Of far greater interest is Benedict's attitude toward what we may call foreign affairs, and in this we discover again the more genial side of his character. Those who had known the different aspects of the Pope's personality—the punctilious learning of the ecclesiastic and the bonhomie of the man—must have wondered how he would confront the hereditary problems of the Papacy. Benedict at once made it plain that his policy would be one of deliberate and judicious compromise. Anxious though he was, especially in view of the Italian ambitions of Maria Theresa, about his temporal possessions, he placed his spiritual power and responsibility in the foreground, and on temporal matters he made more concessions than any Pope of equal wit and will had ever made. He was, he told Tencin, "the mortal enemy of secrets and useless mysticism." For disguised Jesuits and intriguing Nuncii he had no employment. He took court after court, with which his predecessor had embroiled the Papacy, and came to an agreement which almost invariably satisfied them; and in the war of the Spanish succession, when Spanish and Austrian troops in turn violated his territory, he remained strictly neutral.
The chief problem in France was the conflict of the Jesuits and the Jansenists, which was complicated by a revival of the Gallican spirit that put difficulties in the way of Papal interference. The Bull Unigenitus, with which Clement XI. had sought to extinguish the controversy, had increased the disorder, and the zealots pressed the Pope to intervene. Parlement would have resented his interference, and it was not until 1755, when the Assembly of the Clergy failed to find a solution, that Louis XV. asked the Pope to make a further declaration. The credit of his moderate Encyclical[331] is not wholly due to him. The French asked him to refrain from pressing the Unigenitus as a standard of faith and merely to demand external respect for it. This agreed with the Pope's moderate disposition, but the Jesuits and other zealots at Rome were enraged, and Choiseul—without Benedict's knowledge, of course—made extensive use of bribery to win the College of Cardinals. Benedict's letters reflect his weariness between the antagonistic parties and frequently express that he is willing to respect Gallican susceptibilities to any extent short of a surrender of the faith. A draft of the Encyclical was submitted to the French court before it was published. Both the Jesuits and the lawyers attacked it, but the Parlement was won to the King by an attempt on his life and the Jesuits soon found all their energy needed to defend their existence.
With Spain the Pope concluded one of the most remarkable Concordats in Papal history. There had gradually been established a custom by which the Papacy appointed to all benefices which fell vacant during eight months of the year, and the bishops and their chapters appointed to vacant benefices during the remaining third of the year. The court had the right of appointment only to benefices in Granada and the Indies. As a natural result, Spanish ecclesiastics crowded to Rome, and it was estimated that the Dataria derived from them about 250,000 crowns a year. Spain resented the arrangement, but the clerical population of Rome clung tenaciously to it. Benedict in 1751 entered into secret negotiations with Spain, and contrived to keep them secret until 1753, when he startled and irritated Rome by publishing his famous Concordat. By this he granted the Spanish King the right to nominate to all except fifty-two benefices in Spain and America. The cardinals bitterly complained that they had not been consulted, while the officials deplored the abandonment of Papal prestige and the cessation of so much profitable employment. Benedict had, however, made a shrewd bargain with Ferdinand VI. The King had to pay a capital sum of 1,143,330 crowns, which, at an interest of three per cent., would cover the yearly loss to the Curia. At a later date the Pope released the Spanish Infanta from the dignity of cardinal, yet permitted him to retain a large part of his clerical income.
A similar agreement ended the long friction with Portugal and (in 1740) gave John V. the right to present to all the episcopal sees and abbeys in his dominions; and in 1748 the Pope further gratified the King with the title of Fidelissimus. The King of Sardinia received, soon after Benedict's succession, the title of Vicar of all the Papal fiefs in his dominions and the right, for an annual payment of 2000 crowns, to gather their revenues. Naples, in turn, was pacified, after many years of dangerous friction. There had been stern quarrels about jurisdiction over the clergy, and by a Concordat of the year 1741 Benedict consented to the creation of a supreme court, with an equal number of clerical and lay judges and an ecclesiastical president, for the trial of such cases. With Venice the Pope was less successful. The decaying Republic had a standing quarrel with Austria about the patriarchate of Aquileia; Austria, which possessed part of the territory, would not acknowledge the authority of the Venetian patriarch. Benedict appointed a Vicar for the Austrian section, and Venice, ever ready to flout Papal orders, drove the Nuncio from the city. The Pope thereupon divided the province into two archbishoprics, but Venice still angrily protested and the dispute remained unsettled at Benedict's death.
Austria gave the Pope his most anxious hours. The joy of Rome at the fidelity of southern Germany was in the eighteenth century clouded by the growth of a spirit akin to Gallicanism: the spirit which would presently be known as Febronianism. Charles VI. had in 1740 left the Empire to his elder daughter, Maria Theresa, and Spain had contested the succession in the hope of winning for itself the provinces of Lombardy and Tuscany. In the war which followed Benedict took no side, but the conflicting armies devastated his territory and approached very near to Rome. His letters to Tencin reflect his distress and anxiety, no less than his helplessness. When the war was over, he sent a representative to the conference at Aix-la-Chapelle, where his rights were endangered by the contest of the two ambitious queens; Elizabeth of Spain was the last of the Farnese and was disposed to claim for her son the principality which Paul III. had wantonly conferred on his son Pier Luigi. The chief question that interested the Papacy was whether Don Philip should receive the investiture of Parma and Piacenza from Rome or the Empress, and Benedict had the satisfaction of seeing it virtually settled in favour of Rome. On Paul III. himself, and other nepotist Popes, Benedict passes a very severe judgment in his letters. For his part he severely excluded his relatives from Rome, and when a young son of his nephew came to study at the Clementine College, he took care that the boy should receive no particular favour.
It is one of the remarkable features of Benedict's Pontificate that he won considerable respect even in the Protestant lands. Englishmen, perhaps, did not know, as we know from the Pope's letters, how deeply he sympathized with the exiled Stuarts. "James III." lived for some time at Rome on a pension provided by France, Spain, and the Papacy, and Benedict had often to relieve the financial embarrassment of the foolish and extravagant prince. His second son became Cardinal York, and, in conferring the dignity on him, Benedict declared that he would be pleased to withdraw it if ever Providence recalled him to the throne of his fathers. In spite of these amiable sympathies, Benedict was much appreciated by cultivated Englishmen, and in 1753 he reconstituted and enlarged the English hierarchy.
With Frederic of Prussia, also, he had friendly relations. He was the first Pope to recognize the title of "King of Prussia" assumed in 1701 by the Electors of Brandenburg, and in this again he overruled the opposition of the cardinals. In 1744 Frederic begged the Pope to make Scatfgoch, a Breslau canon whom the King liked, coadjutor to the Bishop of Breslau. Scatfgoch talked with scandalous license about religion and morals; it was said at Rome that he dipped his crucifix into his wine to give the Saviour the first drink. Benedict, to Frederic's anger, refused; but three years later, when the bishop died, and the Nuncio reported the conversion of the canon, the Pope gratified Frederic by making him bishop. Frederic permitted the erection of a Catholic chapel at Berlin.
The new Catholic world beyond the seas made more than one claim on the untiring Pope. Immediately after his election we find him sending a Vicar Apostolic to settle the troubles of the Maronites of Syria, and in 1744 he reconciled and regulated the affairs of the Greek Melchites of Antioch. In the farther East a fierce controversy still raged, both in China and India, regarding the heathen rites and practices which the Jesuit missionaries permitted their native converts to retain. Clement XI., Innocent XIII., and Benedict XIII. had successively employed him, when he was an official of the Curia, to prepare a verdict on these "Chinese and Malabar rites," but it was reported that the Jesuits still defied the orders of the Popes. In his private letters to Tencin, Benedict sternly condemns the "tergiversations" of the Jesuit missionaries, but in his Papal pronouncements he is more cautious. His Bulls Ex Quo Singulari,[332] which puts an end to the trouble in China, and Omnium Solicitudinum,[333] which condemns the practices in Malabar (India), are scholarly and severe treatises. They hardly mention the Jesuits, but they leave no loophole for those casuistic missionaries. From the other side of the globe Benedict received complaints that Christians were still enslaving the American natives, on the pretext of converting them, and he renewed the prohibition issued by Paul III. and Urban VIII.
From all quarters of the globe Benedict received heated complaints about the Jesuits. They permitted the worship of ancestors in China, and closed their eyes to Hindu charms and amulets in India. They conducted great commercial enterprises in North and South America, and struggled bitterly against the bishops in England. France accused them of intensifying the domestic strife of its Church, and Spain and Portugal brought grave charges against them. But Benedict XIV. seems to have dreaded the overweening and doomed Society. Even his private letters are singularly free from direct allusions to them, and more than one Jesuit scholar was employed by him on tasks of importance. His friend Cardinal Passionei, a worldly cardinal, of easy ways, who spent his days in luxurious ease at Frascati, often urged him to reform the Society, but it was not until the last year of his life that he took any step in that direction. Portugal was now approaching its great struggle with the Jesuits, and Benedict, on April 1, 1758, directed Cardinal Saldanha to inspect and report upon the condition of the Jesuit houses and colleges in that country. He died a month later, unconscious of the great revolution which the Catholic Powers were preparing to force on the Papacy.
Of the isolated ecclesiastical acts of Benedict it is impossible to give here even a summary. No Pope since the great Pontiffs of the early Middle Ages had enriched his Church with so much (from the Papal point of view) sound legislation: none had had so scientific a command of ecclesiastical affairs or united with it so indefatigable an industry. His Bull Magnæ Nobis Admirationis[334] prescribes, in the case of mixed marriages, the rules which are enforced in the Church today. He forbade monks to practise surgery or dispense drugs; though Europe would have been more completely indebted to him in this respect if he had not made an exception in favour of the atrocious drug known as "theriac" and the foolish compound which went by the name of "apoplectic balsam." He condemned Freemasonry,[335] though his decree was not enforced. But one must glance over the thirteen volumes of his Bullarium and the seventeen volumes of his religious and liturgical works if one would realize his massive industry and devotion to his duties.