Borgia family; Borja, Francisco de, Saint, 1510-1572; Italy -- History -- 1492-1559
On the seventeenth of August 1611, he was named Cardinal-Presbyter of
the Title of Santa Croce _in Gerusalemme_, being then a youth;
“invenis,” says Ciacconi; twenty-two years of age, says the exact and
uniquely well-informed Moroni. On the fifteenth of May 1630, he was
raised to the Cardinal-Bishopric of Albano, and named Archbishop of
Seville. In Rome, he was on the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office,
and ambassador of the Catholic King to the Holy See. In the Kingdom of
Naples, he was Viceroy. He bought, (Mr. Henry Harland wittily says that
one may buy such things,) the additional title of “Father of the Poor,”
by distributing annually in charity ten thousand crowns; and he
exchanged his archbishopric of Seville for that of Toledo. In 1641, he
held a diocesan synod over which his Vicar-General presided as his
proxy, and governed his archdiocese, while he was cultivating his
ambition in Rome. He was an unwilling assistant at the two Conclaves,
which elected the Lord Gregory P.P. XV and the Lord Urban P.P. VIII. And
in November 1645, while England was in the throes of the Great
Rebellion, he died at Madrid, after fifty-six years of life, and
thirty-four of cardinalate, a disappointed man, and was buried in the
metropolitan cathedral of Toledo.
* * * * *
Don Francisco de Borja, great-great-grandson of the Saint, son of Duke
Don Carlos de Gandia by his wife Doña Maria Ponce de Leon, was born on
the twenty-seventh of March 1659. He was a man of singular and
extraordinary piety and learning, Archdeacon of Calatrava and Canon of
Toledo. By his proved fidelity he gained the favour of the Catholic King
Don Carlos II, who made him Councillor of Aragon. From Rome, he received
the bishopric of Calagurita; and (on the fourteenth of November 1699,
according to Moroni, or on the twenty-first of June 1700, according to
Guarnacci,) the scarlet hat of the cardinalate and the archbishopric of
Burgos. He died on the fourth of April 1702, undistinguishable from
other ecclesiastics of his rank.
* * * * *
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