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The colour of money: Can Pope Francis curtail the wealth of the cardinals?

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Pope Francis has a reputation for personal austerity, but he will have his work cut out for him if he is to convince much of the Catholic faithful that the whole Church — including the cardinals — really is all in it together. (Franco Origlia / Getty Images)

Pope Francis caused a stir in the Vatican last month when he ordered cardinals and other senior officials to take a pay cut. Even the Catholic Church is strapped for cash in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the pope saw a need for them to do their bit to help balance his books. Media reports indicate that cardinals now “earn” up to €5,000 (or AUD $7,750) each month, in addition to receiving free or subsidised accommodation. Unflattering recent accounts of their social lives and allegations of financial corruption might lead some to consider this income excessive. At very least, such reports have led to renewed scrutiny of how much money cardinals spend, and on what.

The Vatican claims that Francis’ actions constitute “the first time in living memory” that a pope has acted in this way. This may be true, but it overlooks the long and rich history of spats about how cardinals are rewarded. The financial relationship of the pope to his cardinals has shaped much Catholic history: it brought about the Western Schism (when, at one point, three popes claimed to rule at once), and has simmered ever since.

Francis should be careful what he wishes for. Efforts to impose austerity across the upper echelons of the Catholic Church have been as likely to cause further conflict as they have been to achieve their intended goal.

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Popes versus cardinals

Today we think of cardinals as the pope’s subordinates who are also his electors. But key to understanding cardinals’ relationships with money is that not every cardinal throughout history has seen his station that way. In the Middle Ages, some cardinals and their supporters wondered quite openly whether their right to choose the pope gave them an independent status in the Church. As Bernard of Clairvaux put it in a letter advising Eugene III (r. 1145-53), the cardinals were less his personal assistants than a separate and powerful Senate of the Church: “those whom you did not choose, but who chose you”. If this was the case, did it not, in turn, entitle cardinals to their own share of the Church’s revenues, some wondered?

Medieval popes would have none of that argument, but still felt it prudent to buy the cardinals off with a generous block grant. Nicholas IV allocated them half of the Holy See’s income in 1289, on condition that they did not treat it as their right. John XXII (r. 1316-34) gave them half of the 70,000 florins left behind by the late Clement V on a similar basis. These popes also acknowledged cardinals’ rights to seek and acquire money from other sources — for example, from those for whom they did favours.

Matters only came to a head when Urban VI (r. 1378-89) — who, perhaps tellingly, was one of those rare popes never to have been a cardinal himself — told members of the College they could spend only what he chose to give them. He forbade members of the College from accepting gifts or annuities from lay persons or from holding any additional church offices which might supplement their income. Most of Urban’s cardinals decamped to France, where they declared his election void and chose a different pope. The schism that ensued lasted thirty-nine years.

“Princes of the Church”

After the Schism, cardinals sought to restore the papacy’s prestige by styling themselves as “Princes of the Church”. If the papacy was as important as it claimed to be, then its leading representatives had to be willing to comport themselves as such.

Jean Jouffroy, a fifteenth-century Burgundian French cardinal, argued, with no apparent irony, that cardinals’ heavy responsibilities meant that, like CEOs today, they simply deserved great wealth. Jouffroy’s contemporaries competed to outdo each other and the pope in the magnificence of their Roman quarters and their lifestyles. Alessandro Farnese, who later became pope Paul III (r. 1534-49), at one point kept 306 men serving in his household.

All this was to the good for Renaissance Rome’s lively cultural and artistic scene, which many of these cardinal-princes nurtured as patrons. However, such patronage required ever-larger quantities of money. The cardinals gathered at the start of each conclave throughout the fifteenth century, making a pact that whichever of them was chosen as pope would share a greater portion of the spoils. Of course, no new pope ever honoured this commitment, arguing that it would abridge his special plenitude of power to do so.

Cardinals turned, increasingly, to trafficking in bishoprics and other Church offices as a means of raising their income. Three cardinals from the 1510s — Pompeo Colonna, Agostino Trivulzio, and Raffaele Riario — took on a combined total of thirty-three bishoprics during their careers. One cardinal — Alessandro Farnese again — held sixty-four separate benefices (that is, church offices with a salary attached) during the 1520s and early 1530s. The humanist poet Ludovico Ariosto penned a waspish satire about another cardinal, Francesco Armellini (1470-1527), which joked that he would seek money at every hour in every place from every person.

Such financial chicanery brought cardinals into disrepute, not least because they often held these offices, not consecutively, but concurrently (a practice strictly against the precepts of canon law).

In 1536, in the wake of the Reformation, Paul III commissioned a special committee de Emendanda Ecclesia (for the reforming of the Church) which aimed to put a stop to all the financial “abuses”. Nevertheless, many cardinals were still trading church offices thirty years later. The Italian priest and writer Girolamo Garimberto, who in 1567 wrote one of the first books dedicated to the subject of cardinals, still included a whole section on cardinals “who had succumbed to avarice”.

Cardinals idealised

After the Council of Trent (1545-63) the spectacle of money-grabbing cardinals came to be viewed as unseemly. A new literary genre promoted the “ideal” cardinal as restrained, pious, humble, moral, and wise. In short, someone who would not want to spend conspicuously large sums to make himself look important. All cardinals were encouraged to adapt their lifestyles accordingly.

Nevertheless, even the wisest and most venerable among them was still not above squabbling with the pope about money. Carlo Borromeo (1538-84) and Pope Pius V (r. 1566-72) — both now saints — fought over endowments Borromeo’s uncle Pius IV had settled on him. Clement VIII (r. 1592-1605) also later successfully wielded the threat of financial sanctions against members of the College who opposed his policies. In fact, the belief that cardinals still had it a bit too easy remained a popular on-going anticlerical trope. Giancarlo de’ Medici (1611-63), a cardinal famed for his love of mistresses and chocolate, maintained a specific cupboard in the Pitti Palace in Florence for his favourite sweets (a surviving inventory notes its stock at that time as forty-three boxes).

Other cardinals traded in luxury goods — fine art, exotic plants, Chinese silks and porcelains were particular favourites. Silvio Valente Gonzaga (1690-1757), Secretary of State to Pope Benedict XIV, grew what was probably Italy’s first example of that eighteenth-century symbol of opulence, the pineapple, in his Roman villa.

Nineteenth-century artists like Jehan Georges Vibert (1842-1902) made a good living by satirising such apparent extravagances. The Diet shows a rotund cardinal in rich silk robes drinking a pitcher of milk. The Marvelous Sauce depicts an even portlier cardinal supping samples supplied by a comely young Italian chef. By this time, the pope had lost all his lands in the Italian peninsula and was going around begging loyal Catholics for money, which only made Vibert’s underlying message all the more piquant.

“All in it together”?

Francis has a reputation for personal austerity, but he will have his work cut out for him if he is to convince much of the Catholic faithful that the whole Church, including the cardinals, really is all in it together. And the Catholic Church is currently in a moment of constitutional flux, which adds to the uncertainty. If Francis “retires” at eighty-five next year, as his predecessor Benedict XVI did in 2013, it may raise new questions about the pope’s status in the Church. Can a pope who presides as a de facto term-limited executive chairman really set its institutional norms in the same unilateral fashion that his predecessors did when they were claiming the authority of absolute monarchs with a direct covenant with God?

How much cardinals spend on maintaining the dignity of their office will always be highly political because it cuts to the heart of the Catholic Church’s spiritual brand. With the Vatican’s finances still notoriously murky, today’s cardinals may well find a way around Francis’s cost-cutting measures, just as earlier ones did for those of his predecessors. The current pope is unlikely to find that his recent announcement can be the last word on the subject.

Miles Pattenden is a Senior Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and Deputy Research Coordinator, in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. He is the author of Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1700.

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