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Pontificate   Listen
verb
Pontificate  v. i.  (R. C. Ch.) To perform the duty of a pontiff.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pontificate" Quotes from Famous Books



... height of its power under Innocent III. The eighteen years of his pontificate were one long effort, for the most part successful, to make the pope the arbiter of Europe. Innocent announced the claims of the Papacy in the most uncompromising manner. "As the moon," he declared, "receives its light from the sun, and is inferior to the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... of Pope Adrian IV, who died thirty-nine days after his election to the supreme pontificate without having been crowned, is one of the fine passages ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery

... Benedictines that Gregory the Seventh was enabled to contend at once against the Franconian Caesars and against the secular priesthood. It was by the aid of the Dominicans and Franciscans that Innocent the Third crushed the Albigensian sectaries. In the sixteenth century the Pontificate exposed to new dangers more formidable than had ever before threatened it, was saved by a new religious order, which was animated by intense enthusiasm and organized with exquisite skill. When the Jesuits came to the rescue of the Papacy, they found it in extreme peril: but from ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... of these beautiful children, and the then pope gave his consent; but the Roman people could not bear the loss of one already so useful and distinguished, and almost before he had started he was recalled. When, during his own pontificate, Gregory carried out his purpose, it was probably due to a request of Queen Bertha, speaking, most likely, in behalf of some of the Kentish people, made to the Frankish bishops for missionaries. "It has come to our knowledge," writes Gregory, "that, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... the tamer of Attila and the hero of Chalcedon, had not been dead twenty years when Cassiodorus was born. Pope Gregory the Great, the converter of England, was within fifteen years of his accession to the Pontificate when Cassiodorus died. The first great schism between the Eastern and Western Churches was begun in his boyhood and ended before he had reached old age. He saw the irretrievable ruin of Rome, such as Augustus and Trajan had known her; the extinction of ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)

... even directs a choice. When consul, [34] he contracted his daughter, a lady already of the happiest promise, to myself, then a very young man; and after his office was expired I received her in marriage. He was immediately appointed governor of Britain, and the pontificate [35] was added to ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus

... Mark's, under the seal of the Fisherman, on the fifteenth day of September, in the year 1582, the eleventh of our pontificate. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various

... exalted beyond all fear of competition-the dignity of lordship over the holy city of Mecca. This was then held under no higher tenure than the sufferance and caprice of the Arab tribes. To perpetuate this lordship by assuming an hereditary and inviolable pontificate was Mahomet's first idea, and at a banquet given to the whole of his kinsmen he revealed his scheme. They, however, rejected his appeal, and he then proclaimed himself as an apostle to all, and setting aside existing forms and traditions proceeded to a higher flight of ambition. ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight

... considerable reputation, his literary fame rests chiefly on his fine historical works, of which fifteen volumes appeared, including the "History of the Jews," the "History of Christianity to the Abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire," and the "History of Latin Christianity to the Pontificate of Nicholas V." The appearance of the "History of the Jews" in 1830 caused no small consternation among the orthodox, but among the Jews themselves it was exceptionally well received. Dean Milman wrote several hymns, including ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... very Pope who had done most for the prosperity of the city. Porcari aimed at the complete overthrow of the papal authority, and had distinguished accomplices, who, though their names are not handed down to us, are certainly to be looked for among the Italian governments of the time. Under the pontificate of the same man, Lorenzo Valla concluded his famous declamation against the gift of Constantine with the wish for the speedy secularization of the ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... demise of Eugenius III.; an oppression which, if its violence seemed to slumber during the short career of Anastasius IV., whose patriarchal age and paternal goodness to the poor in a famine which desolated the country under his pontificate, commanded respect and won all hearts, yet woke up again with fresh vigour on the accession of his successor, the English Pope ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby

... Peter's under the seal of office of the penitentiary, the XV Kalends of July in the third year of the pontificate of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various

... on Easter Day, 556, he began a pontificate which was from the first disputed and even despised. The Archbishop of Milan and the patriarch of Aquileia would not communicate with him. In Gaul he was received with suspicion, and he was obliged to write to King Childebert, submitting to him a profession of his faith.[8] It is clear that the ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton

... by his letters in form similar to a brief given on the twenty-eighth day of January, 1585, and the thirteenth year of his pontificate, Pope Gregory XIII, our predecessor of happy memory, led thereto through certain reasons known at the time, issued an interdict and prohibition to all patriarchs and bishops, including even the province of China and Japan, under pain of ecclesiastical ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various

... great office during that period. Four years apiece, or thereabouts. It is very suggestive of the unhealthiness of underground graveyards as places of residence. One Pope afterward spent his entire pontificate in the catacombs—eight years. Another was discovered in them and murdered in the episcopal chair. There was no satisfaction in being a Pope in those days. There were too many annoyances. There are one hundred and sixty catacombs under Rome, each ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... supreme skill and practice. Nor could nature have created a more vigorous intellect, or one to exercise his art and carry it into execution with greater invention and proportion, or with a more thorough knowledge, than Bramante. But no less essential than all this was the election to the Pontificate, at that time, of Julius II, a Pope of great spirit, full of desire to leave memorials behind him. And it was fortunate both for us and for Bramante that he found such a Prince (a thing which rarely happens to men of great genius), at whose expense he might be ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari

... other into the background. Though the population of the city at the inception of the Reformation had sunk to eighty thousand, there were vast crowds of placemen, and still greater ones of aspirants for place. The successful occupant of the pontificate had thousands of offices to give away—offices from many of which the incumbents had been remorselessly ejected; many had been created for the purpose of sale. The integrity and capacity of an applicant were never ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... reform. The popular party replied in a singular manner. The office of Pontifex Maximus was the most coveted of all the honors to which a Roman citizen could aspire. It was held for life, it was splendidly endowed, and there still hung about the pontificate the traditionary dignity attaching to the chief of the once sincerely believed Roman religion. Like other objects of ambition, the nomination had fallen, with the growth of democracy, to the people, but the position ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude

... Cardinal Poggetto (du Poiet) caused Dante's treatise De Monarchia, to be publicly burned at Bologna, and proposed further to dig up and burn the bones of the poet at Ravenna, as having been a heretic; but so much opposition was roused that he thought better of it. Yet this was during the pontificate of the Frenchman, John XXII., the reproof of whose simony Dante puts in the mouth of St. Peter, who declares his seat vacant,[41] whose damnation the poet himself seems to prophesy,[42] and against whose election he had endeavored ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... taught the heliocentric doctrine—that the earth revolves round the sun. In the exercise of her right to determine what true science is, the Church, in the Pontificate of Paul V, stepped in, and by the mouth of the holy Congregation of the Index, delivered, on March 5, 1616, the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... Latin words conveying the same meaning. But if we would learn how the figure of a man came to be suspended upon this form of the cross, we must refer to Mediaeval History, which teaches that in the year 680, under the Pontificate of Agathon, and during the reign of Constantine Pogonat, at the sixth council of the church, and third at Constantinople, it was ordered in Canon 82 that "Instead of a lamb, the figure of a man nailed to a cross ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill

... at Venice; his pontificate was marked by a schism created by proceedings in the Council of Basel towards the reform of the Church and the limitation of the papal authority, the issue of which was that he excommunicated the Council and the Council deposed him; he had an unhappy time of it, and in his old ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... the possibilities of a Council of Tihran. It was an important occasion of which Gobineau reminds us, well worthy to be marked by a Council, being nothing less than the decision of the succession to the Pontificate. ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne

... transaction, and more jubilant, was the Nuncio Salviati, in Paris. While desiring that the cardinal secretary "should kiss the feet of his Holiness in his name," and "rejoicing with him in the bowels of his heart at the blessed and honorable commencement of his pontificate,"[1162] while declaring that, despite his previous belief that the court of France would not much longer tolerate the admiral's arrogance, he would never have imagined the tenth part of what he now saw with his own eyes, ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... I answered modestly, "the great-grandson of the unfortunate Marco Antonio Casanova, secretary to Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, who died of the plague in Rome, in the year 1528, under the pontificate of Clement VII." The words were scarcely out of my lips when he embraced me, calling me his cousin, but we all thought that Doctor Gennaro would actually die with laughter, for it seemed impossible to laugh so immoderately without risk of life. Madame Gennaro was very ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... me, saying, "Signor Cardinal de Retz, 'ecce opus manuum tuarum'" ("Behold the work of your own hands"). I went home accompanied with one hundred and twenty coaches of gentlemen, who did not doubt that I should govern the Pontificate. ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz

... Popes who may be counted, no more than five attained the age of eighty. Their mode of life, though conducive to longevity in the minor offices of the Church, seems to be overbalanced by the cares of the Pontificate. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... Dolabella to be made consul, (and they deny that he was a king who was always doing and saying something of this sort,)—but after Caesar had said this, then this virtuous augur said that he was invested with a pontificate of that sort that he was able, by means of the auspices, either to hinder or to vitiate the comitia, just as he pleased; and he declared that he would do so. And here, in the first place, remark the incredible ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero

... all who pertain to the Church in every place and time and state; but all other men are called heads with reference to certain special places, as bishops of their Churches. Or with reference to a determined time as the Pope is the head of the whole Church, viz. during the time of his Pontificate, and with reference to a determined state, inasmuch as they are in the state of wayfarers. Secondly, because Christ is the Head of the Church by His own power and authority; while others are called heads, as taking Christ's place, according to 2 Cor. 2:10, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... Judaism exist together?" The High Priest was Joseph Kaiapha, but beside and behind him we always see another man, Hanan, his father-in-law. He had been High Priest, and in reality kept all the authority of the office. During fifty years the pontificate remained in his family almost without interruption. The family spirit was haughty, bold, and cruel. It was Hanan, his family, and the party he represented, who really put Jesus to death. After the death of Jesus was decided, he escaped for a ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various

... During the pontificate of Nicholas V., Calixtus III., and Pius II., very little was done for reform. The fear that if another General Council were convoked the disgraceful scenes of Basle might be repeated, and the dangers which threatened Europe from a Turkish ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey

... ecclesiastics and the temporal power of the Church, he was, although successful for a time, finally vanquished.[2] St. Bernard invoked the aid of the secular arm to rid France of him. Later on Pope Eugenius III excommunicated him. He was executed during the pontificate of Adrian IV, in 1155. He was arrested in the city of Rome after a riot which was quelled by the Emperor Frederic, now the ally of the Pope, and condemned to be strangled by the prefect of the city. His body was then burned, and ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard

... at a moment when its scandalous traffic was carried on in the light of day with more than usually cynical indifference, was actually presented at Rome under the patronage of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna at the carnival of 1490, during the pontificate of Innocent VIII. Gradually a more complex form was evolved, the number of speakers was increased, and some of these made their entrance during the progress of the recitation. So too in the matter of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... Gonzaga, created Cardinal in 1527. After the death of his brother, Duke Federigo, he governed Mantua for sixteen years as regent for his nephews, and became famous as a patron of arts and letters. He died at Trento in 1563 while presiding over the Council there, in the pontificate of Pius IV. ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini

... way to the entreaties of his attendants, he began to restrain his sorrow, and to consider the injury which his own health might sustain by the further indulgence of his grief.'"—Roscoe's Life and Pontificate of Leo Tenth, 1805, i. 265. [See, too, for the original in Burchard Diar, in Gordon's Life of Alex. VI., Append., "De Caede Ducis Gandiae," Append. No. xlviii., ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... Whigs under Lord John Russell were in office, Lord Minto, Lord Privy Seal, who was Palmerston's father-in-law, was sent to Rome in the autumn recess to secure the adherence of Pius IX., then in the first months of his Pontificate, to the same line of action, and to bring to the notice of His Holiness the conduct of the Irish priesthood in supporting O'Connell. The fact that neither Gregory XVI. nor Pio Nono made any response to these appeals lends point to the sardonic comment ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell

... pensive and caressing. Although a Protestant, she had formed, during her long residence in Rome, an entire friendship with the Cardinal Consalvi, who was the prime-minister and favorite of Pope Pius VII through his whole pontificate. These two beautiful women, as soon as they met, felt, by all the laws of elective affinity, that they belonged to each other. The death of the Pope was followed, in a few months, by that of his minister and friend. During ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... pontiffs subordinate to the French government and thus weakened their influence in the rest of Europe. This "Babylonian Captivity" [Sidenote: The Babylonian Captivity 1309-76] was followed by a greater misfortune to the pontificate, the Great Schism, [Sidenote: The Great Schism 1378-1417] for the effort to transfer the papacy back to Rome led to the election of two popes, who, with their successors, respectively ruled and mutually anathematized each other from the two rival cities. The difficulty of deciding which ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... Catacombs of St. Callixtus are among the most important of the underground cemeteries. They were begun before the time of Callixtus, but were greatly enlarged under his pontificate [A.D. 219-223]. Saint though he be, the character of Callixtus, if we may judge by the testimony of another saint, Hippolytus, stood greatly in need of purification. His story is an amusing illustration of the state of the Roman ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various

... early history up to the period of the abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire, appeared in 1840, and they were followed by the six large volumes of the 'History of Latin Christianity,' carrying the history of the Western Church to the end of the Pontificate of Nicholas V. in 1455. This great work was published in two instalments—the first three volumes in 1854, and the remaining three in the following year—and it gave its author indisputably the first ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... will exercise the pontificate in France, and in the Kingdom of Italy, in the same manner and under the same ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... who had succeeded Clement VIII. in 1605, with the brief interlude of the twenty-six days of Leo XI.'s pontificate, was zealous, as might be supposed, to check the dangerous growth of the pestilential little republic of the north. His diplomatic agents, Millino at Madrid, Barberini at Paris, and the accomplished Bentivoglio, who had just been appointed to the nunciatura at Brussels, were indefatigable ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... splendor. Its halls were small, and lined, not with marble, after the luxurious fashion of many patrician palaces, but with the common Alban stone, and the pattern of the pavement was plain and simple. Nor when he succeeded Lepidus in the pontificate would he relinquish this private dwelling for the regia or public residence assigned that ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... During the splendid pontificate of Anthony Beke (or Beak), the knights of the palatinate had continually to be in the saddle, or buckled in armor. The prelate was so impatient of rest that he never took more than one sleep, saying it was unbecoming a man to turn from one side to another in ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving

... Interview with Jesus.—"No figure is better known in contemporary Jewish history than that of Annas; no person deemed more fortunate or successful, but also none more generally execrated than the late high priest. He had held the pontificate for only six or seven years; but it was filled by not fewer than five of his sons, by his son-in-law Caiaphas, and by a grandson. And in those days it was, at least for one of Annas' disposition, much better to have been than to be high priest. He enjoyed all the dignity of the office, and ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... originated with the Church, when the public morals were far from being well ascertained, as is proved by many well-known privileges belonging to the Seigneur or Lord of the Manor. Pope Gregory the Great, who was raised to the Pontificate in 590, appears to have been the first who conferred upon bishops the right of deciding this description of questions. It was, doubtless, from considerations of tender regard for female modesty that the Church took upon itself the painful duty of investigating ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport

... No one knows for certain when it started, or why. A local antiquary, after prolonged study of chronicles, memorials, rolls and records, to say nothing of local churchyards, refers it with some confidence to the reign of HENRY II. (LOUIS VII. being King of France, in the pontificate of ADRIAN IV. and so on), and to the forcible abduction of a pig (called the White Pearl) by the then ruling monarch of Kilterash. The Editor of The Kilterash Curfew, in one of his recent "Readings for the Day of Rest," remarked that Christian charity compelled him to hurl this foul aspersion ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 14, 1917 • Various

... free brotherhood, but incapable of making himself their interpreter; fearful of the consequences, and trembling like one who feels himself insecure, lest he should see the people, raised to a new consciousness of its own faculties and of its own rights, question the authority of the pontificate—Pius IX. vacillated contemptibly between the two paths presented to him, muttered words of emancipation, which he neither knew how nor intended to make good, and promises of country and independence to Italy which his followers betrayed by conspiring ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various



Words linked to "Pontificate" :   government, pontiff, Roman Catholic Pope, authorities, Catholic Pope, pontifex, papacy, talk, Holy Father, regime, Vicar of Christ, Bishop of Rome



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