LORENZANA, FRANCISCO ANTONIO.—Cardinal, born in León (Spain) on 22 September 1722, died in Rome on 17 April 1804. He was elected bishop of Palencia in 1765, and the following year archbishop of Mexico, where he held the Fourth Provincial Council, whose acts he published in two volumes, together with those of the preceding councils; he founded the Hospital of the Foundlings, which he generously endowed with revenues. He also had a collection of letters and reports by Fernando Cortés published (1770).
Appointed archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain in 1772, he rendered outstanding services to scholarship by founding the Archiepiscopal Library; publishing works on the Toledan Fathers and on the Mozarabic liturgies; issuing editions of the Gothic and Mozarabic Breviaries and of the collection of all the councils of Spain; and publishing the writings of Martin León, the acts of the Council of Trent, and the Roman Catechism. He founded a house of charity in Toledo, while in Ciudad Real he rebuilt the hospital and the church of the Fatebenefratelli. Pius VI created him cardinal in the Consistory of 30 March 1789 and assigned him the title of the Holy Twelve Apostles. Charles IV, king of Spain, appointed him legate to the Pope in 1797, and upon the death of Pius VI, which occurred at Valence on the Rhône, he played a very active part in the decision to hold the Conclave in Venice and generously assisted the cardinals with their travel expenses. Having resigned the archbishopric of Toledo in 1800, he settled in Rome and was among the founders of the Academy of Catholic Religion.