GREGORY XVI
Bartolomeo Cappellari
(1765, el 1831, †1846)
  

 

GREGORY XVI, (1765–1846), Pope from 1831. Bartolomeo Cappellari entered the Camaldolese monastery of San Michele di Murano in 1783. In 1799 he published Il trionfo della Santa Sede, in which he treated of the sovereignty of the Pope and developed the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. He was made Abbot of San Gregorio in 1805 and Procurator-General of his order in 1807, but had to leave Rome in the following year, owing to the Napoleonic suppression of the religious orders.

    He returned in 1814, was created Cardinal and Prefect of the Propaganda in 1826, and elected Pope in 1831 by the party of the Zelanti after a conclave lasting over 50 days. Soon after, revolution broke out in the Papal states and was quelled only by the intervention of Austria, a fact which caused the five great powers—Austria, Russia, England, France, and Prussia—to demand reforms in their administration. As these were only partly carried out, the revolt began again, and in 1832 Austrian troops were recalled, whereupon the French occupied Ancona and did not withdraw till 1838. But the troubles continued, and on Gregory’s death, in 1846, dissatisfaction was rife and the finances of the Holy See in disorder, owing to the heavy expenditure involved by the upkeep of a strong military force.

    Gregory’s relations with the foreign powers remained strained during the greater part of his reign. He condemned Liberalism in the person of F. R. de Lamennais (encyclical Singulari nos, 1834) and also the semi-rationalist theology of G. Hermes (brief Dum acerbissimas, 1835). Despite the political difficulties in which he was involved, Gregory XVI did much for the missions, erecting many new bishoprics and vicariates and encouraging the formation of a native clergy. His apostolic constitution In supremo (1839) denounced slavery and the slave-trade. He also founded the Etruscan and Egyptian museums at the Vatican and the Christian museum at the Lateran.

Acta Gregorii Papae XVI, ed. A. M. Bernasconi (Rome, 1901–4) (defective); for the first five years of his pontificate, cf. A. Barberi (ed.), Bullarii Romani Continuatio, 19–20 (Rome, 1857–8). A. Bartoli and others, Gregorio XVI: Miscellanea Commemorativa (Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae, 13–14; Rome, 1948). [N. P. S.] *Wiseman, Recollections of the Last Four Popes and of Rome in their Times (1858), pt. 4 (pp. 415–532). D. Demarco, Il tramonto dello Stato pontificio: Il papato di Gregorio XVI (Turin, 1949; repr. Naples [1992]). [W.] O. Chadwick, A History of the Popes 1830–1914 (Oxford, 1998), esp. pp. 1–60. J. Leflon, ‘La Crise révolutionnaire 1789–1846’, in Fliche and Martin, 20 (1949) pp. 426–71. I. Droandi in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 59 (2002), pp. 229–45.

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