CLEMENT XII, pope. - Lorenzo Corsini, born in Florence on 7 April 1652; died in Rome on 6 February 1740. He studied in Rome at the Collegio Romano and earned doctorates in both civil and canon law at Pisa. He became titular archbishop of Nicomedia in 1691, treasurer general and governor of Castel Sant’Angelo under Innocent XII (1696), then papal commissioner in Ferrara under Clement XI, and was created cardinal of San Susanna on 17 May 1706. At the age of seventy-nine he was elected to succeed Benedict XIII on 12 July 1730.
He restored the diminished dignity of the papal court, vigorously suppressed long-standing abuses, removed the protection of sacred places from numerous murderers, and reorganized the depleted finances while supporting agriculture. A zealous and solicitous pastor, he expanded the missions in Tibet and among the Tartars and the Maronites of Lebanon. During the War of the Polish Succession (1733), the neutral pontiff took the occasion to establish the principle of recognizing as sovereign the one who had attained peaceful possession of the crown; thus, despite earlier ties with the French candidate Stanislas Leszczyński, he immediately acknowledged the rival Frederick Augustus III once the latter, with Austro-Russian backing, had gained the upper hand. He acted in the same manner toward both Austrians and Spaniards, who continued to contest the rule of the Kingdom of Naples with alternating fortunes and repeated violations of the papal neutrality.
He combined long-suffering with firmness in overcoming successive attacks and tangled disputes over the free exercise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in Spain (1734–38), in Naples where Bernardo Tanucci’s anti-curial policy held sway, in France (1737) where the Parlement of Paris even dared to forbid the reading of the bull canonizing St Vincent de Paul, in Portugal, and later in Piedmont where tensions from the previous era persisted. To him belongs the first formal condemnation of Freemasonry, issued in two bulls dated 28 April 1738 and 14 January 1739. Meanwhile he did not neglect to encourage learning; despite financial constraints, his pontificate was one of the most glorious and productive in artistic terms. He commissioned the main façade of the Lateran Basilica, the sumptuous Corsini Chapel within it—where he himself is buried—and the façade of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, all designed by the architect Alessandro Galilei.