CARDINALITIAL STIPEND. — This is an annual allowance which the pope grants to cardinals, whether resident in Rome or employed elsewhere in the service of the Holy See, who lack sufficient income to maintain the dignity of their cardinalate with decorum. This allowance is in addition to what the cardinals receive from their offices, so that sometimes the pope does not assign them the full cardinalitial stipend, but only that amount which is lacking to bring the cardinal’s income up to the stipend’s total.
The so-called cardinalitial stipend already existed during the pontificate of Callistus III, for in the conclave of 1458, held after his death and from which Cardinal Piccolomini emerged as Pope Pius II, this matter formed part of the capitulation agreed upon by the cardinals (v. PASTORE, II, p. 9). To those cardinals who did not possess an annual ecclesiastical income of 4,000 gold florins, the Apostolic Chamber was to provide 100 gold florins per month until that sum was reached. All this was confirmed in the capitulation subscribed to in the conclave from which Pope Paul II emerged (ibid., pp. 283–84).
In the time of Paul V the cardinalitial stipend amounted to 1,500 gold scudi per year and was granted to cardinals who did not possess ecclesiastical revenues of 6,000 scudi, a sum deemed sufficient to maintain the dignity of the purple. Alexander VII, Benedict XIII, and Pius VI created cardinals only when they could provide them with the said 6,000 scudi. Napoleon, when he sought to intervene even in this sphere of ecclesiastical activity, assigned to each of the so-called red cardinals a cardinalitial dowry of 30,000 scudi. Newly created cardinals did not receive the stipend until their mouths had been opened—that is, until they had been granted authority to express their opinions before the pope and their fellow cardinals; but since sometimes several months could pass before they obtained this authority, during which time the cardinal, lacking income, had to bear the heavy expenses of his rank, Gregory XVI decreed that the stipend should be granted to them immediately upon creation, without awaiting this formality. Pius IX, in the fundamental statute for the temporal government of the States of the Church, promulgated on 14 March 1848 (§ 49), determined among other things the sum required for the maintenance of the Sacred College of Cardinals.
At present the cardinalitial stipend still exists and is paid in proportion to the increases granted to all other salaries; however, its amount is quite modest. Before 1870 the stipend was disbursed by the Apostolic Chamber through the Prefect of the Apostolic Palaces; now it is paid by the Administration of the Property of the Holy See, always in monthly installments.