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Clement XIII, né Carlo della Torre Rezzonico (March 7, 1693 - February 2,
1769) was pope 1758-1769.
Clement XIII by Anton Raphael Mengs
He was born a noble of Venice, received a Jesuit education in Bologna and became a cardinal in 1737. Previously he had filled various important posts in the
Curia and had been bishop of Padua since 1743. He
became pope on July 6, 1758. Notwithstanding the meekness and affability of his upright
and moderate character, modest and generous with his extensive private fortune, his pontificate was disturbed by perpetual
contentions respecting the pressures to suppress the Jesuits coming from the
progressive Enlightenment circles of the philosophes in France, and also, more unexpectedly in the
less progressive courts of Spain, the Two Sicilies, and Portugal. In 1758 the reforming minister of
José I, the Marquis of Pombal, expelled them from Portugal, and shipped them en masse to Civitavecchia, as a "gift
for the Pope." In 1760, Pombal sent home the Papal nuncio and recalled the portuguese ambassador. The pamphlet titled the
Brief Relation, which represented the Jesuits as having set up virtually an independent kingdom in South America under
their own sovereignty, and of tyrannizing the Indians, all in the interest of an insatiable ambition and avarice, whether or not
it was completely true, was damaging to the Jesuit cause.
In France, the Parlement de Paris, with its strong upper bourgeois background and Jansenist sympathies, opened the pressure to expel the Jesuits from France in the spring of 1761, and the
published excerpts from Jesuit writings, the Extrait des assertions taken out of context perhaps, certainly provided
anti-Jesuit ammunition. Though a congregation of bishops assembled at Paris in December 1761 recommended no action, Louis XV
promulgated a royal order premitting the Society to remain in the kingdom, with the proviso that certain essentially liberalizing
changes in their institution satisfy the Parlement with a French Jesuit vicar- general who should be independent of the general
in Rome. To the arrét of August 2, 1762, by which the Parlement suppressed the Jesuits in France, impossing untenable conditions
on any wishing to remain in the country, Clement replied by a protest against the invasion of the Church's rights, and annulled
the arréts. Louis XV's ministers could not permit such an abrogation of French law, and Louis finally expelled the Jesuits in
November 1764.
Clement warmly espoused the Order in a papal bull Apostolicum pascendi issued on January 7, 1765, which was largely ignored. By 1768 the Jesuits had been
expelled from France, the Two Sicilies and Parma. In Spain, they appeared to be safe, but Charles III, aware of the drawn-out contentions in Bourbon France, decided on a more peremptory
efficiency. The night of April 2 - 3, 1767, all the Jesuit houses of Spain were suddenly surrounded, the inhabitants arrested,
shipped to the ports in the clothes they were wearing and bundled onto ships for Civitavecchia. The king's letter to Clement XIII
promised that his allowance of 100 piastres each a year would be withdrawn for the whole Order, should any one of them venture at
any time to write anything in self-defence or in criticism of the motives for the expulsion, motives that he refused to discuss,
then or in the future.
The question of the investiture of Parma occurred to aggravate Clement's troubles. The
Bourbon kings espoused their relative's quarrel, seized Avignon, Benevento and Ponte Corvo, and united in a peremptory demand for
the total suppression of the Jesuits (January 1769). Driven to extremities, Clement consented to call a Consistory to consider
the step, but on the very eve of the day set for its meeting he died (February 2, 1769), not without suspicion of poison, of
which, however, there appears to be no conclusive evidence.
From the Annual Register, for 1758: Clement XIII was "the honestest man in the world; a most exemplary ecclesiastic; of the
purest morals; devout, steady, learned, diligent..."
This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. and other sources
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