DESPUIG Y DAMETO, ANTONIO. — Cardinal, born of a noble family at Palma de Mallorca on 31 March 1745, died at Lucca on 2 May 1813. An exemplary priest of broad erudition, he promoted scholarship in his homeland and was rector of that University (1783–85). In 1785 he came to Rome as an auditor of the Rota, and 179 Decisiones by him remain published. Returning to his homeland, he was bishop of Orihuela (1791), archbishop of Valencia (1795) and of Seville (1796); he was obliged to resign the latter office two years later for reasons of health and, even more, because of political intrigues, receiving in exchange the title of patriarch of Antioch and numerous public offices from the king.
In April 1797 he was sent once again to Rome, as a member of a special commission appointed by the king to assist Pope Pius VI in the critical circumstances through which he was passing as a result of the French invasion. Indeed, he generously subsidized the papal court during the Pope’s exile beginning in March 1798 and, after the Pope’s death (22 August 1799), paid the funeral expenses and subsidized the Conclave of Venice from which Pius VII emerged elected. Much beloved by the new Pope, on 11 July 1803 he was created cardinal of the title of S. Callisto. After a journey to his homeland, where he organized a library and a museum with the excavation objects he had recovered from a plot of his own land at Ariccia (Rome), he returned to Rome in May 1807, became archpriest of S. Maria Maggiore and the Pope’s pro-vicar, remaining always close to him and even joining him in exile in Paris. For reasons of health he obtained permission to return to Italy, and died shortly thereafter. He published a short work on the earthquake that devastated Calabria in February 1783 and which he had happened to witness (Naples 1783, Palma de Mallorca a. d.), and the life of Caterina Thomés, his fellow townsman (Palma de Mallorca 1816 and 1864), whose beatification he had obtained (and who was canonized in 1930). Many manuscripts and letters are preserved in Palma in the archive of his family.
Sede, in Analecta sacra Tarraconensia, 15 (1942), pp. 403–18; 16 (1943), pp. 201–22; M. Batlori, Cartas del p. Pou al card. D., Maiorca 1946; id., El card. D. y su tiempo, there 1948.
Renata Orazi Ausenda