Biography of St. Clement XIII
CLEMENT XIII, Pope (1693 – 1769)
Biography of Pope Clement XIII
Saint Clement XIII, born at Venice on March 7, 1693, was educated by the Jesuits at Bologna and received degrees in law at Padua. 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. He would promoted a synod in 1746 and published a profound pastoral on the priestly state. His personal life was in keeping with his teaching and he was called a saint by his own people. He was always without money owing to the lavishness of his alms-giving 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. He knew well the force and direction of the storm which was gathering on the political horizon.
Regalism and Jansenism were the traditional enemies of the Church, but a still more formidable foe was rising into power. This was the party of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, the “Philosophers” as they called themselves. They were highly educated men with representatives in power in the Portuguese and in all the five Bourbon Courts. They were opposed to Church and the entire Christian religion itself. They put restraints on all Church actions seeking wipe it out. In planning their war against the Church, they saw as their first step the destruction of the Jesuits. Such were the conditions confronting Clement XIII when he began his pontificate.
His attention was first called to Portugal, where the attack on the Jesuits had already begun. Sebastião Carvalho, the minister of Portugal and later Pombal, both Voltairians, carried out the first assault on the Jesuits. Carvalho ordered the native Indians in the Uruguay Reductions to abandon their cultivated lands and migrate into the virgin forest. The rebellion that followed was blamed on the Jesuit missionaries since the Indians were under their care. Meanwhile, a puppet prince, Joseph I, was shot in 1758, apparently by the husband of the lady he had seduced. Pombal held a secret trial in which he pronounced the whole Tavora family guilty, and with them three Jesuit Fathers, on the sole evidence was that they had been friends of the Tavoras. Then, on the pretext, he imprisoned their superiors, some hundred in number, in his subterranean dungeons. Later, he confiscated all missionary funds and except for their superiors who remained in prison, shipped the Jesuits from Portugal and its colonies to Civitavecchia. “Clement, however, received them kindly. Pombal ordered 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 Church in France had similar problems in the attack opened by the predominantly Jansenit Parliament in the spring of 1761 when they proceeded to examine the Jesuit constitutions and demanded that they be reduce the power of the general and substitute a commissioner appointed by the Crown. Louis XV referred their constitutions to the French bishops assembled at Paris in December, 1761. Forty-five bishops reported in favor of the constitutions and recommended they be left as they were. Twenty-seven or more sent their approval; but the king was being drawn the other way by his Voltairian statesmen and Madame d*e Pompadour. He issued an edict in 1762 allowing the Society to remain in the kingdom, but prescribed essential changes in their institute to satisfy the Parliament. Clement XIII intervened in various ways in this crisis. He published the Bull “Apostolicum”, of 9 January, 1765. Its object was to oppose to the current misrepresentations of the Society’s institute, spiritual exercises, preaching missions, and theology, a solemn and formal approbation, and to declare that the Church herself was assailed in these condemnations of what she sanctioned in so many ways.
Statesmen in Spain having the ear of Charles III were in regular correspondence with the French Encyclopedists and were of the same mind as those in Portugal and France. So, on the night of April 2, 1767, all Jesuit houses were suddenly surrounded and the habitants arrested and shipped-off to an unknown destination. They were forbidden to take anything with them beyond the clothes on their back. No explanation was given beyond the king’s letter to Clement XIII, stating that the king found it necessary to expel the Jesuit subjects for his own reasons which would not revealed and he was sending them all to Civitavecchia to the pope’s care. The pope wrote back beseeching the king to see that if any were accused they should not be condemned without proper trial, and assuring him that the charges against the institute and the whole body of its members were misrepresentations due to the malice of the Church’s enemies. It is now known that this idea of a royal secret was merely a pretext devised in order to prevent the Holy Sea from having any say in the matter.
The throne of Naples occupied by a son of Charles III and that of Parma by the King’s nephew. Both were minors with Voltairian ministers whose policies were directed from Madrid. Accordingly the Jesuits were similarly banished from their domains. The pope issued a condemnation in his Monitorium of 30 January, 1768, of certain laws passed by the duke eroding the Church’s liberties. The Bourbon Courts demanded the withdrawal of the Monitorium, threatening that if he refused he would divest the pope by armed force of his territories in Avignon and the Vanaissin in France, as well as Benevento and Montecorto in Italy. Finally, on January 18,1769, the ambassadors of France, Spain, and Naples presented to him identical notes demanding the total suppression of the Society of Jesus throughout the world.
Clement died under the shock and strain of this on February 2, 1769 at the age of 76. He had the insight to see through the pretences of the Church’s enemies while discerning the correct course for the Church. His pontificate afforded the spectacle of a saint standing steadfast in his moral strength against the enemies of the Church and the powers of the world with their physical might trained against him. He greatly encouraged devotion to the Sacred Heart, and ordered the Preface of the Blessed Trinity to be recited on Sundays.
Source: Catholic Encyclopedia, 2004