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The final chapter closes back on the Roman Curia, and it explains how, in Bellarmine’s view, the dynamics and mechanics of its power worked. The first section of this chapter illustrates the implication of Bellarmine’s theory for the development of the political and administrative structure of the Roman Curia. The second section of this chapter focuses on Bellarmine’s position on Copernicanism and on the Galileo affair, and it argues that Bellarmine’s opinions on natural philosophy were consistent with his politico-theological view of the Pope as the spiritual and intellectual leader of Christianity. The third and final section of this chapter presents some concluding remarks on the significance of Bellarmine’s theory for our understanding of ‘modern’ notions of power and authority, and it proposes a theoretical reading of Bellarmine’s theory against Carl Schmitt’s notion of territorial sovereignty and Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony.

The Catholic Revolution began on October 13, 1962. After the free vote for the Members of the Commissions, the Council Fathers began to realize that they could overcome the entrenched power of the Roman Curia and that they could change the Church in certain important areas like liturgy, ecumenism, the interpretation of scripture, attitudes towards Jews, and religious freedom. With the realization that they had the power to remake the Church, the bishops were swept by ecstasy, effervescence, and an extended moment of collective behavior. They challenged not the authority of the Pope but the power of the Roman Curia because they did not intend to intrude into fundamental doctrines of God, Jesus, Trinity, Eucharist, and life after death. They also did not make any judgments about matters such as birth control, divorce, or masturbation and said nothing of marriage of priests or ordination of women. Yet in fact they did destabilize many of the structures of nineteenth-century Catholicism. In the three decades since the Revolution, the conflict has continued between the leadership which orders, and lower clergy and the laity, which do not in general accept the right of the leadership to give orders on certain issues.

The election of Giuseppe Sarto, archbishop of Venice, as Pius X in 1903 was a surprise in that he had little political or diplomatic experience and knew nothing of the workings of the Curia. He did not understand modern thought in science and religious scholarship, and his papacy was marked by a conservatism condemning the modern world and appealing to a loyalty involving the practice of the whole faith of the traditional Church. Pius X's papacy saw the codification of canon law and encouragement of frequent communion, but his reforms of the Curia did not go very far. In France the Dreyfus case and the separation of Church and State caused vehement, sometimes violent, conflict between Catholics and anti‐clericals. The division, which would take years to overcome, was caused by the papacy's earlier condemnation of democracy and socialism, the belief of the French Right that Catholicism was its political strength, the prejudices of some left‐wing politicians, and the centralization of authority which made it impossible for French bishops to ignore the pope's decisions. In Italy the old fight between the pope and the Italian government was now obsolete. It continued on the level of words, but by 1913 Catholics were participating wholeheartedly in Italian politics.

The first to deny any historicity to the figure of Romulus, the founder of Rome, was Barthold Georg Niebuhr, in the first volume of his Storia romana, published in 1813. In his opinion at least, the figure, from his miraculous birth to his equally miraculous ascent to heaven, was an ensemble of legends, formed from the most varied elements: the sagas that circulated in ancient Latium and which could have been transmitted orally, and those spread by Greek historians, who, from at least the fourth century, were interested in Rome and its most ancient history. There were violent attacks on Niebuhr, who was in those years the Prussian ambassador in Rome, chiefly from spheres closely connected to the Curia; since, by denying the historicity of Romulus, he was also denying the passing of the legitimacy of the Roman empire.

The Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews was established by Pope Paul VI on October 22, 1974. This chapter discusses the precedents of the Commission and its beginning, its configuration in the context of the Roman Curia, and the chief moments of its work between 1974 and 1986. The Commission is not the absolute beginning. Already before 1974, during the Second Vatican Council, the very difficult and frequently discussed topic of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism had come to the fore when the fathers were preparing the document known as Nostra Aetate. In the debate preceding the redaction of the declaration, especially in the various interventions by Cardinal Augustin Bea and other Council fathers, the special character of Judaism and of its relationship with the Catholic Church had also been emphasized. The visit of Pope John Paul II to the Great Synagogue of Rome on April 13, 1986, has been one of the three decisive moments of his pontificate concerning the history of relations between the Catholic Church and Judaism.

This chapter examines Pope Benedict XVI's interpretation of Vatican II with respect to the question of conciliar hermeneutics as opposed to rupture and discontinuity. It first provides an overview of Vatican II and its three goals: spiritual renewal, updating (aggiornamento), and promotion of Christian unity. It then considers Pope Benedict's year-end address to the Roman Curia on December 22, 2005 before turning to a discussion of the hermeneutics of discontinuity and church reform. It concludes with an analysis of the sharp distinction between continuity and discontinuity at Vatican II.

During the central decades of the seventeenth century, Caramuel’s understanding of probabilism was the object of both acute interest and widespread, and at times violent, criticism. As a result, the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Book and the Holy Office decided to examine and eventually censure two of Caramuel’s most influential works. Through an analysis of the lengthy process leading to the censure and correction of these books, this chapter examines the theological, intellectual, moral, and political issues at stake in the debate over Caramuel’s doctrine and explores the complex and ambivalent way in which the institutional and theological center of the Catholic Church responded to probabilism.

The lower courts of the realm, operating in the counties, villages and manors continued to function after the manner of assemblies, often applying a law that was communally derived. The higher courts of the Curia were more lawyerly in their application of the law, although they continued to be dominated by a lay membership. The Curia courts made their decisions largely according to their reading of the kingdom’s statutes and of the Tripartitum. They were not bound by previous decisions; nor did the publication of judgments serve to provide a body of precedents. The Curia courts were, however, flexible in their interpretations as a consequence of which they were partly able to adjust the law to embrace new forms of commercial activity. Nevertheless, the two levels of the kingdom’s structure of courts, the lower and the higher, were capable of interaction. The law of bankruptcy is illustrative of this.

The activity of Hungary’s courts only becomes visible in the thirteenth century. The chapter considers their subsequent development and the structure of the royal courts of the Curia that operated in the monarch’s name. The business of the courts was led by case-managers or rapporteurs, who were called protonotaries, to such an extent that the courts were themselves often superfluous, since much routine work was lifted into the inns where the protonotaries resided. On the other hand, the protonotaries had to defer to the court, which was itself crowded. Royal courts were composed of judges and assessors, the latter often being elected by the diet. Court judgments were thus rendered by a constituency larger than just law men. At the same time, the royal courts were linked to the structure of courts in the countryside and business flowed between the two levels of the judicial hierarchy.

The Gamaleon prophecy (named for the pseudonym of its author) offers a detailed narrative centered on two interconnected enmities: that between Germans and Romance Europe, and that between the Empire and the Roman Curia. The prophecy hinges on a conflict over the imperial crown between a villainous emperor of the south and a righteous emperor of the Germans. The elected German emperor achieves victory, subdues Romance Europe, reduces Rome to poverty, and seizes control of the Church. Thus, the prophecy exposes the way that resentment of the Curia could take on nationalist dimensions, and the reform of the Church could be viewed as an imperial cause.

This chapter traces the history of the superior courts of common law in Westminster Hall, after they emerged from the undifferentiated Curia Regis of the twelfth century. The most important was the Common Bench, the court for ‘common pleas’ which after 1234 was legally distinct from the court held before the king himself, the King’s Bench. A third court, the Exchequer, was meant for the king’s revenue business. By 1700 all three had become courts for common pleas, by making use of fictions: in the King’s Bench a fictional allegation of trespass in Middlesex (to put the defendant in gaol, with the aid of a writ of latitat), in the Exchequer a fictional allegation of debt to the Crown in a writ of quominus. These are explained. Such techniques did not escape controversy, and the process of jurisdictional conflict and assimilation is related.

At the time of Maria Maddalena’s death in 1607, public manifestations of cult for people who had not been investigated and recognized for their holiness by the ecclesiastical authorities were causing disquiet amongst members of the papal Curia in Rome. The nuns of Maria Maddalena’s convent worked together with their confessor to develop a cult for their sister that grew quickly after her death, but they did so extremely carefully. This chapter explores the central role of contact relics and their wide sharing by devotees, arguing that it was because Maria Maddalena was widely available in a tangible form through these objects that she became part of people’s devotional lives and social networks.