petty or sulphurous polemics, great Jesuit teachers like Bellarmine
(d. 1621) laid siege to the very foundations of the
Controversial and Missionary Triumphs. Protestant citadel. These thinkers performed for
the unity of the faith in France and in the
Catholic states of Germany services of transcendent
merit, exceeding far in importance those of their
flourishing allies, the Inquisitions of Spain, Italy, and of the
Spanish Netherlands (see Inquisition). But the most fundamental
spiritual progress of the papacy was made by its devoted
missionaries. While the majority of Protestant leaders left
the conversion of the heathen to some remote and inscrutable
interposition of Providence, the Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans
and kindred orders were busily engaged in making Roman
Catholics of the nations brought by Oriental commerce or
American colonial enterprise into contact with Spain, Portugal
and France. Though many of the spectacular triumphs of the
cross in Asia and Africa proved to be evanescent, nevertheless
South America stands the impressive memorial of the greatest
forward movement in the history of the papacy: a solidly
Roman continent.
2. 1648–1789. From the close of the Thirty Years’ War to the outbreak of the French Revolution the papacy suffered abroad waning political prestige; at home, progressive financial embarrassment accompanied by a series of inadequate governmental reforms; and in the world at large, gradual diminution of reverence for spiritual authority. From slow beginnings these factors kept gaining momentum until they compassed the overthrow of the mighty order of the Jesuits, and culminated in the revolutionary spoliation of the Church.
At the election of Innocent X. (1644–1655) the favour of the Curia was transferred from France, where it had rested for over forty years, to the House of Habsburg, where it remained, save for the brief reign of Clement IX. (1667–1669), for half a century. The era of tension Foreign Relations. with France coincides with the earlier years of Louis XIV. (1643–1715); its main causes were the Jansenist and the Gallican controversies (see Jansenism and Gallicanism). The French crown was willing to sacrifice the Jansenists, who disturbed that dead level of uniformity so grateful to autocrats; but Gallicanism touched its very prerogatives, and was a point of honour which could never be abandoned outright. The regalia controversy, which broke out in 1673, led up to the classic declaration of the Jansenism and Gallicanism. Gallican clergy of 1682; and, when aggravated by a conflict over the immunity of the palace of the French ambassador at Rome, resulted in 1688 in the suspension of diplomatic relations with Innocent XI., the imprisonment of the papal nuncio, and the seizure of Avignon and the Venaissin. So pronounced an enemy of French preponderance did Innocent become that he approved the League of Augsburg, and was not sorry to see the Catholic James II., whom he considered a tool of Louis, thrust from the throne of England by the Protestant William of Orange. Fear of the coalition, however, led the Grand Monarch to make peace with Innocent XII. (1691–1700). The good relations with France were but a truce, for the Bourbon powers became so mighty in the 18th century that they practically ignored the territorial interests of the papacy. Thus Clement XI. (1700–1721), who espoused the losing Habsburg side in the War of the Spanish Succession, saw his nuncio excluded from the negotiations leading to the Peace of Utrecht, while the lay signatories disposed of Sicily in defiance of his alleged overlordship. Similarly Clement XII. (1730–1740) looked on impotently when the sudden Bourbon conquest of Naples in the War of the Polish Succession set at nought his claims to feudal sovereignty, and established Tannucci as minister of justice, a position in which for forty-three years he regulated the relations of church and state after a method most repugnant to Rome. No better fared Clement’s medieval rights to Parma; nor could the sagacious and popular Benedict XIV. (1740–1758), who refused to press obsolete claims, either keep the foreign armies in the War of the Austrian Succession from trespassing on the States of the Church or prevent the ignoring at the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle of the papal overlordship over Parma and Piacenza. In fact, since the doctrinaire protest of Innocent X. against the Peace of Westphalia, at almost every important settlement of European boundaries the popes had been ignored or otherwise snubbed. Not for two centuries had the political prestige of the papacy been lower. Moreover, a feeling of revulsion against the Jesuits was sweeping over western Europe: they were accused of being the incarnation of the most baneful principles, political, intellectual, moral; and though Clement XIII. (1758–1769) protected them against the pressure of the Bourbon courts, his successor Clement XIV.Suppression of the Jesuits. (1769–1774) was forced in 1773 to disband the army of the Black Pope (see Jesuits). The sacrifice of these trusted soldiers failed however to sate the thirst of the new age. Pius VI. (1775–1799), was treated with scant respect by his neighbours. Naples refused him tribute; Joseph II. of Austria politely but resolutely introduced fundamental Gallican reforms (“Josephism”); in 1786 at the Synod of Pistoia (q.v.) Joseph’s brother Leopold urged similar principles on Tuscany, while in Germany the very archbishops were conspiring by the Punctation of Ems to aggrandize themselves like true Febronians, at the expense of the pope (see Febronianism). These aggressions of monarchy and the episcopate were rendered vain, outside the Habsburg dominions, by the revolution; and to the Habsburg dominions the clerical revolution of 1790 caused the loss of what is to-day Belgium. However, the deluge which shattered the opposition to Rome in the great national churches submerged for a time the papacy itself.
In the States of the Church, during the first part of the period the outstanding feature in the history of the Temporal Power is the overthrow of nepotism; in the second, a dull conflict with debt. The chief enemies of nepotism were Alexander VII. (1655–1667), who dignified the secretaryship of state and gave it its present The States of the Church. pre-eminence by refusing to deliver it up to one of his relations; and Innocent XII. (1691–1700), whose bull Romanum decet pontificem ordered that no pope should make more than one nephew cardinal, and should not grant him an income over twelve thousand scudi. Thus by 1700 nepotistic plunder had practically ceased, and with the exception of the magnificent peculations of Cardinal Coscia under Benedict XIII. (1724–1730), the central administration of finance has been usually considered honest. Nepotism, however, still left its scars upon the body politic, shown in the progressive decay of agriculture in the Campagna, causing Rome to starve in the midst of fertile but untilled nepotistic latifundia. The fight against the legacy of debt was slower and more dreary. One pope. Innocent XI. (1676–1789), threatened at first with bankruptcy, managed to leave a surplus; but this condition, the product of severe economy and oppressive taxation, could not be maintained. In the 18th century it became necessary to resort to fiscal measures which were often harmful. Thus Clement XI., at war with Austria in 1708, debased the currency; Clement XII. (1730–1740) issued paper money and set up a government lottery, excommunicating all subjects who put their money into the lotteries of Genoa or Naples; Benedict XIV. (1740–1758) found stamped paper a failure; and Clement XIII. (1758–1769) made a forced loan. The stoppage of payments from Bourbon countries during the Jesuit struggle brought the annual deficit to nearly 500,000 scudi. Under Pius VI. (1775–1799) the emission of paper money, followed by an unsuccessful attempt to market government securities, produced a panic. By 1783 the taxes had been farmed for years in advance and the treasury was in desperate straits. Retrenchment often cut to the bone; wise reforms shattered on the inexperience or corruption of officials. Grand attempts to increase the national wealth usually cost the government more in fixed charges of interest than they yielded in rentals or taxes. The States of the Church, like France, were on the brink of bankruptcy. From this disgrace they were saved by a more imminent catastrophe—the Revolution.
