Cardinals declare the April election void and elect a second Pope

FONDI, Campagna, September 20, 1378 AD — The cardinals who left Rome went into conclave in the palace of the Count of Fondi today and elected Cardinal Robert of Geneva in the place of the man they had made Pope five months ago. They declared that election void, on the ground that the Roman crowd had frightened them into voting for Pope Urban VI.

The quarrel is five months old and personal. Within weeks of the coronation Pope Urban VI was insulting the cardinals to their faces. He shouted at them in public, called one cardinal stupid and another a liar, told a third to be quiet, and warned the college that he would swamp it with new Italian cardinals. Saint Catherine of Siena, who has written to him more than once since the election, told him to “Mitigate a little, for the love of Christ crucified, those sudden impulses which nature forces on you.”

The French cardinals wanted Pope Urban VI gone. He will not resign, and they cannot remove him, so every king, queen and city in Europe must now decide which of the two men is the Pope.

Canon law gave the cardinals no way to take the papacy back. A pope validly elected can be deposed for heresy and for nothing else, and nobody has accused Pope Urban VI of heresy. So they do not say they have removed him. They say there was never an election to undo: an act done in fear is void in law, and their votes in April were cast in fear of the crowd at the doors.

Nobody on earth can rule on that claim. Pope Boniface VIII laid it down in 1302 AD that when the highest power of all errs it can be judged by God alone and not by man, so there is no court to bring the case to. In April these same men had announced the election: the day after the coronation the whole college notified the cardinals at Avignon. Cardinal Robert of Geneva wrote to his relative the King of France to say that the Archbishop of Bari had been made Pope.

Pope Gregory XI died at Rome on March 27 this year. The cardinals went into conclave as soon as his funeral was over, with deputations pressing them to choose a Roman and the same demand shouted after them in the streets. They chose Bartolommeo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari, who took the name Urban VI.

In June the French cardinals gave the unhealthy Roman summer as their reason for leaving the city and rode out to Anagni; the papal chamberlain went with them and carried off Pope Gregory XI’s tiara and most of the papal jewels.

Talks at Tivoli on June 26 came to nothing. When the Dominican prior of Santa Sabina brought Pope Urban VI the cardinals’ demand that he resign, the Pope answered: “I will not resign to give place to the devil and make sinners exult. Nay, I will abide and beat them down in the name of the Lord our God.”

Pope Urban VI had taken the government of the Campagna away from Onorato Gaetani, Count of Fondi, and had refused to repay a large loan Gaetani made to the Holy See. On August 9 the cardinals had an encyclical read aloud in the cathedral of Anagni. They had elected the Archbishop of Bari only to escape the peril of death, it said, and it anathematized him as an antipope, a deceiver and destroyer of Christians. They then moved to Fondi, to elect under Gaetani’s protection. Two days ago Pope Urban VI created twenty-six new cardinals, all but two of them Italians — a college of his own, built while the old one was assembling at Fondi to replace him.

The seceding cardinals elected the Cardinal of Geneva unanimously today. In February of last year, at Cesena, Robert of Geneva had ordered the Church’s mercenary companies to put the inhabitants to the sword; at least four thousand people were killed there. The three Italian cardinals were in the room and did not vote, and they raised no objection. They proclaimed Robert of Geneva Pope the next day, under the name Clement VII.

The King of France is a relative of Robert of Geneva. In August a Franciscan friar carried the cardinals’ declaration from Anagni to the King, who accepted it. The King then wrote to Joanna, Queen of Naples: if the Queen took the cardinals’ part and defended the Church, she would be praised everywhere and the King would be in her debt.

Naples is the first great prize. Queen Joanna was openly pleased by the April election of her own subject and sent troops to Tivoli to guard him. At the end of August she changed sides and sent her chancellor to the cardinals at Fondi. She owes the Holy See 64,000 florins in tribute, and the money will go to whichever of the two men she recognises.

The palace they voted in today belongs to a man St. Catherine of Siena has already written to. A few weeks ago she told Onorato Gaetani that self-love and anger had corrupted him: “In the secret of your heart, you hold that Pope Urban VI is the true Sovereign Pontiff… We are bound to hold that he is the Pope, canonically elected, the vicar of Christ on earth, and we are bound to obey him even unto death.”