, and by 1825, many people, and indeed, many Catholics saw the event as just another relic of a dead past. Leo XII proclaimed it anyway, and it proved a huge success, drawing half-a-million pilgrims. The pope also rallied opposition to renascent persecution of Catholicism in the Netherlands, and encouraged the movement towards Catholic emancipation in Great Britain.
He is, however, nowadays remembered unfavorably in Italy for his governance of the Papal State, which was reactionary and repressive. A dear friend of mine, a priest who is very well versed in the modern history of the Church, once described the Papal State in its latter days as “the Afghanistan of 19th century Europe.” The Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on Leo XII sums the matter up very nicely: “There is something pathetic in the contrast between the intelligence and masterly energy displayed by him as ruler of the Church and the inefficiency of his policy as ruler of the Papal States. In face of the new social and political order, he undertook the defense of ancient custom and accepted institutions; he had little insight into the hopes and visions of those who were then pioneers of the greater liberty that had become inevitable.”
But writing once again as one with no expertise in this area of history, I make bold to add the following. This article was written in 1910, at a point when the social upheaval and violence let loose by the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars, and the “inevitable greater liberty” of European society, had not yet reached its crescendo in the unrelenting massacres of the two world wars. The Church itself is now still recovering from its own dizzy and wholly misplaced optimism about the modern world and its place within it. So perhaps the day will come when the forebodings of Leo XII and the other zelanti about what the new order of things would do to society will seem wiser than they have hitherto.
As noted above, Leo XII’s health had already long been bad at the time of his election, and he is supposed to have received extreme unction 17 times during his papacy. Towards the end of his first year as Pope, he came very close to dying, and was saved only when his close friend, the Passionist St Vincent Strambi, bishop of Macerata and Tolentino, offered his own life to God in exchange for the pope’s recovery. He finally passed away a few days after being taken severely ill in February of 1829. He is buried in the floor of St Peter’s basilica, before the altar which holds the relics of his first papal namesake; those of Saints Leo II, III and IV rest in the altar immediately to the left.
The altar of Pope St Leo I in St Peter’s basilica.
Today is the feast of St Stephen, the first king of Hungary, crowned on either Christmas day of 1000, or New Year’s Day of 1001; before then, the ruler of the Hungarians had been known as the Grand Prince. He held the throne until his death on the feast of the Assumption in 1038, and was canonized in 1083, together with his son Emeric, and a Venetian monk and missionary named Gerard Sagredo, the first bishop of Csanád, one of the eleven sees which Stephen established in his country. His feast is kept on the general calendar on September 2, the date on which the capital of Hungary, Buda, was liberated from the dominion of the Ottoman Turks in 1686; it is also the date of Emeric’s death in 1031.
The Baptism of King Stephen, 1875, by the Hungarian painter Gyula Benczúr (1844-1920).
The Matins lessons for Stephen state that “he obtained the royal crown from the Roman Pontiff, was anointed as king by his (i.e. the Pope’s) order, and offered his kingdom to the Apostolic See,” which is to say, placed it under his vassalage. The precise circumstances of this act, and its significance, have been the subject of much debate among historians, and I do not intend to delve into this very complicated matter. But it is worth noting that this event is depicted on the monument of the contemporary Pope, Sylvester II, who reigned from 999-1003. This was set up in the Lateran basilica in 1909, the work of a sculptor named Jószef Damko, at the behest of Vilmos Fraknói, a well-known priest and historian, as a tribute to the Saint who was very much the father of their nation. In the upper part, Stephen and Emeric kneel down before the Virgin and Child, and in the lower part, Stephen receives his crown from the Pope. (Both images from Wikimedia Commons by Sailko, CC BY 3.0)
The lower part of the monument is the original inscription from the tomb of Pope Sylvester, the only part which survived after the two fires that devastated the Lateran basilica in the 14th century. This man was born with the name Gerbert, in a town called Aurillac in south central France, about 945 AD. After studying in a nearby Benedictine monastery as a youth, he traveled to Spain, where he learned a variety of subjects then largely unknown to most of the West, but flourishing under the patronage of the Moorish rulers. It was he who reintroduced the general use of the abacus, and he is also said have been the first to use the so-called Arabic numbers, (which were actually invented in India). This gave rise to the foolish idea (repeated by the 12th century English historian William of Malmesbury) that he was a wizard, which in turn gave rise to a popular tradition among the Romans, (not, of course, ever endorsed by the Church), that when a pope is about to die, his bones rattle within the tomb, and the stone of the inscription sweats.
I was in Rome for Holy Week this year, staying not very far from the Lateran. I visited the basilica on Holy Thursday, but didn’t see or hear anything unusual about the monument, nor did I hear any reports to that effect, but it was the Triduum and Easter, and of course people were very busy; Pope Francis died four days later, on Easter Monday. But in 2005, I was at the Escorial in Spain on April 1, and overheard the women who worked in the giftshop repeating a news report from Rome, that the stone had indeed been seen to sweat, and a rattling noise heard coming from behind it, and John Paul II died the next day.
At that time: Jesus obliged his disciples to go up into the boat, and to go before him over the water, till he dismissed the people. And having dismissed the multitude, he went into a mountain alone to pray. And when it was evening, he was there alone. But the boat in the midst of the sea was tossed with the waves: for the wind was contrary. And in the fourth watch of the night, he came to them walking upon the sea. And they seeing him walk upon the sea, were troubled, saying: It is an apparition. And they cried out for fear. And immediately Jesus spoke to them, saying: Be of good heart: it is I, fear ye not. And Peter making answer, said: Lord, if it be thou, bid me come to thee upon the waters. And he said: Come. And Peter going down out of the boat, walked upon the water to come to Jesus. But seeing the wind strong, he was afraid: and when he began to sink, he cried out, saying: Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus stretching forth his hand took hold of him, and said to him: O thou of little faith, why didst thou doubt? And when they were come up into the boat, the wind ceased. And they that were in the boat came and adored him, saying: Indeed thou art the Son of God. (Matthew 14, 22-33, the Gospel of the octave day of Ss Peter and Paul)
This image of St Peter walking on the upon the water was originally made by Giotto in 1298 as a mosaic on a wall of the courtyard of the old St Peter’s Basilica, opposite the church’s façade. Only a few fragments were saved from the destruction of the old basilica; this copy is an oil painting made in 1628 from drawings of the original. In 1675, a new mosaic on the same design was mounted in the portico of the new basilica, facing the main door, as a reminder to pilgrims as they leave the church to pray for the Holy Father.
This is the fifth installment of a series on the thirteen papal namesakes of our new Holy Father Leo XIV; click these links to read part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.
The tenth and eleventh Popes to bear the name Leo were both members of the Medici family, the ruling dynasty (at first de facto, later de jure) of Florence. Thanks to the family’s disastrous lack of concern for the Church’s laws about consanguineous marriage, Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici was related to Leo X on both his father’s and his mother’s side, and took the name in honor of his relative. But since he died on the 27th day of his papacy, he is really more of a footnote to this series than anything else. He was born on this day in the year 1535, in the reign of another Medici, Clement VII, exactly 300 years before the birth of another Pope, St Pius X.
A portrait of Pope Leo X Medici, with his cousins Giulio de’ Medici, the future Pope Clement VII (born 1478, r. 1523-34), and Luigi de’ Rossi (1474-1519), both of whom he made cardinals; painted ca. 1518/20 by Raphael Sanzio, one of the artists who most benefitted from Leo’s generous patronage of the arts.
Lazy historians, and those who have been unknowingly misled by them, often use the name Medici as a kind of by-word for a general sense that during the Renaissance, the Church was extremely corrupt; and likewise, that the religiosity professed by members of the ruling classes was extremely hypocritical. It is far beyond my scope to untangle the many ways in which this is fair to say, and the many ways in which it is unfair. For those interested in learning more about the matter, I cannot recommend highly enough the relevant chapter (11) of a book I am currently reading, Inventing the Renaissance, by Dr Ada Palmer, who teaches history at the University of Chicago, and whose writing style is very engaging. Suffice it therefore to say that while Leo X’s early career is very astonishing by modern standards, it was not so by the standards of his own age; but the fact that they were the standards of the age goes a long way to explaining why the protestant revolt broke out during his pontificate, and why the Council of Trent needed to happen.
I also need to state that since he lived at the beginning of the 16th century, his papacy is far better documented than those of the Leos we have seen earlier in this series, and this article does not pretend to be anything more than a vary basic summary of his career.
He was born Giovanni de’ Medici in December of 1475, the seventh child of Lorenzo the Magnificent and his wife, a Roman noblewoman named Clarice Orsini. As a second son, he was destined from childhood for a career in the Church, which began at the age of seven, when he was tonsured and made an apostolic protonotary. The following year, he was made commendatory abbot of two different abbeys, one being the great Montecassino; when he was 13, Pope Innocent VIII (his sister Maddalena’s father-in-law) made him a cardinal, although he was not allowed to dress as one until he reached 16. He was then sent to study theology and canon law at the highly prestigious university of Pisa, but found literature far more to his liking. Among his tutors were two of the greatest scholars of the era, Angelo Poliziano and Cardinal Bernardo Bibbiena.
The wooden paneled ceiling of the Roman basilica of Santa Maria in Domnica, made in the time of Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, who held the title of this church from 1489 until his election to the papacy in 1513, with the name Leo X. Each section represents a title of the Virgin Mary from an earlier form of the Litany of Loreto. (Photo by Mr Jacob Stein.)
Shortly after he was formally vested as a cardinal in 1492, he took possession of his title church in Rome, Santa Maria in Domnica, which he retained for 24 years, until his papal election. The building as it appears today is mostly the result of the major restorations he commissioned, which included the very beautiful paneled wood ceiling shown above. Within less than a month, his father died, and he returned to Florence, only to come back to Rome at the death of Pope Innocent in July, to participate in his first conclave.
The pope thus elected was Alexander VI, the second of the two Borgias, a name which eclipses that of the Medicis as a byword for corruption. Since Alexander was quite hostile to the family, Cardinal Giovanni deemed it best to return to Florence, but shortly after, Italy was invaded by France, and plunged into a period of extraordinary chaos. The Medici were driven out of their city, and the cardinal was forced to flee with several members of his family; he eventually returned to Rome, and stayed out of the Borgia palace intrigues, living quietly in the family palace (now the seat of the Italian senate) and keeping a court devoted to literary pursuits.
The Medici family palace in Rome, known as the Palazzo Madama; engraving by the Italian artist Giuseppe Vasi (1710-82).
The year 1503 saw the death of both his older brother, at which he became head of the family, and of Pope Alexander, after which he participated in two conclaves, since the cardinals’ first choice, Pius III, died after only 26 days. The new Pope, Julius II, was not as hostile to the Medicis as Alexander had been, but not especially friendly either, and for eight years, Cardinal Giovanni’s life continued much as it had under Alexander, until he was made the papal legate to Bologna, which was part of the Papal State.
Julius II is often referred to as “the warrior pope”, since his reign was taken up almost entirely with a vexingly complicated series of wars. The aforementioned book by Ada Palmer contains this absolute gem of sentence which sums things up as follows: “The War of the League of Cambrai is so incomprehensible (that) its Wikipedia page had to develop a new table format to index the betrayals.” Here I note only that in one of the crucial battles of this period, which took place at Ravenna on April 11, 1512, Card. Giovanni was taken prisoner by the French, who would have brought him as a hostage back to France, but he was able to escape and return to Ravenna.
The Liberation of St Peter from Prison, 1513-14, by Raphael Sanzio. This fresco is in the same room as the painting below; the choice of subject was certainly chosen as an allusion to Pope Leo X’s escape from capture after the battle at Ravenna.
Since the republic established in Florence after the fall of the Medici was allied to France, Julius II, hoping to subvert it, sent troops into Tuscany to support their restoration. This led to an appalling sack of the city of Prato, after which the terrified Florentine government allowed the family to return. Cardinal Giovanni and his younger brother Giuliano entered the city in September of 1512, hoping to reconcile the various factions tearing it apart, but republican sentiment against the Medici ran high. In the midst of a plot to assassinate the brothers, the news of Pope Julius’ death (February 1513) arrived, and Cardinal Giovanni departed for Rome to participate in his fourth and final conclave.
The Meeting of Pope St Leo I and Attila the Hun, 1514, by Raphael and students (more the latter than the former), a fresco within the rooms of Pope Julius II, now part of the Vatican Museums. The cardinal at the far left is Giovanni de’ Medici. Julius died before the artist got around to painting him as Leo I, and was then succeeded by Card. de’ Medici, who chose the papal name Leo, and was therefore painted into the image a second time, as his namesake.
After the high intensity political drama of Julius II’s papacy, the choice of a Medici to replace him was aimed very deliberately at reconciliation. (Plus ça change...) Partly at the instance of his old friend and tutor Cardinal Bibbiena, Cardinal de’ Medici was elected on the very first day of balloting. His papal name Leo was apparently chosen in remembrance of St Leo I, on whose feast day the battle of Ravenna, and his own deliverance from capture, had taken place the previous year. He was only thirty-seven at the time; after him only one other pope, his cousin Clement VII, would ever be elected at a similarly young age. He is also the last pope who was not already a priest at the time of his election.
The hopes of the cardinals that his papacy would be one of peace and reconciliation were soon realized. Late in Julius’ papacy, a group of cardinals had rebelled against him, withdrawn to Pisa, and attempted to call an ecumenical council against him; Julius’ response was to excommunicate them all, and convoke a council of his own. (In one of the most touching displays of popular devotion to the venerable person of the Holy Father, the citizens of Pisa gathered each night outside the place where these cardinals were staying to serenade them with death-threats.) Leo pardoned them all, along with the leaders of the assassination plot in Florence, and of a would-be uprising in Rome. Later on in his papacy, a group of cardinals, including one of Julius II’s nephews, Raphael Riario, would engage in a conspiracy to poison him. The plot was exposed, and the principal leader executed. Leo would have been perfectly within his rights to execute the rest as well, but he let them off with substantial fines, and confiscated Cardinal Riario’s very large palace.
The Palazzo della Cancelleria, in another engraving by Vasi; originally known as the Palazzo Riario, confiscated and turned into the chancery of the Roman Curia by Leo X.
Pope Julius did not live to see even the beginning of his counter-council, which was continued by Leo, and lasted for almost five years; this is Lateran V, one of the great and ghastly failures among the ecumenical councils, a missed opportunity to enact badly needed reforms. The eruption of the so-called Reformation just after its closure was certainly one of those signs of the times that a more recent ecumenical council said the Church should look out for, and which the Church then, as more recently, completely failed to see. But this was no more the fault of Pope Leo than of thousands of other churchmen of his era, a truth that was recognized many years later by the opening speech of the Council of Trent.
However, he looms large in any history of the Reformation, in part simply because he was the pope, and in part because he excommunicated Martin Luther. It was also he who issued the indulgence that became the flash-point for the rebellion, which was offered in exchange for monetary contributions to the rebuilding of St Peter’s basilica, a project which had been begun, but just barely, by Julius II. His nepotism, typical for the period, furthered the ecclesiastical careers of several relatives, among them his cousin Giulio, who would become Pope Clement VII after his death and the brief reign (20 months) of Adrian VI. He also expanded the territory controlled by his family, paving the way for them to eventually take absolute control of the Florentine republic and transform it into the Duchy of Tuscany.
A sketch by the Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498-1574), made when he visited Rome in 1532-36, showing the ruins of the old St Peter’s basilica, and the beginnings of the construction of its replacement.
In other ways, Leo was actually a very successful Pope. He negotiated a new concordat to regulate relations between the Church and the kingdom of France, which remained in effect until the French revolution. This was part of a more general pacification of relations with France, which in turn brought much needed calm to the whole Italian peninsula. But the politics of the era were such that it was often necessary to change sides, (see again the quote above from Dr Palmer), and towards the end of his reign, he took the part of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V against France, also hoping that the emperor would stem the tide of the Lutheran rebellion. This hope proved vain, but Leo did not live to see its failure, since he died, suddenly and unexpectedly, on December 1, 1521, at the age of only 46.
As stated above, for my purposes, the brief pontificate of Leo XI is really more of a footnote to that of his kinsman Leo X than anything else. He was born on this very day in 1535 to a cadet branch of the Medici family, distinguished from the main line as the Medici di Ottajano. In his youth, he was tutored by a Dominican priest, (the Medici family had always had a close relationship with the order), and wished to enter the clergy, but was opposed in this by his mother, since he was the only male left in his branch of the family. It is a sign of the early success of the Counter-Reformation that she evidently did not think he could just as well have gotten ordained and fathered enough illegitimate children to continue the line, as e.g., Pope Paul III had. The former Florentine republic had now been established as a proper duchy, ruled by the main branch of the family, and she duly packed him off to the court in Florence.
In 1560, he visited Rome in the company of Duke Cosimo I, and became friends with his countryman St Philip Neri. Six years later when his mother died, he resumed his studies for the priesthood, and was ordained within a year. He then served as the Florentine ambassador to Rome for some years, residing in the city with his kinsman Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici. In 1573, he was appointed bishop of Pistoia, but within less a year, he was transferred to Florence, where he served as archbishop for 31 years. He was made a cardinal in 1583, and participated in a total of six conclaves. (Between September of 1590 and December of 1591, three popes in a row, Urban VII, Gregory XIV and Innocent IX, ruled for less than a year; Urban’s is the shortest papacy in history, 12 days.)
During his time as archbishop of Florence, the Carmelite nun Saint Maria-Magdalene de’ Pazzi had predicted to him that he would be elected Pope, but that his reign would be brief. This prophecy was realized in 1605; elected Pope on April 1st, he was crowned on April 10th, and died on the 27th. His papal reign is the eighth shortest in history!
This is the fourth installment of a series on the thirteen papal namesakes of our new Holy Father Leo XIV; click these links to read part 1, part 2 and part 3.
The church of Rome and the papacy have usually been late-comers to the great movements of reform and renewal in the Church, and have just as often been themselves in dire need of reform and renewal. But eventually Our Lord’s prayer that Peter, being once converted, confirm his brethren, comes again to fulfillment, the papacy at last accepts the need for a reform, and becomes its most important leader. This pattern is exemplified by the career of St Leo IX (1049-54), whose papacy is the point at which Rome, so long caught up in the general decadence of the Church in the West, definitively embraced the cause of reform. To understand this, we must back up a bit and explain some history.
Pope St Leo IX heals a man possessed by a devil, an illustration from a collection of Saints’ lives known as the Passionary of Weissenau, ca. 1170-1200. (Fondation Bodmer, Coligny, Switzerland; Cod. Bodmer 127, fol. 191r; http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/cb/0127. The dark blue lines across the figure of the possessed man are stiches across a tear in the folio.)
Pope St Nicholas I, who traditionally shares the epithet “the Great” with Ss Leo I and Gregory I, and is famous inter alia for his defense of the Church’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, died in 867 after a reign of nine years. And yet, the papacy then underwent such a rapid moral collapse that it was a distance of but thirty years and eight popes from him to Stephen VI, whose reign of roughly sixteen months is summed up as follows in the Catholic Encyclopedia.
“Whether induced by evil passion or perhaps, more probably, compelled by the Emperor Lambert and his mother Ageltruda, he caused the body of (his predecessor) Formosus to be exhumed, and … placed before an unwilling synod of the Roman clergy. (Note: this is often referred to as ‘the Cadaver Synod’.) A deacon was appointed to answer for the deceased pontiff, who was condemned for performing the functions of a bishop when he had been deposed and for passing from the See of Porto to that of Rome. The corpse was then stripped of its sacred vestments, deprived of two fingers of its right hand, clad in the garb of a layman, and ultimately thrown into the Tiber. Fortunately it was not granted to Stephen to have time to do much else besides this atrocious deed. Before he was put to death by strangulation, he forced several of those who had been ordained by Formosus to resign their offices …”
Pope Formosus and Stephen VI - The Cadaver Synod, by Jean-Paul Laurens, 1870 (Public domain image from Wikipedia.)
After this infamous event, which has provided endless grist for the mills of anti-Catholic controversialists, the papacy remained essentially quiescent as simony, lay investiture (the de facto control of ecclesiastical appointments by lay civil rulers) and clerical incontinence became nearly omnipresent in the Church over the course of the tenth century, the first in which there is not a single canonized or beatified pope.
Nevertheless, it is often darkest just before the dawn, and the tenth century also saw, less than 15 years after the reign of Stephen VI, the foundation of the abbey of Cluny. What made Cluny so important, especially in the 10th and 11th centuries, was the fact that the duke who founded it in 910, William of Aquitaine, renounced all control over it, in an age when monasteries were essentially the private property of the nobility, who appointed whomever they wished as abbots and officials. Given the tenor of the times, such appointments were very often made solely for the sake of providing an important connection with a salary, and with no reference to whether the man so appointed had any intention of living as a monk. Much the same applied to clerical offices of all ranks.
In the case of Cluny, however, its independence from lay control, and almost 200 years of long-lived Sainted abbots (919-1109), enabled it to become a true model of religious life, a model spread throughout Europe by innumerable daughter houses, and adopted by many older foundations.
The consecration of the third abbey church of Cluny by Pope Urban II, depicted in a manuscript of the early 12th century.
The previous article in this series covered the reigns of Leos V-VIII, all of which were fairly brief, and not much is known of them, so it gave no more than a hint of the sad state of things in Rome in their time. Suffice it to say for now that Leo V was unlawfully deposed, and Leo VIII was the successor of John XII, whose reign has traditionally been described as a “pornocracy – a reign of harlots.” And thus did things continue in Rome until the reign of another particularly unworthy successor of St Peter, Benedict IX (r. 1032-48), whom St Robert Bellarmine described as “the nadir” of the papacy, and over whose career we draw a veil, as the sons of Noah drew a veil over their father. His deposition at the hands of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry II was as unlawful as that of John XII had been, and just as impossible to regret.
His successor, Damasus II, died on the 24th day of his reign, at which point the emperor chose a kinsman, Bruno, the bishop of the French city of Toul (about 180 miles to the east of Paris), and an active and enthusiastic reformer, to replace him. From this point on, the reform party within the Church was in the ascendant, and would go from strength to strength, with the popes very much at its fore, promoting the Cluniac ideal of religious life for all the ranks of the clergy. As a result, the clerical vices which were universal in the mid-11th century were almost entirely gone by the end of the 12th.
A notable sign of this radical volte-face was the custom of taking a regnal name, which took hold in this period, and has held ever since with almost no exceptions. Bruno of Toul was not the first to do this, but he was the first to choose the name Leo. From 1046 to 1145, thirteen of the eighteen popes were “second of that name”, followed by eight “thirds” out of eleven from 1145 to 1227, a clear signal that after the long period of decadence, the papacy was now returning to its glorious past.
The cathedral of St Stephen in Toul; the current building was begun in the 13th century, long after Leo IX’s time.
Bruno was born in the Alsace region, which was then part of the Holy Roman Empire, in 1002; his father was a close relation of the emperors. When he was five, he was sent to the school at Toul, and upon completion of his studies, made a canon of the cathedral. In 1026, he accompanied the emperor Conrad II on a military expedition to Italy, commanding a company furnished to the emperor by his bishop. During his absence, the bishop died, and Bruno was swiftly elected to replace him, taking possession of the see on the feast of the Ascension, 1027, at the age of only twenty-five, well below the canonical age for the episcopacy. But despite his youth, he was highly successful in reforming the clergy and monks of his diocese, following the Cluniac model.
After twenty years as a model bishop, he was chosen to become pope in the summer of 1048 by his kinsman the emperor, now Henry II. On his way to Rome, he stopped at Cluny, and where he persuaded a Roman monk named Hildebrand, who had retired there some years earlier, to join him and help him in the great project of reform; this is the future Gregory VII, the fifth pope after Leo, whose feast day is kept tomorrow.
Gregory’s career as a reformer was so successful that the movement as a whole is often called “the Gregorian reform” after him. But it was so because of the momentum first given to it by Leo, who brought to the see of Peter the same energetic reforming spirit with which he had governed Toul. The revised Butler’s Lives of the Saints describes his papacy as “a kind of visitation of Western Christendom in order that he might personally enforce his regulations and arouse the conscience of those in authority.” All over Italy, France and Germany, synods were held, presided over either by the pope in person, or a legate sent by him, at which the vices which had crept in were denounced, and the pattern of a reformed clerical life established. It is astonishing to consider how effective this program was, often in the face of indifference or intense opposition from both clergy and laity; all the more so, when one considers how low the reputation of the papacy had been just a few years before. For this, Leo is often called a “peregrinus apostolicus – an apostolic pilgrim”, and in this regard, laid the pattern for the rules of many of the popes who came after him, especially in the following 80 years or so.
Of course, no reformer is wholly successful in all that he attempts, and it should not surprise us to read of failures of his pontificate as well. As ruler of the papal state, he became deeply embroiled in the political affairs of Italy, and particular the problem of the oppressive rule which the Normans had established in the south. (Conflict with the Norman monarchy of Sicily would dominate the affairs of the papacy well into the 13th century.) This brought him to take to the field in arms against them, but he was defeated and captured, which weakened the prestige and the position of his own person, and of the papacy as an institution, and earned him the harsh criticism of no less a giant of the reform than St Peter Damian.
Likewise, his reign saw the beginning of the definitive break between Rome and Constantinople in 1054, precipitated by the violence, both literal and rhetorical, of the patriarch Michael Cerularius, and by the response of Leo’s legates to it. This matter is, of course, far too complicated to delve into in an article such as this; suffice it to note here that the mutual excommunications were issued just under two months after his death. When Leo knew that he was dying, he had his bed set up, and a coffin next to it, at the high altar of St Peter’s; he passed to eternal life on April 19, 1054. Miraculous cures began taking place at his tomb immediately, and he was formally canonized by Bd Pope Victor III in 1087.
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