The interesting papacy of Benedict XIV (1740-1758)

While much in Pope Benedict XIV’s encyclical about the Jews is to be condemned, we need to add qualifications. For one thing, his warnings against using violence against the Jews of Poland were not insignificant in that time. For another, it was under his papacy that Lorenzo Ganganelli (later Pope Clement XIV) undertook a study of a blood libel charge against Jews and expanded it to a compehensive review. He demonstrated that all the principal blood accusations since the 13th century had been groundless. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, “Benedict XIV, impressed by the arguments in the memoir, declared the Jews of Yanopol innocent,” and ordered the Bishop of Warsaw “to protect the Polish Jews in the future from such accusations.”

Another interesting aspect of Benedict XIV’s papacy was his opposition to what we might describe now as the Vatican II-style outreach efforts of the Jesuits. According to Wikipedia:

Perhaps the most important act of his pontificate was the promulgation of his famous laws about missions in the two bulls, Ex quo singulari and Omnium solicitudinum. In these bulls he denounced the custom of accommodating Christian words and usages to express non-Christian ideas and practices of the native cultures, which had been extensively done by the Jesuits in their Indian and Chinese missions. An example of this is the statues of the ancestors—is honor paid to the ancestors to be considered unacceptable ‘ancestor worship,’ or is it something more like the Catholic veneration of the saints? And can a Catholic legitimately ‘venerate’ an ancestor known not to have been a Christian? The choice of a Chinese translation for the name of God had also been debated since the early 1600s.

The consequence of these bulls was that many of these converts left the church.

My analogy between the Jesuits’ evangelizing practices and those of Vatican II isn’t exact, since what Vatican II proposed and John Paul II did was to frame Christian ideas in non-Christian or secular language (e.g., “the rights of the human person”), while the Jesuits, we are led to understand, expressed non-Christian ideas in Christian language. But the basic idea, of altering the Christian message to reach the culturally different or the religiously resistant, is the same. Benedict XIV was unwilling to dilute Christian truth in order to expand the size of the Church. In this, he was unlike John Paul II, but, it seems, like Benedict XVI.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on Benedict XIV (whose real name was Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini), he was a man of exceptional learning and cultivation, taking an active interest in the literature and science of his time, and well known for his own writings. Even Voltaire admired him and dedicated to him his book on Muhammad:

To his subjects Benedict was an idol. If they complained at times that he wrote too much and governed them too little, they all agreed that he spoke well and wittily, and his jokes and bon mots were the delight of Rome. Cares of state, after his elevation to the pontificate prevented him from devoting himself as much as he would have wished to his studies of former days; but he never lacked intellectual stimulus. He surrounded himself with such men as Quirini, Garampi, Borgia, Muratori, and carried on an active correspondence with scholars of many shades of opinion. His intellectual pre-eminence was not only a source of pride to Catholics, but formed a strong bond with many not of the Faith. Voltaire dedicated to him his “Mahomet” with the words: “Au chef de la véritable religion un écrit contre le fondateur d’une religion fausse et barbare.” [“To the head of the true religion, a writing against the founder of a false and barbarous religion.”]

That Voltaire, the scourge of Christianity, would address the pope in this manner and call the Roman Catholic Church the true religion, is perhaps a testament to Benedict XIV’s unusual appeal. In any case, who will be the Voltaire of our time, to give and to dedicate to Pope Benedict XVI a book showing the real truth about Islam?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 30, 2005 09:59 AM | Send