The Cardinals: Thirteen Centuries of the Men behind the Papal Throne (review)

Michael Walsh has over many years been much engaged in the writing and compilation of ecclesiastical biography, not least in his editing of the revised Oxford Dictionary of Popes (Oxford, 2006). It is not surprising, therefore, that he has published this general study of cardinals, a companion piece to his Westminster Cardinals (New York, 2008) and his study of the conclave. It begins with a useful introduction on the development of the cardinalitial office and continues with some sixty pithy character sketches, which take their inspiration from the brief-lives formula adopted by Trevor Beeson, the former dean of Winchester, in his series of informative and sometimes sardonic vignettes of leaders of the Church of England.

The cardinals lack the comfortable provincialism of the Anglican clergy but still form an inner elite, an intimate circle, in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is manageable enough in scale; only some 4000 men have received the title, and there have been generally fewer than 100 at any one time to make them eminently accessible. The origins of the cardinalitial dignity are obscure (despite there being little doubt about the etymology of the word, taken from cardo, a hinge) but by the high Middle Ages, like much else in the Western Church, the cardinalate had received definition and focus. By the end of the twelfth century they formed a college, met with the pope regularly in consistories, and conducted papal elections in conclaves. By the end of the thirteenth century they had acquired a very distinctive hat.

What makes the cardinals historically important is their role in the election of the pope—“the men behind the papal throne”—and whatever else they do or are is secondary. Their corporate identity outside the conclaves remained unclear; they never quite constituted a senate in the Church and were not a separate order. Their individual contributions—whether as curial officials, politicos and diplomats, scholars, crown cardinals of high birth, or leading bishops in their local church—have been diffuse. Walsh provides an excellent overview of the variety of “the princes of the Church” over a wide chronological span. He delights in the quirks and singularities of the saints and sinners who have made up the Sacred College.

Most of the biographies are of Europeans, as most cardinals have been from that continent and within Europe mainly Italians. He looks at “nearly men”—those who came close to receiving the papal crown. None came closer than the Englishman Reginald Pole. Among the saintly figures he features is one with strong North American ties: Breton-born Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus (1768–1836), who was an exile in England as a young priest, spent twenty years in Boston, became the Boston Archdiocese’s first bishop, became notable for his work among Native Americans, and died as cardinal archbishop of Bordeaux. Walsh also presents an affectionate portrait of Thomas Weld (1773–1837), a widower from an English recusant Catholic family who was ordained as a priest in 1821 and appointed five years later as a bishop in Upper Canada—a place he never visited. In 1830 he became a cardinal in Rome and became celebrated as the cardinal who was accompanied openly in the city by his (legitimate) grandchildren.

This book makes interesting and sometimes amusing reading and is an insightful and well-informed introduction to the subject. It would have benefited from a concluding section, balancing the opening part of the book, which might have provided some unifying themes to the book. It also could have allowed the author to show how the internationalization of the Sacred College beyond Europe to the developing world has been so significant a feature of the office over the last century, a mirror (as so often with the cardinals) of the wider Church. The Catholicity of the Church is now firmly wedded to its Mediterranean roots...