Carlo della Torre di Rezzonico (Venice, March 7th 1693 - Rome, February 2nd 1769), elected pope the July 6th 1758 under the name of Clement XIII (in Latin Clemens XIII , in Italian Lenient XIII ).
Life
Accession with pontificate
Educated by the Jesuit S with Bologna, it made studies of canonical Droit and began its career in 1716, with the Roman Curie, like chief clerk with the Supreme court of the apostolic Signature. In 1725, it was promoted listener of the Rote Roman for the republic of Venice. It was named cardinal-deacon in 1737. In 1747 it was devoted bishop of Padoue. It succeeded on the throne of Pierre Benoît XIV, and was the predecessor of Clément XIV. The same year the family of Rezzonico celebrated the marriage of Ludovico Rezzonico with a wife of the powerful family of Savorgnan. Sons of man who had bought the unfinished palate on the Grand Channel (now Ca' Rezzonico) and had completed his construction, the new Roman pontiff had bad reputation for his unrestrained nepotism.The question of the Jesuits
In spite of the humility and the affability of its right and moderate, modest nature with excess (it had made cover with sheets of fig tree manufactured in series the traditional sculptures of the Vatican) and generous with its vast personal fortune, the pontificate of Clement XIII was disturbed by the continual pressures which tried to make on him the French mediums influenced by the spirit of the Lights, so that it removed the Jésuite S. Clément XIII put at the Index the Encyclopédie of D' Alembert and Diderot, but it is an action which would have been more effective at the previous century. A more unexpected resistance came from the courses the least carried to progress, those of Spain, the Deux-Siciles and the Portugal. In 1758, the reforming minister of Joseph Ier of Portugal (1750 - 1777), the Marquis de Pombal, expelled the Jesuits of Portugal and dispatched them in mass with Civitavecchia, like “gift for the Pope”. In 1760, Pombal returned to Rome the apostolic nuncio and pointed out the ambassador of Portugal. A booklet entitled Brève Relation represented the Jesuits as having founded in South America under their own sovereignty a practically independent kingdom where they tyrannized the Indians, the whole to serve their insatiable ambition and their avarice; that was true or not (and they was very clearly false about the Indians, for which the solicitude of the Fathers of the Company is well-known), it was a very serious blow for the Jesuits.In France, the Parliament of Paris, dominated by the upper middle classes and which posted sympathies Jansénistes, began in spring 1761 to make pressure to expel the Jésuites France; one published extracts of texts written by Jesuits, these assertions were perhaps taken apart from their context, but that nourishes the anti-Jesuit cause. Though a congregation of bishops at this meeting in Paris in December 1761 recommended anything to make, Louis XV (1715 - 1774) promulgated a royal order which did not make it possible the Company to remain in the kingdom, that so certain changes were brought in their constitution to conform it to the wishes of the Parliament and if one created a vicar-general of the French Jesuits who would be independent of the general residing at Rome. The August 2nd 1762, the Parliament removed the Jesuits in France, by imposing unacceptable conditions on each one of their requests to remain in the country, Clément XIII answered by a protest against the violation of the rights of the Church and broke the stop, but the ministers of Louis XV could not allow that a French law thus was cancelled and the King finally expelled the Jesuits in November 1764.
Clement XIII vigorously supported the order in a papal bubble Apostolicum pascendi, the January 7th 1765, where it pushed back like calumnies criticisms against the Jesuits and rented the utility of the order. In 1766, it wrote the bubble Christianæ reipublicæ salus , against the Lumières. Vis-a-vis in France and Portugal, he refused to modify the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. All that was ignored almost everywhere: in 1768 the Jesuits had been expelled of France, Deux-Siciles and Parma. In Spain, they were believed in safety, but Charles III of Spain (1759 - 1788), impressed by what one affirmed in France, finally chooses to act even more vigorously: in the night from April 2nd to 3rd 1767, all the houses of the Jesuits in Spain were suddenly encircled, and those which were there were stopped, dispatched towards the ports in the clothing which they wore on them and piled up on boats which one sent to Civitavecchia. In a letter with Clément XIII, the King prevented that its annual allowance of 100 piastres would be withdrawn for the whole order if any of its members were warned at one unspecified time to write a justification whatever it was or to criticize the reasons for their expulsion, reasons which he refused and would always refuse to discuss.
It is practically the same fate which awaited them in the territories of the duke of Parma and Plaisance, a Bourbon which advised the Guillaume liberal minister of Tillot. In 1768, Clément XIII published an energetic protest (Monitorium) against the policy of the government of Parma. The question of the nomination of Parma increased the troubles of the Pope. Kings Bourbon supported the cause of their cousin, occupied Avignon, Bénévent and Pontecorvo and jointly presented a peremptory request for the total removal of the Jesuits (January 1769). Pushed in his last cuttings off, Clément XIII agree to convene a consistory to examine the question, but he died the day day before even when this one was to meet (February 2nd 1769), not without one suspecting the poison, for which, with truth, it seems not to have no convincing proof there.
According to the Registre Annuel for 1758: the Pope Clement XIII was “ the most honest man of the world; an ecclesiastic of most exemplary; practitioner the purest morals; excessively pious person, posed, cultivated, dedicated… ”
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