Our oldest authority for the institution of the cardinalate is found in a few words of unquestionable authenticity in the Liber Pontificalis, or Lives of the Popes, extracted and compiled from very ancient documents by Anastasius the Librarian in the IXth century. It is there written of S. Cletus, who lived in the year 81, was an immediate disciple of the Prince of the Apostles, and his successor only once removed: “Hic ex præcepto beati Petri XXV[95] presbyteros ordinavit in urbe Roma, mense decembri.” These priests, ordained by direction of blessed Peter, formed a select body of councillors to assist the pope in the management of ecclesiastical affairs, and are the predecessors of those who were afterwards called cardinals of the Holy Roman Church. Hence Eugene IV. said in his constitution Non Mediocri (XIX Bull. Mainardi) that the office of cardinal was evidently instituted by S. Peter and his near successors. Again, in the Life of Evaristus, who became pope in the year 100, we read: “Hic titulos in urbe Roma divisit presbyteris.” To this day the old churches of the city, at the head of which stand the cardinal-priests, are called titles, and all writers agree that the designation was given under this pontificate. There is hardly less difference of opinion about the original meaning of this word than there is about that of cardinal. Some have imagined that the fiscal mark put on objects belonging to, or that had devolved upon, the sovereign in civil administration being called titulus in Latin, the same word was applied by Christians to those edifices which were consecrated to the service of God; the ceremonies, such as the sprinkling of holy water and the unction of oil used in the act of setting them apart for divine worship, marking them as belonging henceforth to the Ruler of heaven and earth. Others think that as a special mention was made in the ordination of a priest of the particular church in which he was to serve, it was called his title, as though it gave him a new name with his new character; and this may be the reason of a custom, once universal, of calling a cardinal by the name of his church instead of by his family name.[96] Father Marchi, in his work on the Early Christian Monuments of Rome, has given several mortuary inscriptions which have been discovered of these ancient Roman priests and dignitaries, and from which we take these two: “Locus Presbyteri Basili Tituli Sabinæ,” and “Loc. Adeodati Presb. Tit. Priscæ.” After locus in the first and its abbreviation in the second inscription, the word depositionis—“of being laid to rest”—must be understood.
Let us here remark with the erudite Cenni that these titled priests were not such as were afterwards called parish priests or rectors of churches, with whom they were never confounded, and over whom, as intermediaries between them and the pope, they had authority. These titulars were a select body of men not higher in point of order, but otherwise distinct from and superior to those priests who had parochial duties to perform within certain limits. Whether we believe that cardinal meant originally one who was chief in a certain church, just as was said (Du Cange’s Glossarium) Cardinalis Missa, Altare Cardinale, and as we say in English, cardinal virtues, cardinal points; or whether we accept it as one who was appointed to a particular church, it is not true that the Roman cardinals were so called either because they were the chief priests—parochi—of certain churches, or because they were attached—incardinati—to a title. The great Modenese author on Italian antiquities has been deceived by similarity of name into stating that the origin and office of the cardinals of Rome did not differ from that of those of other churches (Devoti, Inst. Can., vol. i. p. 188, note 4). Observe that the ordination performed by Cletus was done by direction of blessed Peter; that it was that of a special corps of priests; that it was not successive, but at one time, and that in the month of December, the same which an unbroken local tradition teaches is the proper season[97] for the creation of cardinals, out of respect for the first example. Now, the pope surely needed no special injunction to continue the succession of the sacred ministry; we may consequently believe that the ordination made by him with such particular circumstances was an extraordinary proceeding, distinct from, although immediately followed by, the administration of the sacrament of Orders. Therefore if after the Evaristan distribution of titles the successors of these Cletan priests came to be called cardinals, it was not so much (accepting the origin of the name given above) because they were attached to particular churches as because they were attached in solidum to the Roman Church, the mother and mistress of all churches, or, better still, as more conformable to the words of many popes and saints, because they were attached to (some good authors say incorporated with) the Roman pontiff. And it is in this figurative but very suggestive sense that Leo IV. writes of one of his cardinals whom he calls “Anastasius presbyter cardinis nostri, quem nos in titulo B. Marcelli Mart. atque pontif. ordinavimus” (Labbe, Conc., tom. ix. col. 1135). In the same sense S. Bernard, addressing Eugene III., calls the cardinals his coadjutors and collaterals, and says (Ep. 237) that their business is to assist him in the government of the whole church, and (Ep. 150) that in spiritual matters they are judges of the world. Not otherwise did Pope John VIII., in the year 872, write that as he filled in the new law the office of Moses in the old, so his cardinals represented the seventy elders chosen to assist him. For this reason cardinals alone are ever chosen legates a latere—i. e., Summi Pontificis. The cardinals of Rome, therefore, were not cardinals because they had titles, but just the contrary. We have been a little prolix on a point that might seem minute, because there was once a determined effort made in some parts of France and Italy, especially during the last century, to try to prove that the cardinals of the Roman Church were no more originally than any other priests having cure of souls in the first instance, except that by a fortunate accident they ministered in the capital of the then known world. This was an attempt to depress the dignity of the cardinalate, or at least, by implication, to give undue importance to the status of a parish priest, as though he and a cardinal were once on the same footing. The like insidious argument would be prepared to show, on occasion, that the pope himself was in the beginning no more than any other bishop. The same name was often used in the early church of two persons, but of each in a different sense; and thus the mere fact of there having been cardinals in other churches than that at Rome no more diminishes the superior authority and higher dignity of the Roman cardinalate than the name of pope, once common to all bishops, lessens the supremacy of the Roman pontificate. In ecclesiastical antiquities a common name often covers very different offices. In general, however, the instinct of Catholics will always be able to make the proper distinction, no matter how things are called; and the words of Alvaro Pelagio, who wrote his lachrymose treatise De Planctu Ecclesiæ about the year 1330, show how different was the popular opinion of the provincial and of the urban cardinals: “Sunt et in Ecclesia Compostellana cardinales presbyteri mitrati, et in Ecclesia Ravennate. Tales cardinales sunt derisui potius quam honori.” The name of cardinal was certainly in use at the beginning of the IVth century; for the seven cardinal-deacons of the Roman Church are mentioned in a council held under Pope Sylvester in 324; and a document of the pontificate of Damasus in 367, registering a donation to the church of Arezzo by the senator Zenobius, is subscribed in these words: “I, John, of the Holy Roman Church, a cardinal-deacon, on the part of Damasus, praise this act and confirm it.” Among the archives, also, of S. Mary in Trastevere, there is mention of Paulinus, a cardinal-priest in 492. The name of cardinal was restricted by a just and peremptory decree of S. Pius V. in 1567 exclusively to the cardinals of pontifical creation, and it was only then that the haughty canons of Ravenna dropped this high-sounding appellation. The idea figuratively connected with the cardinalship in the edifice of the Holy Roman Church is briefly exposed by Pope Leo IX., a German, in a letter to the Emperor of Constantinople. “As the gate itself,” he says, “doth rest upon its post, thus upon Peter and his successors dependeth the government of the whole church. Wherefore his clerics are called cardinals, because they are most closely adhering to that about which revolveth all the rest” (Labbe, tom. ii. Epist. i. cap. 22.) The author of an old poem on the Roman court (Carmen de Curia Romana) gives in a few lines the principal points of a cardinal’s pre-eminence:
“Dic age quid faciunt quibus est a cardine nomen
Post Papam, quibus est immediatus honor?
Expediunt causas, magnique negotia mundi,
Extinguunt lites, fœdera rupta ligant.
Isti participes onerum, Papæque laborum,
Sustentant humeris grandia facta suis.”
More completely, however, than anywhere else are the rights, prerogatives, and dignity of the cardinalate set forth in the 76th Constitution of Sixtus V., beginning Postquam ille verus, of May 13, 1585.
A fact recorded by John the Deacon in the life of S. Gregory I. shows us how high was the office and rank of a cardinal, and that to be appointed to a bishopric was considered a descent from a higher position. He says that this great pope was always careful to obtain the consent of a cardinal before appointing him to govern a diocese, lest he should seem, by removing him from the person of Christ’s Vicar, to give him a lower place: “Ne sub hujusmodi occasione quemquam eliminando deponere videretur.” That bishops undoubtedly considered the cardinalate, in the light of influence on the affairs of the whole church and the prospect of becoming pope, as superior to the episcopate, appears at an early period, from a canon which it was necessary to make in order to repress their ambition in this direction. In a council held at Rome in the year 769 this canon was passed: “Si quis ex episcopis … contra canonum et sanctorum Patrum statuta prorumpens in gradum Majorum[98] sanctæ Romanæ Ecclesiæ, id est presbyterorum cardinalium et diaconorum, ire præsumpserit, … et hanc apostolicam sedem invadere … tentaverit, et ad summum pontificalem honorem ascendere voluerit, … fiat perpetuum anathema.”