Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History

Chapter 1: Pope Benedict XIV (1740-1758)

PARt 1 Catholic Enlightenment and the Papacy 41 1 R Pope Benedict XIV ( 17 4 0 –17 5 8 ) The Ambivalent Enlightener MARIo RoSA the biographical profile of Benedict XIV allows us to understand many aspects of the Catholic Enlightenment and its history, in the light of numerous studies of a general nature from recent decades. It is significant that these aspects initially find their place in the framework of the tridentine tradition but, under pressure from an Enlightened Catholicism (especially a Catholicism enlightened by the “regulated devotion” of Ludovico Antonio Muratori), find expression in some encyclicals from the first decade of Benedict’s papacy, which treated the pastoral commitments of the bishops and the training of the clergy, and in several interventions regarding the critical updating of hagiography and ecclesiastic historical studies. this dynamic conception of culture would soon open up greater initiatives by Benedict XIV, such as reform of “La Sapienza” University in Rome, restoration of classical and Christian monuments like the Colosseum and Santa 42 Mario Rosa Maria Maggiore, and relationships with Italian and foreign learned men—from Muratori to Maffei, Boscovich to Fontenelle, and the much-discussed one with Voltaire. the reform of the Congregation of the Index, made by Benedict XIV in 1753, was meant to signify on Rome’s part a new way of looking at modern scientific culture and a more liberal development of debates within Catholic culture itself. At the same time the work of Benedict XIV allows us to track the ways in which the Roman Church, aware of the new political realities that had come into being in Europe following the wars in the first half of the century, made an important reply through a series of concordats with some Italian states and with Portugal and Spain. It would be this awareness of contemporary developments by Benedict XIV that opened new perspectives to the then-emerging power in Europe, the Protestant Prussia of Frederick II, by redefining relationships between Catholics and Protestants, thus easing the century-old rifts deriving from the Reformation. In the same constructive spirit, the pope intervened within the Papal States, bringing about a series of economic and social reforms in order to root out entrenched financial and administrative difficulties. Such reforms were in agreement with what was happening in the Europe of the Enlightenment with regard to reforming its culture. As a result, Benedict XIV become renowned not only as a “philosophic” pope, as the Enlightenment press already called him, but as an enlightened sovereign of a state that, according to European public opinion, seemed characterized by a particular backwardness. on this intertwining of different eighteenth-century elements Benedict XIV also based other interventions, relating to the economic and commercial reality of the world: for example, the problem of the lawfulness of a loan at interest, about which the pope, in his encyclical Vix pervenit of 1745, took a mediatory stance between the contrasting motivations found in the Catholic world. We again find a mediatory stance in his other decisions; for example, those regarding the missionary practice followed in China and India between 1742 and 1744, or issues concerning French Jansenism, upon which he took a conciliatory position in another encyclical of 1756. Benedict XIV often used encyclicals in dialogue with the Catholic world, and his pontifi- Pope Benedict XIV (1740–1758) 43 cate was thereby instrumental in giving that world the modern form we know today. However, the work of Benedict, especially as he shifted during the second decade of his papacy (from 1750 onward), followed a precarious course between the weight of the past and the requirements of a present at the threshold of modernity. this shift derived not so much from the swing away from the initial surge of reform characteristic of his pontificate, nor from the reaction of more conservative organs of the Curia with regard to the development of the Enlighteners— instead, Benedict XIV himself grew increasingly aware of the need to address aspects of the new culture of Enlighteners that could subvert Catholic values, and to do so in a way that would give the church greater internal cohesion and a more solid defense against the outside world. A sign of this change would be the stance toward the Jewish world taken by the Papal States, a stance that changed from relative tolerance to more repressive intolerance, even at the risk of a wider repositioning of traditional anti...