The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864. Various
and if any candidate is found to have two-thirds of the votes cast, the election is complete. If, however, the legal two-thirds are not reached, any voter may change his vote by saying that he accedes to the votes thrown in favor of any other candidate. This mode of election is called accession, and has often been found successful where the prominence of any candidate was sufficient to make it evident that two or three votes would secure a choice.
Inspiration is another mode of election, not so common as the ballot, but which, whenever any candidate has succeeded in forming a strong party, is not without its advantages. Several cardinals call out together the name of their candidate, and if many of them agree in calling the same name, the rest are seldom willing to hold out in open opposition to a choice which after all may be made without them: the successful candidate always being expected to remember those who favored, and seldom known to forget those who opposed his election.
A fourth and last mode, never resorted to except in desperate straits, and when the contest seems interminable, is by delegation: the power of choice being delegated by the cardinals to one or more of their number, and all solemnly pledging themselves to abide by the decision. It was thus that Gregory X. was chosen by a delegation of six,—and that John XXII. became Pope after two years of regular voting had failed to procure a successor to the Prince of the Apostles. It has been said, however, that John, who, partly by his talents and partly by fraud, had raised himself from the lowest walks of life, had no sooner secured a pledge of concurrence than he announced his own name as that of the candidate of his choice. Surprised, but not edified, the cardinals made no opposition to his elevation, for Christendom and folio crammed with projects and reports: bishops and missionaries transport him in a moment from England to China, from Egypt to Peru. If you could look into those piles of papers which are awaiting his signature, you would find petitions and remonstrances, death-warrants and pardons, political processes and criminal processes, schemes for a new bishopric or a new canonization, plans for a cathedral in New York or a convent in Syria, for a new prison in the Patrimony or a new tax in the Marches, architecture and law, finance and theology, sacred and profane all jumbled together: and what wonder they should keep jumbled, from the beginning to the end, from his coronation to his funeral, leaving him, even with the best intentions and the most untiring industry, a helpless prey to intrigues and cabals and all the artifices and deceptions which beset a throne? Gioja and Romagnosi are under the ban, and he has no wish to ask them for the clue to the labyrinth he is wandering in, even if he had the time. He has no time to read the newspapers. His knowledge of them is derived from abstracts prepared for him by a clerk in the Governor's office,—containing, therefore, what the minister allows to be put there, and nothing more; while their living pictures, those columns of advertisements which bring before you day by day the wants and hopes and pursuits of so many of your fellow-creatures, carrying you, as it were, into hundreds of families, and laying open to your scrutiny hundreds of human hearts, the different lights in which men and things appear to the organs of different parties, and the proof which, in the midst of their contradictions, they all concur in giving that there is a spirit abroad which cannot be lulled to sleep, are lessons all lost for him, and which, perhaps, would be equally lost, even if he had the leisure and the knowledge to study them.
He dines alone,—for in the city, in the dearth of publicans and sinners, no one can sit at table with the Vicar of Christ; and thus dinner-hour, the open-hearted hour, puts him almost more absolutely in the hands of his immediate attendants than any hour of the twenty-four. If he walks, it is in the garden or library; if he rides, it is surrounded by guards and followed by his household train. He took his last walk in the streets when he was a prelate, and thenceforth knows no more of the city than he can see through his carriage-windows; and now even that imperfect view is more than half cut off by the officers of the guard, who ride their great black horses close to the carriage-door.
But enough of the Pope, and much more than I had intended when I first took up my pen. That, even when he has studied them most, the temporal interests of his people must suffer in his hands, has been proved by the sufferings of millions through centuries of oppression and misrule. And must it not always be so, when the interests of husbands and fathers are intrusted to men cut off by education and profession from the domestic sympathies wherein these interests have birth, and that domestic hearth which is at once the source and the emblem and the purifier of the State?
The electors and advisers of the Pope form the College of Cardinals, seventy in number, when full: six bishops, fifty priests, and fourteen deacons; once merely the parish priests of Rome, then princes of the Church and electors of its visible head. In this body, formerly so important and on which so much still depends, all Catholic Europe has its representatives, although it is mainly composed of native Italians. Many of them are men of exemplary piety, many of them eminent for talent and learning, but some, too, mere worldlings, raised by intrigue or favor or the necessities of birth to a position too exalted for weak heads, and too much beset with temptation for corrupt hearts.
The path that leads to the sacred college is neither a straight nor a narrow one. There are no prescribed qualifications of age or of rank. Leo X. was cardinal at thirteen; and although no such premature appointment to the gravest duties has been made since, or will ever, probably, be made again, yet there is always a salutary sprinkling of youth in this eminent body, if priests and prelates can ever be said to be truly young. And although families of a certain rank are sure of the speedy promotion of any child whom they may see fit to dedicate to the Church, yet the representative of untainted blood has often found himself side by side with the son of a peasant or of an artisan. The cardinal is not necessarily even a priest. Adrian V. died without ordination; and Leo X. held the keys of St. Peter four days with unconsecrated hands. He may even have been married, but must be single again when he puts on the red hat.
The appointment is made by the Pope, and, although announced to the whole body assembled in consistory, requires no confirmation to make it valid. Certain offices lead to it, and are known as cardinalate offices. Every prelate looks forward to it with hope, and every priest with longing; and besides the priests and prelates, the regular orders also, the monks and friars, claim a representation in the college. But whatever the pretensions or expectations of individuals may be, the decision rests with the Pope, whose good-will, adroitly managed, has often let fall the coveted honor upon men who had little else to recommend them. It was certainly honorable to this reverend body in our own day that they numbered Mai and Mezzofante among their brethren; but in Rome the story ran that neither the palimpsestic labors of the one nor the fifty languages of the other would have won him the well-earned promotion, if the Pope's favorite servant had not set his heart upon making his children's tutor assistant-librarian of the Vatican.
Although nominally the council of the Pope, the consistory or official assembly of the cardinals has few of the characteristics of a deliberative body. The Pope addresses them from his throne; but the substance of his address is already known to most of them beforehand, and his opinion upon the subject, as well as theirs, made up before they come together. They have no constituents to enlighten, nothing to hope and nothing to fear from public opinion. They are all so near the topmost round that each of them is justified in feeling as if he already had his hand upon it; but to whichever of them that envied preëminence may be destined, it is neither the favor nor the gratitude of the people that can raise him to it. What they already hold they are sure of; and it is only to the good-will of their colleagues that they are to look for more.
But it is in those public meetings that the Roman court puts on all its splendor. The very hall has a grave and imposing air about it that inspires serious thoughts in serious minds, and checks, for a moment, the frivolous vivacity of lighter ones. You cannot look at the walls without feeling a solemn sadness steal over you, as you think of the thousands of your fellow-creatures who have gazed on them with the same freshness and fulness of life with which you now gaze on them, since Raphael and Michel Angelo first clothed them with their own immortal conceptions, three hundred years ago. It was in an assembly like this, and perhaps in this very room, that the condemnation of Luther was pronounced, that Henry was proclaimed "Defender of the Faith," and that Cardinal Pole rejoiced with his brethren of the purple over the approaching return of England to the bosom of the Church. And as you are musing on these things, and centuries seem to pass before you like the figures of a dream, the room gradually fills, the cardinals come in and take their places, each clad in the simple