THE STATES OF THE CHURCH
[1700-1800 A.D.]
On the outline of government and policy in the ecclesiastical state, as these features presented themselves in the seventeenth century, very little has to be either altered or added, if we would make the picture true for the age that succeeded. It is necessary indeed to pay, at the outset, that tribute of respect which is deserved by the personal character of most of the sovereigns who ruled on the Seven Hills during the eighteenth century. Never had the bishops of Rome been so decorous, so generally unexceptionable in morals; seldom had they numbered so many men of sincere and earnest piety; never had the list included names more illustrious for talent and learning. Two popes in particular, Prospero Lambertini and the accomplished Antonio Ganganelli, would have reflected honour upon any throne in Christendom.
But those venerable priests, who, for a few years before they sank into the grave, left the altar and the closet, the breviary and the pen, to wear the triple crown and wield the keys of St. Peter, discovered by sad experience what everyone who has administered that office must have discovered before he had slept a month under the roof of the Vatican. Genius becomes a public calamity, virtue itself is paralysed into despair, when, after a lifetime spent in the library or the cloister, they are summoned, in the decrepitude of old age, to discharge duties more complicated, more difficult, requiring greater versatility and greater energy in action than those which belong to any other sovereignty in the world. Where the whole edifice of government must be overturned before effectual repair can be wrought upon any of its parts, differences in the character of successive rulers are confined in their results to individual and temporary interests. In regard to the permanent improvement or deterioration of the state, Rodrigo Borgia was as innocent as the irreproachable Barnaba Chiaramonti; Clement VII was as wise as Sixtus V; and the hermit-pope Pietro di Murrhone, with his gentle and pious ignorance, was not more helpless than Julian della Rovere, who wore armour beneath his sacerdotal robe.
The most unpleasing task which the popes of the eighteenth century had to perform was that of accommodating their prerogatives over the Catholic states to those opinions of independence which were now rooted in every cabinet of Europe. The priestly chiefs bowed with infinite reluctance to this hard necessity; some of them disgraced themselves by persecuting foreign inquirers, like Giannone and Genovesi; and, but for the activity and talent of Clement XIV, who yielded gracefully what he had no power to withhold, the papal court might have suffered losses infinitely more injurious than the sacrifice which it was obliged to make of its able servants the Jesuits. Pius VI, on whose head were to break the thunders of the French Revolution, was more a man of the world than any of his recent predecessors. Long employed in offices of the government, and familiar in an especial degree with the business of the Roman exchequer, he distinguished himself by endeavours zealous and incessant, but utterly unsuccessful, to introduce internal ameliorations. The sluggish imbecility of the papal rule cannot be better proved than by the fact that, till the middle of the eighteenth century, while internal taxes and restrictions ground the faces of the people, there was no duty (though, at several points of time, there were absolute prohibitions) on the importation of foreign manufactures; and that one of the most vaunted measures of this reign was the organisation of a force to protect the frontiers against smuggling; a measure of which, amidst all their recent tariffs, the popes do not appear to have ever dreamed.
In the details of his new system of foreign duties on merchandise, as well as in many of his regulations for agriculture and internal trade, Pius and his advisers proved singularly how much they were still in the dark as to the principles of political economy. His partial abolition of the innumerable baronial tolls did not confer benefits half sufficient to counterbalance the evils produced by his arbitrary restrictions on the corn-trade; his expensive operations for draining the Pontine marshes were rendered useless by his gift the reclaimed lands to his nephew; and his depreciation of the currency by excessive issues of paper money was an anticipation of one of the worst errors committed by the leaders of the French Revolution.