Commentaria in Numeros
Let princes and prelates learn here to confer offices and benefices, not on sons and kinsmen, but on the more worthy. Behold, Moses resigned the principate, by command of God, to Josue, sprung from another tribe, namely Ephraim; but the pontificate he resigned, not to his sons, of whom he had two, but to Eleazar; and this, as St. Jerome says on chapter i to Titus, “that we might learn that these dignities are to be conferred not on blood but on life. But now,” he says, “we see many make this a matter of favour, so that they seek not to raise up in the Church, as pillars, those whom they know to profit the Church more, but those whom they either themselves love, or by whose obsequiousness they are won over, or for whom some great man has pleaded; and, to say nothing worse, those who have obtained by gifts to be made Clerics.” Origen also weighed the same, homily 22 on Numbers: “Here,” he says, “there is no acclamation of the people, no regard paid to kinship. And surely, what else is it to direct the pontificate to the enriching of one’s family than altogether to profane a thing so sacred and so divine, and to apply it to secular use, as that Baltasar did at the banquet? For which sacrilege he paid dearly, being at once stripped of kingdom and life.”
Celestine V, as Alvarus relates, when he heard that his brother’s son had come to the court, commanded him to be cast out at once, and when many Cardinals interposed as intercessors, with much labour and prayer they obtained at most this, that he should grant him some simple and slender benefice: which having received, he was at once sent home. So Alvarus, book II On the Lament of the Church, chapter xv, and Hieronymus Platus, On the Dignity of Cardinals, chapter xxv.
Nothing is more illustrious in this matter than Clement IV, the Supreme Pontiff, who, chosen Pastor of the Church in the year 1265, wonderfully held the same constancy. For it is handed down in memoirs that he had two daughters born of lawful marriage, and ordered thirty livres of Tours to be paid to one of them to be placed in a monastery, and three hundred to the other to marry, on the condition that she should marry a man of equal condition. Moreover, when he had a nephew to whom he himself had never given anything, but the prelate of France, to oblige the Pontiff, had conferred upon him three canonries; and many then entreating him to honour him with some dignity, he could not only never be brought to do it, but even compelled him of his own accord to keep whichever one of those three benefices he preferred, and to resign the rest. So Platus in the same place.
Platina adds in his Life that when friends interceded for the nephew aforesaid he answered in these words: “I will yield to God, not to flesh and blood; God wills that his goods be spent on pious causes. He is not a worthy successor of Peter who gives more to kinship than to piety and to Christ.” Moreover, a letter of Clement himself on this matter to one of his kinsmen is recorded by Onuphrius and Ciaconius in the life of Clement IV; which, because it is rare and most worthy of eternal memory and imitation, I have thought good to append here; it runs thus: “While many rejoice at our promotion, we alone are they who more certainly experience the immensity of the burden, and therefore what to others furnishes joy, to us furnishes fear and weeping. And that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave in these tidings, we would have thee know that thou oughtest to be more humble than usual. For that which greatly humbles us ought not to lift up ours, especially since the honour of this world is momentary, and passes away like the morning dew: neither do we wish thee, or thy brother, or any other of ours to come to us without our special command, because, frustrated of his hope, if he presumed to come otherwise, he would have to return in confusion. Nor in the marriage of thy sister seek a higher rank on our account, for she would not have us propitious, nor helpers in anything. If, however, thou shalt betroth her to the son of a simple knight, we purpose to help thee with three hundred livres of Tours. And if thou seekest higher things, expect not a penny from us; and this very thing we wish to be most secret, and known only to thee and thy mother. This also thou shouldst know, that we wish none, man or woman, of our blood to be puffed up under pretext of our exaltation: but we wish both Mobilia and Cecilia to have such husbands as they would have if we were in simple clerical state. Visit Sibylla, and tell her that she is not to change her place, but remain at Susa, and observe all gravity and honesty of dress, and not presume to undertake prayers to us for anyone. For they would be useless to him for whom they were made, and harmful to those who made the request. And if by chance gifts should be offered by any on this account, let her refuse them, if she wishes to keep our favour. Greet thy mother and brothers. Given at Perugia, on the feast of Sts. Perpetua and Felicitas.”
Well done, Clement; by this deed more than by any marble thou hast made thy name eternal; the grateful and holy memory of thee shall live for ever; no age will blot out this thy bull; this thy glory, this thy honour, future ages shall speak, posterity shall praise thy wisdom, the citizens of heaven shall celebrate thy integrity before God and the whole world, on that last and decisive day of the great judgment, and thenceforward through all eternity; whereas if thou hadst consigned goods, not thine but Christ’s, to forgetful heirs, soon to perish, and ungrateful in hope, thou wouldst long ago lie inglorious and unknown, buried with thine in perpetual oblivion (to say nothing of the offence of God and men)! For God does not permit families raised and exalted by ecclesiastical goods to endure long, as frequent experience teaches. Say, then, what living and hoping thou didst say, and now possessing and enjoying thou sayest: “The Lord is the portion of my inheritance and of my cup: it is thou that wilt restore my inheritance to me.”
Pope Marcellus, although he held the pontificate for very few days, yet in this short time gave a specimen of that virtue which he had doubtless determined thereafter to hold. For made Pontiff, he suffered none of his kin to come to Rome, not even his brother Alexander; and his two sons also, whom he himself was bringing up at Rome, he permitted to be greeted by none, and to go out in public seldom, and scarcely except to hear Mass. Onuphrius also relates, who was most familiar with him and knew his inmost counsels, that it was his deliberate and fixed purpose to bestow on his brother and his children only as much as it was fitting for a nobleman born in that place to have; yet not that they should rise above a private condition, nor be advanced to any dignity. Nay, he had determined not to give away even a penny of the revenues of the Church, except by the judgment of all the Cardinals. So Platus, On the Dignity of Cardinals, chapter xxv.
There occurred also in almost our own times a memorable act of Adrian VI, who is reported to have been so strict toward all his relations that to some he seemed too hard. For a cousin who was studying letters in the gymnasium of Siena, because he had come to Rome without being called, he at once set on a hired horse and sent back; and others joined to him by a fairly close relationship, who had hastened to him from Germany, when he had given each a woollen cloak and a moderate viaticum, he ordered to return on foot, as they had come. The same, in the same place.
St. Richard, Bishop of Chichester, would on no account admit his kinsmen, though mature and fit, to ecclesiastical benefices, knowing that the Prince of Pastors, our Lord Jesus Christ, delivered the keys of the kingdom of heaven not to blessed John the Evangelist, his own kinsman, but to blessed Peter, who was in no way joined to him by blood. So his Life has it in Surius, 3 April.
O how many today have benefices that are maleficences! how many swallow offices like deadly morsels! For those who confer them on kinsmen or friends who are unlearned, impure, vicious and unworthy, bestow on them not benefits but poisons, whereby they themselves kill their own souls and those of their kin, and send them to hell. These make sport with the patrimony of Christ and of the commonwealth, as if it were their own and ancestral inheritance, and do not think that they are only its dispensers, not its lords: they do not think that Christ will demand of them a strict account of this dispensation entrusted to them; they do not think that, as pastors, they ought to feed the whole Church of God, not this or that kinsman, to the great loss of many and of the common good. Woe to prelates, woe to princes!
23. HE REPEATED,—related, told: in Hebrew it is, he commanded.