POPE CLEMENT XIII
249TH Pope (1758-1769)

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Born at Venice, 7 March, 1693; died at Rome, 2 February, 1769. He was educated by the Jesuits at Bologna, took his degrees in law at Padua, and in 1716 was ppointed at Rome referendary of the two departments known as the "Signatura Justitiæ" and the "Signatura Gratiæ". He was made governor of Rieti in 1716, of Fano in 1721, and Auditor of the Rota for Venice in 1725. In 1737 he was made cardinal-deacon, and in 1743 Bishop of Padua, where he distinguished himself by his zeal for the formation and sanctification of his clergy, to promote which he held a synod in 1746, and published a very remarkable pastoral on the priestly state. His personal life was in keeping with his teaching, and the Jansenist Abbé Clément, a grudging witness, tells us that "he was called the saint (by his people), and was an exemplary man who, notwithstanding the immense revenues of his diocese and his private estate, was always without money owing to the lavishness of his alms-deeds, and would give away even his linen". In 1747 he became cardinal-priest, and on 6 July, 1758, he was elected pope to succeed Benedict XIV. 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.

Regalism and Jansenism were the traditional enemies of the Holy See in its government of the Church, but a still more formidable foe was rising into power and using the other two as its instruments. This was the party of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, the "Philosophers" as they liked to call themselves. They were men of talent and highly educated, and by means of these gifts had drawn over to themselves many admirers and adherents from among the ruling classes, with the result that by the time of Clement XIII, they had their representatives in power in the Portugese and in all the five Bourbon Courts. Their enmity was radically against the Christian religion itself, as putting a restraint on their licence of thought and action. In their private correspondence they called it the Infâme (the infamous one), and looked forward to its speedy extinction through the success of their policy; but they felt that in their relations with the public, and especially with the sovereigns, it was necessary to feign some kind of Catholic belief. In planning this war against the Church, they were agreed that the first step must be the destruction of the Jesuits. "When we have destroyed the Jesuits", wrote Voltaire to Helvétius in 1761, "we shall have easy work with the Infâme." And their method was to persuade the sovereigns that the Jesuits were the chief obstacle to their Regalist pretensions, and thereby a danger to the peace of their realms; and to support this view by the diffusion of defamatory literature, likewise by inviting the co-operation of those who, whilst blind to the character of their ulterior ends, stood with them for doctrinal or other reasons in their antipathy to the Society of Jesus. Such was the political situation with which Clement XIII saw himself confronted when he began his pontificate.

PORTUGAL

His attention was called in the first instance to Portugal, where the attack on the Society had already commenced. Joseph I, a weak and voluptuous prince, was a mere puppet in the hands of his minister, Sebastião Carvalho, afterwards Marquis de Pombal, a secret adherent of the Voltairian opinions, and bent on the destruction of the Society. A rebellion of the Indians in the Uruguay Reductions gave him his first opportunity. The cause of the rebellion was obvious, for the natives had been ordered to abandon forthwith their cultivated lands and migrate into the virgin forest. But, as they were under the care of the Jesuit missionaries, Carvalho declared that those must have instigated the natives. Moreover, on 3 September, 1758, Joseph I was shot at, apparently by the injured husband of a lady he had seduced. Pombal held a secret trial in which he pronounced the whole Tavora family guilty, and with them three Jesuit Fathers, against whom the sole evidence was that they had been friends of the Tavoras. Then, on the pretext that all Jesuits thought alike, he imprisoned their superiors, some hundred in number, in his subterranean dungeons, and wrote in the king's name to Rome for permission from the Holy See to punish the guilty clerics. Clement did not see his way to refuse a request backed by the king's assurances that he had good grounds for his charges, but he begged that the accused might have a careful trial, and that the innocent might not be included in a punishment they had not deserved. The pope's letter was written with exquisite courtesy and consideration, but Pombal pronounced it insulting to his master and returned it to the sender. Then he shipped off all the Jesuits from Portugal and its colonies, save the superiors who were still detained in their prisons, and sent them to Civitavecchia, "as a present to the pope", without a penny from their confiscated funds left to them for their maintenance. Clement, however, received them kindly, and provided for their needs. It was to be expected that diplomatic relations would not long continue after these events; they were severed in 1760 by Pombal, who sent back the nuncio, Acciajuoli, and recalled his own ambassador; nor were these relations restored till the next pontificate. Pombal had seen the necessity of supporting his administrative measures by an endeavour to destroy the good name of his victims with the public. For this purpose he caused various defamatory publications to be written, chief among which was the "Brief Relation", in which the American Jesuits were represented as having set up an independent kingdom in South America under their own sovereignty, and of tyrannizing over the Indians, all in the interest of an insatiable ambition and avarice. These libels were spread broadcast, especially through Portugal and Spain, and many bishops from Spain and elsewhere wrote to the pope protesting against charges so improbable in themselves, and so incompatible with their experience of the order in their own jurisdictions. The text of many of their letters and of Clement XIII's approving replies may be seen in the "Appendices" to Père de Ravignan's "Clément XIII et Clément XIV".