During this period the papal institution, considered in the development of its inner life, already showed signs of decadence. The diminution of religious faith and sacerdotal prestige shook it to its very foundations. The growth of the lay spirit continued to manifest itself among the burgesses of the towns as well as among the feudal princes and sovereigns. The social factors of communism and nationalism, against which In nocent III. and his successors had struggled, became more power ful and more hostile to theocratic domination. That a sovereign like St. Louis should be able to associate himself officially with the feudalism of his realm to repress abuses of church juris diction; that a contemporary of Philip the Fair, the lawyer Pierre Dubois, should dare to suggest the secularization of ecclesiastical property and the conversion of the clergy into a class of function aries paid out of the royal treasury ; and that Philip the Fair, the adversary of Boniface VIII., should be able to rely in his conflict with the leader of the Church on the popular consent obtained at a meeting of the three estates of France—all point to a singular demoralization of the sentiments and principles on which were based the whole power of the pontiff of Rome and the entire organization of mediaeval Catholicism. Both by its attitude and by its governmental acts, the papacy of the later 13th century itself contributed to increase the discredit and disaffection from which it suffered. Under Urban IV. and his successors the great moral and religious sovereignty of former times became a purely bureaucratic monarchy, in which the main preoccupation of the governors appeared to be the financial exploitation of Christen dom. The continued efforts of the popes to drain Christian gold to Rome were limited only by the fiscal pretensions of the lay sovereigns, and it was this financial rivalry that gave rise to the inevitable conflict between Boniface VIII. and Philip the Fair. By thus devoting itself to material interests, the papacy con temporary with the last. Capetians lost its moral greatness and fell in the opinion of the peoples; and it did itself no less injury by the abnormal extension of the bounds of its absolutism. By its exaggerated methods of centralization the papal monarchy had absorbed within itself all the living forces of the religious world and suppressed all the liberties in which the Church of old had lived. The subjection of the secular clergy was complete, while the episcopate retained no shadow of its independence. The decree of Clement IV. (1266), empowering the papacy to dispose of all vacant bishoprics at the court of Rome, merely sanctioned a usage that had long been established. But the control exercised by the Roman Curia over the episcopate had been realized by many other means. It was seldom that an episcopal election took place with out a division in the chapter, in which resided the electoral right. In such an event, the competitors appealed to the Holy See and abdicated their right, either voluntarily or under coercion, in manibus papae, while the pope took possession of the vacant see. Nominations directly made by the court of Rome, especially in the case of dioceses long vacant, became increasingly numerous. The principle of election by canons was repeatedly violated, and threatened to disappear; and at the end of the i3th century the spectacle was common of prelates, whether nominated or con firmed by the pope, entitling themselves "bishops by the grace of the Holy See." The regular clergy, who were almost wholly sheltered from the power of the diocesan bishops, found themselves, even more than the secular priesthood, in a state of complete dependence on the Curia. The papacy of this period continually intervened in the internal affairs of the monasteries. Not only did the monks con tinue to seek from the papacy the confirmation of their privileges and property, but they also referred almost all their disputes to the arbitration of the pope. Their elections gave rise to innu merable lawsuits, which all terminated at the court of Rome, and in most cases it was the pope himself who designated the monks to fill vacant posts in the abbeys. Thus the pope became the great ecclesiastical elector as well as the universal judge and supreme legislator. On this extreme concentration of the Christian power was employed throughout Europe an army of official agents or officious adherents of the Holy See, who were animated by an irrepressible zeal for the aggrandizement of the papacy. These officials originally consisted of an obedient and devoted militia of mendicant friars, both Franciscans and Dominicans, who took their orders from Rome alone, and whose efforts the papacy stimulated by lavishing exemptions, privileges and full sacerdotal powers.
The sovereign direction of this enormous monarchy belonged to the pope alone, who was assisted in important affairs by the advice and collaboration of the College of Cardinals, who had become the sole electors to the papacy. Towards the close of the 13th century the necessity arose for an express ruling on the question of the exercise of this electoral right. In 1274 Gregory X., completing the measures taken by Alexander III. in the 12th century, promulgated the celebrated constitution by which the cardinal-electors were shut up in conclave and, in the event of their not having designated the new pope within three days, were constrained to perform their duty by a progressive reduction of their food-allowance (see CONCLAVE). But at the head of this vast body there existed a constant tendency which was opposed to the absorption of all the power by a single and unbridled will. In the last years of this period fresh signs appeared of a reaction that emanated froth the Sacred College itself. The cardinal electors endeavoured to derive from their electoral power a right of control over the acts of the pope elect. In 1294, and again in 1303, they laid themselves under an obligation, previously to the election, to subscribe to the political engagements which each promised rigorously to observe in the event of his becoming pope. In general, these engagements bore upon the limitation of the num ber of cardinals, the prohibition to nominate new ones without previous notification to the Sacred College, the sharing between the cardinals and the pope of certain revenues specified by a bull of Nicholas IV., and the obligatory consultation of the consistories for the principal acts of the temporal and spiritual government. It is conceivable that a pope of Boniface VIII.'s temperament would not submit kindly to any restriction of the discretionary power with which he was invested by tradition, and he endeav oured to make the cardinals dependent on him and even to dispense with their services as far as possible, only assembling them in consistory in cases of extreme necessity. This tendency of the Sacred College to convert the Roman Church into a constitutional monarchy, in which it should itself play the part of parliament, was a sufficiently grave symptom of the progress of the new spirit. But throughout the ecclesiastical society traditional bonds were loosened and anarchy was rife, and this at the very moment when the enemies of the priesthood and its leaders redoubled their attack. In fine, the decadence of the papal institution manifested itself in an irremediable manner when it had accomplished no more than the half of its task. The growth of national kingdoms, the anti-clerical tendencies of the emancipated middle classes, the competition of lay imperialisms, and all the other elements of resistance which had been encountered by the papacy in its prog ress and had at first tended to shackle it, now presented an insurmountable barrier. The papacy was weakened by its contest with these adverse elements, and it was through its failure to triumph over them that its dream of European dominion, both temporal and spiritual, entered but very incompletely into the field of realities. (A. Lu.) The accession of the Gascon Clement V. (1305-1314) marks the beginning of a new era in the history of the papacy; for this pope, formerly archbishop of Bordeaux, remained in France, without once crossing the threshold of the Eternal City. Clement's motive for this resolution was his fear that the independence of the ecclesiastical government might be endangered among the frightful dissensions and party conflicts by which Italy was then convulsed; while at the same time he yielded to the pressure exercised on him by the French king, Philip the Fair. In March 1309 Clement V. transferred his residence to Avignon, a town which at that time belonged to the king of Naples, but was sur rounded by the countship of Venaissin, which as early as 1228 had passed into the possession of the Roman See. Clement V. remained at Avignon till the day of his death, so that with him begins the so-called Babylonian Exile of the popes. Through this, and his excessive subservience to Philip the Fair, his reign proved the reverse of salutary to the Church. The pope's subservience was above all conspicuous in his attitude towards the proceedings brought against the order of the Temple, which was dissolved by the Council of Vienne (see TEMPLARS).