Rome Part 10

[Ill.u.s.tration: SAN CLEMENTE, CHOIR AND TRIBUNE OF UPPER CHURCH

The present twelfth-century building was erected over a much more ancient church, and the site was probably one of the earliest meeting-places of the Christians and may have been that of the house of Clement (the fourth pope) as tradition affirms. A temple and altar to Mithras was found below the lower church. The ancient choir is in very perfect preservation, and its screen, removed from the lower church, is of the sixth century, with portions even of the fourth. See pages 35-36, 183, 186-7.]

It is much later in its history that Rome was captivated by Greek religion and transferred to its crude impersonal G.o.ds the brilliant divine personifications of an imaginative people. The Latin had never been familiar with his G.o.ds, perhaps because they always remained impersonal abstractions, G.o.ds who did not use human speech, but whose language was the lightning-bolt of Jupiter and the wave-las.h.i.+ng triad of Neptune. Into what had really always been impersonal, the Greek came infusing warm human life, making the G.o.ds speak the language of men, and inviting men to speak to them in their own tongue. Greek religion was subtler, more individual, freer, more joyous than Latin.

The pious customs which const.i.tuted the earlier Latin religion had begotten a sense of obligation in the wors.h.i.+pper, but it was conscience as the response to an external stimulus; and the peace it brought was a formal peace, _ex opere operato_, not a peace brought home to the individual conscience face to face with the Divine. It is because conscience implies more of individualism than ever entered into Roman religion that Roman religion has always remained without it. It was only in the jaded period of the later empire that the Romans turned altogether from the simple, natural, large elements of the religion of their soil to the fantastic, emotional, and complex cults of Isis and Mithras. The simple religion of the field and the hearth, of natural law, of orderliness and decorum, of a piety provoking and sustaining a sense of _what was owed_ to the G.o.ds, to the dead, to that State which incarnated the religion of the G.o.ds, fell away on the eve of Christianity before the foreign novelties of Greece and Egypt, better suited to the luxuriousness of mind and the growing introspection of a people who had undergone the influence of Greek thought as something indeed always alien to their nature, yet necessary to their place in the world.

When Peter's successors planted a Judaic sect on the ruins of this paganism they had only to follow the genius of Numa's religion in the creation of the Catholic Church--the _civitas Dei_. Here, we may feel, an essential element of the new religion--the idea of the Kingdom of G.o.d--came naturally to supplant the older State religion; and the conception of the nation as a family was eminently germane to the fraternal maxims which grouped round the idea of the _ecclesia_. But old Rome as it had not stopped to inquire concerning small things, so it had never penetrated to interior things, and the Kingdom of G.o.d translated into the language of Rome lost in the process all its interior characters. What was delicate and subtle had never entered into Roman religion, but neither had what was petty, extravagant, or indecorous. Religion was no delicate aroma, but a concrete duty; not an individual choice, nor an individual necessity, nor an individual attraction, but a public rite, a public piety, a public decorum: and these characteristics, as we shall see, inhere in Roman religion to-day.

It is in its liturgy that the mind, or if one may call it so, the temperament of the Roman Church found an ample and worthy expression; and it is in what it lacked as much as in what it put forward that the genius of the Roman rite is seen to differ entirely from that which presided at the making of the ma.s.s in every other part of Christendom.

The effusion the imagery and the gracious parts added from Gaul, the mysticism of the Oriental, the philosophy of Greece, the Northern inwardness and intimacy, contributed nothing to it. Like Roman religion itself it was not a creation of the imagination or the intellect, nor the outcome of devotional sentiment; it was the creation of the Christian polity clothing its religious data, its religious cert.i.tudes, in a becoming garment--giving them a form, expression, a public characterisation. If there was no effusion there was largeness; in place of tenderness there was disengaged from the formal stately public act a perfect liberty of spirit. All through it was the public act itself which justified and consecrated, which was the sanction of the reality the criterion of the fitness of wors.h.i.+p.

Here besides, _sacramenta_ were not mere signs nor _symbola_ mere figures--they were stately vehicles of universal realities, always and everywhere adequate, worthy, co-ordinating, effectual. Roman ritual was quite bare of those things which in England and France are thought ritualistic; its only ritual consisted in the so-called "manual acts,"

that is, in the things which had to be done; those very things which the Eastern Church removed from the sight of the congregation, creating a "ritual" as a superfluous symbolism to engage the attention of the people. But the Roman dealt in real things, not imagery; nakedly setting forth his _sancta_ in the dry light of a realism which had no reticence joined to a great reticence of the emotions. This was the temperament of all Roman religion, pagan and Christian, a persistent rejection of all that could be described as unctuous, a setting forth of wors.h.i.+p as a great public piety which justified itself. Unlike the Greek whose G.o.d must be behind a curtain, the Roman required the divine to be recognised, always and everywhere, in the _res publica_, in the act which had public sanction, public significance, public utility. The deacons came to the holy table bearing a cloth; one stood at one end and threw the roll across to the deacon at the other end; the oblations of the people were manipulated before the a.s.sembly; the wine collected in small phials is poured into a large chalice, repoured into a bowl; the pontiff collects the oblation bread, so do the priests, while acolytes stand at the side holding cloths to receive it; and the same things, not rites but familiar usages, are repeated at the Communion, when bishop and deacons again pour, mix, distribute, wash and put away the holy things and the sacred vessels in the presence and with the a.s.sistance of the people of G.o.d. Here was nothing "common or unclean"; it was the wisdom of Roman ritual justified of her children.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SANTA MARIA IN COSMEDIN

A very early Christian basilica, in the historic part of Rome by Ponte Rotto and the round temple of Hercules, and on the site of the temple of Ceres and Proserpine. In the sixth century it is enumerated among diaconal churches. It belonged to the Greek colony in this quarter, and its name is derived from the word _kosmos_.

Pavement, ambones, choir, and canopy are of the twelfth century. It has been recently restored to its ancient basilica form, and its many closed windows have been reopened. See pages 28, 31, 35-36, 186.]

It will be seen at once how widely different was such a conception of wors.h.i.+p from that elaborated in the East or which we owe to the vague awe, the dreadful sense of mystery, of the middle age. If we compare the Roman basilica with a Greek or Gothic church this difference is immediately sensible. The former owed nothing to mystery, to dimness.

The celebrant faced the people, as he still faces them in all true basilicas; he did not turn his back on them. No early building, indeed, was flooded with light while glazing was in a crude state and wind and weather had to be kept at bay; but the Christian basilica was not darker than other buildings, there was no religious twilight. And as we see it to-day, in _Santa Sabina_, _Santa Maria in Cosmedin_, _Santa Maria in Domnica_, _SS. Nereo e Achilleo_, _Santa Maria Maggiore_, or in the ruined basilicas of _Santa Domitilla_ and _San Stefano_, so it was centuries ago--flooding the mysteries with what light there was because it was the church of a people who cared for no mysteries which could not bear the light. Nevertheless, the simple realism of the Roman ritual by no means meant, for him who could see, the absence of mysticity. Rather it recalled one to the suggestive and sane mysticity which inheres in all common things, in all common uses.

Whether the somewhat rugged Roman, with his inattention to small matters and to the un.o.bvious, saw the mysticity of the early Christian service and the early Christian basilica, may be doubted; but though it is certain he had not set himself to create this mysticity it is equally certain that he could not banish it from his churches.

Italian religion is not the same thing as Roman religion. Rome has not been "the most religious city in the world" because it felt religion more than those nations and provinces whose religious character differed so profoundly from its own, but because it was able to inst.i.tute it on a scale as universal as its own imperialism. The Neapolitan has the superst.i.tion and poetry, the emotional impressionism, of the genuine South; but such a repulsive scene as the peasant, upheld by his friends, licking his way to the altar along the filthy church floor could not be witnessed in Rome. It would be difficult to imagine a Roman wis.h.i.+ng to be exorcised after putting his head into the English or American church to see the stained gla.s.s windows. The "Roman of Rome" leaves such things together with the swallowing of pious-text pills to the unrestrained fervour of some of our English Catholics. The Roman has less religious pa.s.sion and also much less abandonment to the external than the Southerner or even the Englishman. Rome has had--with one ill.u.s.trious exception--no great saints since the sixth century; she has been evangelised by saintly visitors from Sweden, from Tuscany, from Siena, as the primitive Church had been edified by the itinerant Gospel visitors called "prophets." From Lombardy, Venice and Umbria, from Parma, Ancona, Florence, Pisa, Naples and the Abruzzi, saints, seers, missioners, mystics, reformers, have brought her their message: but the terrible proverb _Roma veduta fede perduta_ records the impression she has often made on visitors less elect than these. Not Rome but Venice counts as the "devout city" of Italy, and the well-known story of the Jew who became a Christian on the ground that no religion could have survived Roman corruption unless it were divine, was told me in Rome by a prelate as an encouraging episode.

It was said by Matthew Arnold that the Latin people never cared enough for Christianity to reform it; they never thought it worth while, it is true, to break with the Church to find Christianity. The Italian, moreover, had none of the things which made the Puritan--not his fierce dogmatism, the Judaic strain of his piety, his dread of the external, his contentment with doctrinal formulas. Joined to an indubitable attachment to Catholicism--the magic of which inspired the art even of men who did not believe it--the Italian had also too keen an intuition of the real religious issues (as we understand them to-day) to exchange ecclesiastical tradition for biblical dogmatism.

Christianity was for him much more of a self-justifying religious tradition and much less of a dogmatism than it was for the Protestant.

The Christianity which the Italian would have liked was the Christianity of S. Francis, familiar, meek, tolerant, a genuine disciples.h.i.+p; and it did not irk him to add to this the forms of Catholicism. Like the Reformers, the Italian of the sixteenth century knew little of Church history, but his instinct was on the side of reintegration rather than disintegration of the religious forces enshrining the Christian revelation. The earlier Italian religious movements were almost entirely, like that of the seraphic _frate_, on the side of informing historical Christianity with the new spirit of Christ. A great horror of the ways of Rome, never echoed by the Romans, did, nevertheless, penetrate religious Italy, and few people realise that it was among the Franciscans not among the Reformers that papal Rome was first branded as the "scarlet woman," the unclean Babylon of the Apocalypse.

Has Protestantism the evangelic marks which the Italian, consciously or unconsciously, lays down for Christianity, and what chance would it have in Italy? It will bear repeating that the Puritan's definition of Christianity would never at any time have found acceptance with the Italian; he never could have cared for reform in doctrine and discipline which did not necessarily, did not primarily, involve a real evangelic reform. When one remembers how very little Protestantism was, in its inception, on the side of dogmatic freedom, and that it put a theological formula before all other matters of the law, one may admit that the Italian though he did not reform may yet have loved true Christianity. In the next place the intense individualism of Protestant wors.h.i.+p is distasteful to the Italian who, as we have already realised, does not ask or require that subordination of the society to the individual which religious subdivisions imply, and he would always be repelled by the phenomena of revivalism. It is instructive for us to realise that such things are stigmatised as "buffoonery" by the Italians, whose own elaborate ritual often appears to suggest that description to the Protestant. In the third place, he dislikes the _reclame_ of Protestantism, its self-advertis.e.m.e.nt, the distribution of tracts at church doors and in the public streets. To his mind no religion worthy of the name can have need of such support. The Sister of Charity and the _frate_, indeed, appear familiarly among them in their strange dress, not as they, yet part of themselves, reminding the people of the great ideals of their religion, tracts in their own persons but making no _reclame_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHAPEL OF SAN ZENO (called _orto del paradiso_) IN S.

PRa.s.sEDE

This mosaic chapel was erected by Paschal I. in 822. Its great beauty gave it the name of "Garden of Paradise." The church is near the house of Pudens, and is dedicated to Praxedis his daughter. See pages 45, 46, 240.]

Indeed the way in which all external expression is regarded by the Italian differs radically from the way in which it presents itself to the Anglo-Saxon and the Teuton. Wagner declared that as soon as the German is called on to be artistic he becomes a buffoon. We in England, also, do not know how to express ourselves by means of external symbols; but the Italian experiences no such difficulty. We are not at home with them; he is. If we use them we exaggerate, he gives them their true proportion and place. He can always be taught by his senses, and he is not, as we are, deluded by them. We, in fine, do not know what to do with the external, he does. His sense of humour is active just where the Englishman's is quiescent; he is not capable, for example, of laying store by this or that little bit of ceremony.

The evangelicalism of the Italian, therefore, which one hopes he may some day achieve, will be unlike Anglo-Saxon Christianity--as the catacombs are unlike a "Little Bethel"--he will always require gracious surroundings, he will always ask for the arts to a.s.sist his imagination, and prefer fine music, and even the perfume of incense, to the bids for his soul made by the preacher. That is his reticence, and as it differs from the Anglo-Saxon's the latter does not understand it. The Italian will always best respond to a service conceived in the spirit of the ma.s.s, with its mystical renewal enacted before his eyes, at once exterior and interior, public and intimate; but with no individualistic note, no dependence on the personal element.

The visitor to Rome must be struck with the fact that the Italians are a more religious people than we. They take more trouble about it.

Every morning, day after day, in scores of churches people are going in and out of the heavy leathern door hangings, up and down the steps of the facades; such a spectacle as the visit to the sepulchres on Holy Thursday could not be witnessed in England from one year's end to another. At the street corners, on the stairs, in the shops and the porters' lodges, oil lamps burn before images and shrines; and the deepest curse in the Italian vocabulary is to say _La mala Pasqua_--"a bad Easter to you." "In all things I perceive that ye are somewhat superst.i.tious," said S. Paul, taking as the pretext of his appeal to the Athenians the trouble and care which he saw everywhere bestowed on the unseen world and the claims of wors.h.i.+p: and he could make the same appeal to the Romans to-day with perhaps a greater chance of converting them than the missionary from America. For there is no "provincialism" in Italian religion; the Sunday joys of discussing the anthem, the sermon, the preacher, the details of the service and the congregation, the half mystical half sentimental joy of chewing the cud of sacred things which is so Northern, offer no attractions to the man of the South. He has endless time in the South but no long twilights. In religion as elsewhere the Roman harbours no illusions.

The things--petty or precious--which are possible to a people who can maintain illusions, and have no inconvenient quickness of mind, are not to be expected from him. Chadbands in Rome would have no success and no dupes; and your transcendental emotional sentiments about the Pope are perhaps as little understood as your rejection of him. The Roman dreads death, and he refers to the anointing oil as "_quella cosa piu peggio del viatico_"--"that thing which is still worse than the Viatic.u.m." He lives familiarly with his religion and in a sort of child-like simplicity; yet he is sceptical, and we are not, he has no talent for meditative devotion, and we have.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CLOISTERS OF S. PAUL'S-WITHOUT-THE-WALLS

Erected between 1193 and 1208. The most beautiful cloisters in Rome.

See interleaf, page 158, and page 36.]

Again, the "respectability" of English Church religion would be as little tolerated as the _reclame_ of sheer Protestantism. There is absolutely nothing answering in the Italian temperament to that pride and pleasure in the respectability of church and chapel going which is so potent a factor in England. The sects which proselytise in Rome are the American Methodists, Baptists, and Wesleyans; many of the better educated preferring to all these the native Waldensian Church. One of the chief attractions of what I have called sheer Protestantism lies in its familiarity as compared with the stiff and terrible "respectability" of the English Church. But this is precisely where Italian Catholicism has itself never failed, and the Catholic in Italy is already accustomed to familiar and simple relations with priest monk and friar--to a complete democracy of sentiment. I was recently motioned to a vacant seat by a dignified French ecclesiastic who was giving out the usual notices from the altar after the Gospel of the ma.s.s; a Latin priest will notify the congregation by a gesture when he is about to preach and they can sit down; even an English Catholic priest I know of turns to the people before beginning the Christmas midnight ma.s.s to wish them and theirs a happy and blessed festival.

These fraternal familiarities do not lack in the Nonconformist chapels, but they would most certainly be deemed out of place and not quite decorous in the English Church. Latin simplicity and human interest, the brotherhood of cla.s.s, oppose themselves here to English self-consciousness, English inflexibility, the Puritan sense of propriety; and no one can have lived in Italy without seeing instances multiplied in all ranks of the clergy of that familiarity without loss of dignity to which we have not the key. Another thing little understood in England is that the Italian is not "priest-ridden"; he does not depend upon or run after the priest, and the att.i.tude which the priest in Ireland and the minister in Scotland have been able to a.s.sume towards the people would never have been possible in Italy. The Roman, more especially, has never ceased to let his satire play upon popes and cardinals, and has known how to do so without scorning dogma and discipline. The _bigotte_ is not an Italian type; and is disliked and distrusted, in either s.e.x, when met. The Roman peasant trudging into the city on Sunday morning halts at the big church of S. Paul in the Via n.a.z.ionale, enters, and walks up to the top. A verger at once points out to him his place in the house of G.o.d--for this is the American Episcopal church--and he returns to the door: he was uncertain about the church but he is quite certain now, this is not Latin Christianity. But if the Italian comes to London another surprise is in store for him; he goes to the Catholic church and finds he must take a ticket for his footing there--and, often, he goes no more, he has not sufficient threepences and sixpences; he does not mind being poor but he does not think it very fitting to label you from the start as a threepenny Catholic or a six-penny Catholic.

These things show that certain qualities of Italian Catholicism--its familiarity, its independence (for the Italian has greater liberty of spirit though the Anglo-Saxon has greater liberty of conscience)--are the outcome of the Latin spirit and can only be enjoyed where this has sway. It has most influence in Italy and least in Germany. In the city which inherits the sour persecuting spirit of Westphalia, for example, Catholicism is a very different thing from what it is in the land of its birth. There the faithful are a regiment--human automata--standing up and kneeling down with the uniformity of clockwork; every one who enters is suspected, every one who stands at the door creates scandal, the priests are quaestors and their vergers are lictors. Such things certainly have their compensations for the Teutonic and even the Anglo-Saxon mind--but how different they are from the tolerant liberty of the _domus Dei_ in Italy which is, by the same t.i.tle, the house of the people, with all that familiarity of spirit loved by S. Francis, that utter freedom from self-righteousness! Twice in the course of twelve years, in my personal knowledge, visitors to Cologne Cathedral, in both cases women and Catholics, were a.s.saulted by the beadle in charge and hustled by physical force out of the building, their innocent desire having been to enter the chapel where they supposed the reserved Sacrament to be. The Englishman is no bully, and he does not easily feel that desire to a.s.sault which possesses the Teutonic official; moreover if there is one thing he understands it is political liberty--but I may venture on a rough guess that the vergers of some of our cathedrals--S. Paul's not excepted--have the making of a Cologne beadle in their souls.

The question of racial religious characteristics apparently resolves itself into one of compensations. For those who think that Catholicism decorated with the notes of Puritanism, with the sour Teutonic or the dour Spanish accompaniments to religion, or with the florid sentimentalism of the Gaul, loses its birthright, Italian Catholicism will always retain its primacy: but they must bid good-bye in Italy to memories of religious recollection and mysticity, to the beauties and sedateness possible among an interior people who are not wooed by the senses; the beauty of holiness will have to be pictured through a mist of dirt, ignorant superst.i.tion, and slovenliness, but not athwart the haze of bigotry, cant, and self-gratulation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CLOISTERS IN SANTA SCHOLASTICA, SUBIACO

One of the three cloisters in this Benedictine monastery; it was built by Abbot Lando in 1235, and is decorated on the vault with mosaic work by the Cosmati. See page 36, and interleaf, page 82.]

The Roman skeleton of religion has been clothed upon by other races, who have filled in, expanded, and added those things which fitted Christianity for reception among more complex and introspective or more devout natures; but in the eternal city itself, from the catacombs to a solemn ma.s.s in S. Peter's, the religion of Latium and the religion of imperial Rome have set their indelible seal on Christianity. The familiar pastoral figure of Christ with his crook in catacomb frescoes, carrying a pail, the milk of the Eucharist, has its primitive counterpart in the shepherds' G.o.d Lupercus "driver away of wolves," whose wors.h.i.+p was celebrated in _Roma Quadrata_ by the original settlers, clad in their goat skins, who offered him milk as a libation. But he who said _Ego sum pastor bonus_ is gathering the sheep (and the goats), not driving away the wolves, and he is giving the food which is himself to them, not seeking it of them. The Person of Christ had introduced as much of the intimate and personal as Roman religion was capable of a.s.similating; but the moral implications of this personality--after the first brilliant epoch of the planting of the Faith, with its consciousness of the Person of Christ and its realisation of the moral uses of the Eucharist--were never really appropriated by Rome. Again, the master of ceremonies at papal ma.s.s prompts the pontiff at each stage of the function as did his predecessors for Antoninus Pius or Marcus Aurelius when they too officiated as _pontifex maximus_. The very chairs of the bishops in Rome (where no bishop save the pope or a cardinal in his t.i.tular church sits on a throne) are the _curule_ chairs of the Roman magistrates. Nay more mysterious still are the roots of sacred things in Latin soil, for the Roman pontiffs were to adopt that Etruscan pontifical system in which both civil and ecclesiastical functions were vested in the _Lucomones_. Though Greek theology twice enriched Latin religion, pagan and Christian, nowhere is religion less Greek and more Roman than in Rome. It may be said to be the distinctive feature of Christianity that it is a preaching religion; in France and in England it is more a preaching religion than in Italy, but it is least of all a preaching religion in Rome; and so it has always been.

There is no pulpit in the Roman basilica. In the eternal city as elsewhere Christianity in its inception was a Jewish sect, it rose there as elsewhere among the "Jews of the dispersion," and certain Hebrew things, lections, chants, and exposition of the Scriptures, at once took their place in its public wors.h.i.+p. But Rome has, here also, preserved less of the Judaic strain of piety than any other Christian Church. The Roman has blotted out the Hebrew element.

At the founts of the Roman and the Hebrew story we come indeed upon one mysterious link--the history of each people begins in a fratricide. As Cain slays Abel so Remus is slain by Romulus, but there the likeness ends; there is no reproach in the Roman story--"the voice of thy brother's blood" cries out through the whole course of Hebrew history.

The act of Romulus founded what was most precious to the Roman, his Kingdom of G.o.d on earth--the Roman state, the Roman polity: the act of Cain awoke what lay at the source of Jewish theocracy, the persuasion of sin and of righteousness, the Kingdom based on the conscience.

Neither has ever been able to enter freely into the sentiment of the other. Romulus is a hero, Cain is outcast humanity; but the temple to Romulus still evokes more response in Rome than the moral considerations connected with Abel.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SANTA MARIA SOPRA MINERVA

The Dominican church near the Pantheon, called "S. Mary above Minerva" because it was erected upon Pompey's temple of the G.o.ddess, was built by Florentines in the fourteenth century, and is the only instance of pointed architecture in Rome. Its unlikeness to the Roman basilica is manifest.]

It is the _pax romana_, the peace of the Roman empire, which was actually established as "the Peace of the Church." The peace, juridical or religious, of a world which acknowledged the sway of Rome. Without were barbarians and heretics, within was the _civis roma.n.u.s_. It was a peace consistent with all war save internecine, and Rome, whether political or religious, created in the world it conquered the ambition to live and die united to the greatest of earthly ent.i.ties--to live and die as catacomb epitaphs to orthodox strangers dying in Rome record--_in pace_. The Roman citizens.h.i.+p becomes the Catholic citizens.h.i.+p through the mediation of the Apostle who could say "But I am a Roman born," while setting forth imperially a Palestinian sect to the Gentile world. The stranger Roman citizen who dies in Rome for Christ links two worlds with his blood, dedicates that new _imperium_ where Rome may claim that all homage is paid _et mihi et Petro_, confounds those two things which the master of the Gospel "of the Kingdom" had set apart, the things of Caesar and the things of G.o.d.

CHAPTER X

THE ROMAN CARDINAL

What is a cardinal? In the early days of the Church in Rome the presbyters and deacons of the city, the council and administrators of its bishop, were considerable personages--indeed the bench of presbyters had always been of great importance in the government of the Church in Rome as elsewhere, as Jerome testifies, and the seven deacons were even more conspicuous partly perhaps, as Jerome suggests, because they were few and the presbyters were many, and partly because the diaconate appears very early in Roman Church annals, and may indeed have been a relic of the evangelisation of the eternal city by Peter, at whose instance "the seven" were first inst.i.tuted (Acts vi.

3). To the presbyters and deacons must be added the rural bishops of the Roman district who came in time to a.s.sist the Pope at the great ecclesiastical solemnities, and are an example of those parochial oversights, no larger than parishes, over which we find "bishops"

presiding at a time when--except in the great metropolitan Sees--bishops were little more than rural deans.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SAINT PETER'S]

As the Church grew these presbyters of the original "t.i.tles" or parish churches of Rome, together with the regional deacons of the city, and the suburban bishops, took rank as the cardinal or princ.i.p.al Roman clergy, and in time the privilege of forming part, even in only a t.i.tular sense, of this body of presbyters and deacons of the great See of Rome, was coveted by other than Romans, and the Pope would create the metropolitan of a foreign See or some distinguished foreign ecclesiastic cardinal priest or cardinal deacon of the Holy Roman Church. By the eleventh century the cardinals of the Roman Church are a recognised body, the Senate of the Pope, whose election is being gradually confined to their hands alone. In the next century the popular vote--the vote of the clergy and people of Rome--is altogether abolished, and thenceforth the election of a pope is exclusively vested in the College of Cardinals, whose privileges and dignity were further enhanced at the close of the thirteenth century by Boniface VIII.

Cardinals therefore are the honorary parish clergy of Rome, nominally holding the place of the presbyters of the Roman _t.i.tles_ and of the deacons of the Roman regions; and though a foreign cardinal cannot of course be also a local parish priest in Rome, he is bound to appoint a "vicar" to represent him. The six suburban Sees are always held by six of the senior cardinals _di curia_, that is the cardinals resident in Rome, among whom is always the Pope's cardinal-vicar, and they are called the cardinal bishops. Cardinal priests are usually in episcopal orders, and cardinal deacons are usually in priest's orders. Each cardinal priest or deacon takes his t.i.tle from one of the Roman churches, and is styled _John Cardinal Priest_ (or deacon) _of the t.i.tle of Saints John and Paul on the Caelian_. The oldest presbyteral t.i.tles are to be found in the outlying districts--as SS. Andrea and Gregorio, Archbishop Manning's t.i.tle, S. Clemente, S. Prisca, SS.

Bonifacio and Alessio, or S. Eusebio, on the Caelian Aventine and Esquiline, or among the old ecclesiastical foundations in Trastevere.

The diaconal t.i.tles, on the contrary, are to be found in the centre, corresponding to the ancient regions--S. Maria in Aquiro behind Piazza Colonna, S. Adriano on the Forum, or S. Giorgio the t.i.tle of John Henry Newman in the ancient quarter of the Velabrum.

The Pope was chosen from among the deacons of Rome for eight hundred years, and was consecrated bishop on his election; later on the Pope was chosen from the bishops, but if, as has happened, a layman were elected he proceeded at once to receive the three major orders. A man in deacon's orders or a layman may similarly have the Hat conferred on him, but in this case he may remain in deacon's orders, or if a layman may take simple minor orders. The last deacon in the College of Cardinals was created by Pius IX. He had been a member of the High Council in the "forties," and as such formed one of the deputation sent by the Romans after the flight to Gaeta to beg Pius IX. to return to Rome. The deputation was not even received. Antonelli, this Pope's Secretary of State, was another cardinal who was never in priest's orders.

A cardinal is called the Pope's _creatura_; at the time of Leo XIII.'s death the only surviving cardinal of Pius IX.'s creation was the Cardinal Chamberlain Oreglia di Santo Stefano, so that Leo could all but declare in the words of one of his predecessors, with an allusion to S. John xv. 16, "You have not elected me, but I have elected you."

The full number of the Roman cardinals is seventy. About twenty-five of these are always resident in Rome, and form the papal _Curia_, or administrative council of the Church, with the _entree_ at all times to the Vatican. They are the chief members of the Roman Congregations, the Congregation of Rites, of the Inquisition, the Index, the Bishops and Regulars, etc., through which all ecclesiastical affairs are administered. Cardinals _di curia_ receive a sum of twenty-four thousand francs a year, or less than one thousand pounds. A special stipend is also added for the work done as members of the various congregations.

Their position before 1870 was however a very different one. Then they enjoyed large incomes and their comings and goings were attended with a certain measure of regal state; and in the preceding centuries when the Hat was often conferred, like any other secular distinction, on mere youths and on laymen, their wealth and the luxury and magnificence of their style of living was unsurpa.s.sed in Rome, while the power and position of some cardinal nephew or relative of the Pope was second only to his own.