Paul V, Pope

PAUL V, Pope. - Born in Rome on 17 Sept. 1552, died there on 28 Jan. 1621. Camillo Borghese, from a family originating in Siena, having earned a degree in jurisprudence, held important offices in the Curia, became a cardinal in 1596, vicar of Rome in 1603, and was elected pontiff through an agreement among the factions on 16 May 1605. Distinguished for piety, honesty, gentleness, generosity of charity, love of justice, and tireless activity, he was not immune from "small-scale nepotism"; to his nephew Scipione Caffarelli Borghese he gave the surname, the purple (1605), and a great number of offices and benefices, and kept him as secretary of State, while reserving to himself the handling of important affairs; to his other relatives he gave offices and wealth. Greatly attentive to the interests of the State, he confirmed (30 Dec. 1605) the prohibition against dismembering the papal domain; extended the powers of a Commission for good government; ensured public tranquillity; reformed the magistracy (1 March 1612), improving the administration of justice and providing in particular for the poor and prisoners; attended to the provisioning, the road network, hygiene, and the building of Rome; promoted agriculture and commerce, for which he built a port at Fano. He did not know how, or did not wish, to prevent the progressive elimination of laymen from the bureaucracy; nor did he confront a radical reform of the financial administration, instead resorting too extensively to borrowing.

He made every effort to preserve peace in Europe and above all in Italy. He therefore remained neutral between France and Spain, seeking to bring them closer together, also by means of marriage ties; he opposed the expansionist designs of Henry IV of France and of Charles Emmanuel of Savoy; he advocated peace between Venice and Austria in the Uskok War; he did not allow himself to be drawn in favor of either side in the Valtellina War, which nevertheless had a religious pretext.

He avoided pronouncing on theological questions, such as those concerning the Molinist doctrine of Grace and the Immaculate Conception of Mary, and imposed silence on the disputants and respect for the opposing opinion. Under him the Copernican system was condemned in 1616 (v. GALILEI), and, in 1622, he placed Cremonini's De coelo on the Index.

Of those things that he considered inalienable rights of the Catholic faith and of the Church, P. protested that he wished to be the defender "even to the shedding of blood." The conflict with Venice remained memorable, caused by two laws restricting ecclesiastical property, promulgated by the Republic before P. ascended to the pontificate, and by the violation of the privilege of the ecclesiastical forum with the arrest and summons before the Ten of two members of the clergy. The Pope condemned these measures, threatening censures (10 Dec. 1605). The Signoria accentuated its opposition to the privileges of the Church; and P. in the Consistory of 17 Apr. 1606 pronounced excommunication on the Senate and the interdict over the entire territory. There followed a violent protest by the Doge and a bitter struggle against what were considered in Venice to be undue pretensions of the Church and offenses against the rights of the State. The struggle was fought both with the weapon of the pen, wielded skillfully by jurists and theologians and in particular by the theologian of State, the learned Servite friar Paolo Sarpi (v.), who fiercely attacked what he asserted were abuses of the pontifical power, and with police measures, an order not to give effect to the excommunication and not to respect the interdict, and banishment or grave penalties for those who disobeyed: the submission of a large part of the clergy and of the people to the will of the Signoria was for P. a grave disappointment. The danger of Venice's union with the Protestants seemed near; the intertwining of political interests around the religious dispute made a European conflagration feared. Through the mediation of France, supported by Spain, an agreement was reached and the Pope granted absolution from the censures (21 Apr. 1607); he was given some satisfaction with the release of the two ecclesiastics, the suspension of the laws, and the revocation of the measures against those obedient to the interdict; but the jurisdictional question remained unresolved; the Jesuits remained excluded from Venice for another fifty years. If the Signoria did not obtain the hoped-for support from the powers against the Papacy, neither did the latter's authority gain any advantage from it.

Also in the rest of Europe, the Pontiff wished to preserve for the Church the positions that it held, and to reconquer those lost; but, averse to armed conflicts, he proceeded in general with a prudence that seemed to some at the time excessive, and had results that were not always happy. In the dispute over the succession to the Duchy of Jülich-Cleves, while striving to prevent it from falling to Protestants, he wished to avoid a war arising from it. In the Empire he sought to ensure the succession to the house of Austria and in particular to Ferdinand II, a fervent Catholic, and to prevent dangerous concessions being made to the Protestants; but he tolerated the maintenance of the Religious Peace of Augsburg of 1555 and only when war was inevitable did he proclaim a jubilee to implore God's help against the enemies of the true faith (1620), granted tithes and subsidies to the Emperor and to the Catholic League, and attended to the conclusion of a league of Catholic powers. In France P. opposed the advances of the Huguenots; and he could regard as a victory of the Papacy the removal from the office of syndic of the Sorbonne of Edmond Richer, an opponent of the pontifical power, the withdrawal of a decree of the Parliament of Paris that denied the Pope the right to excommunicate and depose a king who had become a heretic, and the deletion from the cahiers of the Estates General of 1614 of a proposal by the Parisian deputation of the Third Estate that it be declared by law that the king held the crown from God and was entirely independent of any foreign power, spiritual or temporal; he had to be content, however, that the Tridentine decrees were published only by the clergy, not by the political authority. In England the prohibition imposed by P. on Catholics against rising up against James I did not prevent the King from using as a pretext the participation of some of them in the famous Gunpowder Plot (5 Nov. 1605) to implicate their co-religionists and the Pontiff himself and to impose on Catholics an oath of allegiance, which P. condemned with a brief (22 Sept. 1606) as contrary to the faith and to the salvation of the soul; despite the Pope's efforts, the conditions of Catholicism in the British Isles, as in neighboring Holland, remained very difficult. In Russia the hopes placed by P. in the adventurer Demetrius for adherence to the Church of Rome proved false and provoked fiercer hostility against the Latins. Nor did the concession made by P. to the Ruthenians to preserve their rite suffice to overcome the violent opposition of the schismatics to union with Rome.

But P.'s activity in the religious field manifested itself above all in promoting the implementation of the Catholic reform. He gave as an example to the clergy and the faithful Charles Borromeo and Frances of Rome, canonized; Thomas of Villanova, Paschal Baylon, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Philip Neri, Teresa of Jesus, whom he proclaimed, along with others, blessed. He renewed (19 Oct. 1605) the obligation of residence for bishops, admitting no exceptions. He reformed religious Orders; he raised to Orders the Fatebenefratelli of John of God and the Camillians, to autonomous Congregations the Capuchins and the Piarists; he gave a new approval to the statutes of the Society of Jesus and favored it extensively. He conferred regularity and majesty on the sacred rites with the publication and imposition of the Rituale Romanum (20 June 1614); he provided for the better preservation of the documents of the Holy See, gathering them into a secret Archive; through his impulse Bellarmine composed the catechism for youth. The effect of his work was notable, even if not entirely in keeping with his desires. He revived religious life in Rome and in many Catholic countries: for France, particular importance was had by the foundation (1618) of the new Benedictine Congregation of St. Maur, to which belonged those Maurists, who left such a deep mark even in the field of studies, the spread of the Ursulines, the foundation of the Order of the Visitation.

P. gave very broad support to missionary activity: a testimony of his breadth of views in this field is the concession he made to the Chinese of using their own language in the breviary, in the liturgy, and in the administration of the Sacraments. For the missions of the Discalced Carmelites P. founded in Rome a seminary and a higher school. Under his pontificate the Catholic hierarchy in America was reorganized and the first Jesuit Reductions arose in Paraguay.

P.'s very extensive patronage turned above all to the field of art. While what remained of the ancient basilica of St. Peter, threatening ruin, was demolished, and the greater part of its monuments and precious memorials was gathered in the Grottoes, the Michelangelesque construction in the Greek cross was transformed, on a design by Maderno, into the present, much larger one in the Latin cross, the vault of the naves was built, the dome decorated, the Confessio opened; the atrium and the facade were erected, on which stands out the name of Paul V Borghese. At St. Mary Major P. had built and adorned with frescoes by Reni and other celebrated painters the Chapel that bears the family name, and where his tomb is; in front of the Basilica he had the column taken from the basilica of Maxentius raised, surmounted by the statue of the Virgin. In the Vatican the Pauline Chapel and that of the Most Holy Annunciation were erected, the Library enlarged and embellished, fountains opened, the bronze door put in place: in the Quirinal Palace, the summer residence of the Pontiff, the Chapel and the portal were, among other works, executed. The aqueduct of Trajan, restored and called "Acqua Paola," supplied the monumental fountain of the Janiculum, the other near Ponte Sisto, and that of Maderno in St. Peter's Square. In the Campus Martius P. bought and had enlarged a palace, while another palace, now Rospigliosi, near St. Peter's, and the Villa Borghese arose through the work of the cardinal nephew.

Not marked by sensational events, the pontificate of P. V nevertheless left deep traces in the life of the Church and in the creation of papal Rome.

Giovanni Battista Picotti