Mistress of the Vatican (15 page)

Putting together a list of new cardinals was one of the most difficult tasks of a pope and sometimes took years of negotiations. It was not just

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a matter of selecting the most educated, diligent, and moral men of the church for the honor. The first consideration was political—France would be angling to have a French cardinal created, or at least an Italian cardinal who had served as nuncio to France and was known to be sympathetic to the national interests. Whenever France learned it would not be getting a cardinal, the French started mumbling darkly about Henry

VIII. In 1533, when Pope Clement VII wouldn’t grant Henry a divorce to marry his mistress, the king severed ties with Rome, declared himself the head of the Church of England, and never sent the Vatican another dime.

If France got a cardinal, Spain would screech shrilly if it did not get to choose one, too, and might, perhaps, rattle sabers loudly enough in Naples to make sure the request was heard in Rome. Venice and Florence, though smaller and less important than the “great powers” of France and Spain, would come flapping in pushing their own candidates, their dispatches laced with flattery, threats, and bribes. The Holy Roman Emperor in Austria, fighting to his west the heretics in what would become known as the Thirty Years’ War and to his east the advancing Muslim Turks, would also insist on naming a cardinal. Every now and then a king of Poland would clamor for a cap for his brother, and it was hard to turn down the ruler of the last Catholic bastion next to Orthodox Russia.

Then there were the pope’s family members—brothers and nephews, usually, though some popes into the sixteenth century nominated their own sons. In addition to these considerations, in the first list of cardinals publicized after his election, the pope was expected to name someone from the family of the pope who had created
him
cardinal decades earlier, as a way of expressing the Christian virtue of gratitude. And if a pope’s niece married into a powerful Italian family, etiquette demanded that the pope name the groom’s brother a cardinal as part of the marriage treaty.

And then, when all these positions had been filled, the pope could look around for a couple of truly brilliant, dedicated clerics from lesser-known families who had worked their way up in the church. It is not surprising that many popes were elected from among these cardinals of

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merit, rather than those who were created for reasons of politics and etiquette.

Urban VIII would have sent a special messenger to his nuncio in Madrid bearing not only the exciting news of his creation but also the robes of a cardinal. Gianbattista would wear a cardinal’s mourning robes—in fuchsia, oddly enough—until he received his red hat from the pope’s own hand in a special ceremony. Only after that could he wear the traditional red robes and hat. After receiving his fuchsia robes, Gianbattista did not leave Madrid immediately but spent another six months or so tying up loose ends.

In his diary entry of July 6, 1630, Giacinto Gigli noted that Cardinal Pamphili “made a pretty cavalcade” to officially enter Rome.
⁸
In the Piazza del Popolo, in front of Rome’s ceremonial gate, hundreds of carriages bearing Rome’s nobility, ambassadors, and cardinals lined up to welcome the new prince of the church and escort him to the Piazza Navona. We can assume that among them was an excited Olimpia.

According to etiquette, Gianbattista then called on the cardinal nephews Francesco and Antonio Barberini in the Vatican and generously distributed gold coins to their servants as a sign of gratitude to God for his good fortune. After dinner together, the Barberini brothers took Gianbattista to a private audience with the pope, where he knelt and kissed the pontifical foot. Urban took the red hat and put it on Gianbattista’s head, proclaiming in Latin, “
Esto Cardinalis
.” The celebrated red hat was called a
galero;
it was an enormous red velvet sombrero laden with ropes of red cords and huge drapery tassels. The hat was too big and too ridiculous to actually be worn other than in the creation ceremony, but it would be carried on a silver pole in parades and hung over the cardinal’s tomb.

After the private creation ceremony, Gianbattista hopped into his carriage and made courtesy calls on all the pope’s relatives, male and female. Then he returned to his house in the Piazza Navona, where he was expected to remain inside until his public Vatican ceremony five weeks later. Protocol dictated that he was not even to be seen at the doors or windows. Yet that first night he was seen with a look of su-

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preme satisfaction on his face gazing out of the windows overlooking the Piazza Navona and, later, those in the rear of the house overlooking the Piazza Pasquino. He was glad to be home.

On the morning of August 12, 1630, Gianbattista burst forth from his cocoon blazing in red robes, leading a brilliant cavalcade to the Vati-can. There, in a magnificent ceremony in the Sistine Chapel along with the other new cardinals, he officially received the red hat again from the pope. Olimpia attended the ceremony, beaming from her seat of honor.

Having been created cardinal, Gianbattista was required to give huge tips to all of his servants at the Piazza Navona house—from his private secretary to the little boy who shoveled horse manure in his stables. And countless employees of the Vatican were to receive tips—the dozens of secretaries, notaries, and office managers who had pushed his laborious paperwork through the system. The pope’s personal servants also had their hands out, and Gianbattista would have handsomely tipped the papal master of ceremonies, clerks, singers, trumpet blowers, butlers, buglers, grooms, doormen, and gardeners at the proscribed rates. The protocol in
Il perfetto maestro di casa
declared that the papal servants alone received a total of 1,162 scudi. It was a huge amount, yet there was simply no way to get out of paying it without acquiring a terrible reputation for avarice as soon as the coveted red hat was plunked on one’s head.

As cardinal, Gianbattista received a new honorific. On June 10, 1630, the pope decreed that effective immediately all cardinals were no longer to be called “Most Reverend” as they had been for centuries, but were to be addressed by the more honorable “Your Eminence,” and were to take precedence immediately after kings. Feeling outranked by this title, European princes claimed for themselves the title of “Highness” instead of “Excellency.” Furious at this title inflation, the pope instructed his cardinals to continue addressing the princes as “Excellency,” with the result that such letters bounced back to them unopened. “My Master receives no Letters from him that knows not his Merit,” wrote one prince’s secretary.
⁹
Another stated, “the Cardinal has a drunken Secretary, and one that did not know what Titles Princes deserv’d.”
¹⁰

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And so Their Eminences were forced to accept the new titles of Their Highnesses, and at the end of the day, the relative stature of cardinals and princes was the same as before but their titles had swollen significantly.

A new cardinal would be assigned to one or more “congregations” or church governing committees. Imbecile cardinals appointed for political or family reasons were assigned to congregations where they couldn’t do much damage—the Congregation of Fountains, for instance, which met once a month to discuss the repair of water pipes, or that most popular committee, the Index of Forbidden Books, where for their homework the cardinals had to read the dirtiest books in Europe and write reports expressing their shock and outrage.

The French historian André du Chesne (1584–1640) wrote that Urban VIII respected Pamphili’s “erudition,” which he employed “in many of the most difficult negotiations and in the trickiest congregations.”
¹¹
Immediately after his creation, Cardinal Pamphili was assigned to one of the most important congregations of all—that of the Council of Trent—and in 1639 he would become its chairman. This group met twice a week, on Thursdays and Saturdays, to interpret the rulings of the 1563 council. Gianbattista’s appointment to this prestigious congregation was a sign that he was widely acknowledged as an able churchman.

Cardinal Pamphili joined other important congregations, including the Congregation of Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction and Immunity, which protected clerics from civil prosecution of crimes and defined the often gray area between the legal domains of church and local governments. He accepted a position on the Congregation of Church Rites, which created saints after carefully examining the conduct of their lives and the miracles attributed to them after death. He was named to the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, which worked with missionaries spreading the Catholic faith in far-flung regions of the globe such as China and South America.

Cardinal Pamphili was also appointed to the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, which included at least twelve reverend theologians who met with the pope every Thursday to look into accusa-

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tions of heresy. The cardinal chairman of this congregation had a prison in the basement of his palace where he incarcerated unabashed heretics.

Heresy was no recent phenomenon but was almost as old as Chris-tianity itself. Only twenty years after the crucifixion, Paul wrote the Galatians, “Some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ.” From the earliest times, many converts had their own ideas about who Jesus was and what he meant. Those ideas that were not accepted by the mainstream bishops were labeled “heresy,” which comes from the Greek
heresias,
“choice.”

For the first three centuries of Christianity, heresy was punished by excommunication, not death. Early Christians looked disdainfully at Jews who stoned to death blasphemers; the followers of Jesus treated their disgraced brethren more mercifully. It was only when the religion became entwined with imperial power in the fourth century that disrespect of the church meant treason toward the emperor and the state and, therefore, merited death.

Ironically, heresy served as the impetus for the definition of orthodoxy. Reacting to heresy, theologians performed mental gymnastics to create new dogma. In doing so, they often went well beyond anything stated in the Bible. Over time, these writings of the early church fathers and the decrees of popes and church councils became accepted truth in the same way the Bible was.

The church rationalized this acceptance of later doctrine by concluding that divine revelation does not stop with Scripture. In John 16:12–13, Jesus said, “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth.” In other words, God’s word is continuously revealed by the Holy Spirit, inserted into the right time and place of the world’s historical matrix. The Body of Tradition, as the church called it, added new layers of thought in between the meat of Scripture, creating a kind of theological lasagna.

The individual most responsible for slicing up the lasagna was a Ger-man monk named Martin Luther. A slight man with bruising cheekbones, a square face, and tiny blue eyes tucked beneath a Neolithic brow,

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Luther studied his Bible and was perplexed to find the conspicuous absence of much of Catholic dogma. Where were monks? Where was the pope? Where was confession, pilgrimage, last rites? Not in the Bible. The writings of others had defined much of the Catholic Church as he knew it.

Beginning in 1517 Luther protested loudly against the Body of Tradition and soon had a rising German nationalistic movement behind him. For centuries the Germans had felt fleeced by Rome. Germany, consisting of some three hundred small states, could not present a strong unified front to the church, as France and Spain did, to protest taxes and political interference. Good hardworking Germans resented giving their gold into the smooth hands of slippery Italians doing God only knew what in their painted perfumed palaces with girls, or boys, or each other. “German money in violation of nature flies over the Alps,” Luther wrote.
¹²
Given the financial advantages, numerous European princes suddenly found themselves convinced of Luther’s theology.

As a belated response to the swelling Protestant movement, Paul III created the Roman Inquisition in 1542. Because the Vatican was the foremost legal organization of the modern world, the Inquisition imposed strict rules of law to prevent unjust executions. Witnesses could not accuse secretly but must come out and testify openly. All those who bore the defendant a grudge, including those who owed him money or were owed money by him, were banned from testifying. And for those cases involving witchcraft—stillbirths, bad crops, or sick farm animals—doctors and scientists were asked to testify about natural phenomenon that could have caused the complaints. With his rigorous sense of justice, his caution, and his fine legal mind, Cardinal Pamphili would have been a great asset to the Holy Office of the Inquisition and to those poor heretics and witches hauled before it.