Page:On papal conclaves (IA a549801700cartuoft).djvu/162

 146 deemed that the fact of a Cardinal's privilege of franchise being beyond any Pope's power of confiscation was irrevocably determined. Every sacred guarantee conceivable against the arbitrary action of an authority which claims to be above limitation might well have seemed to surround this point of law, that a Pope, though perfectly empowered to interdict, excommunicate, degrade, and even send to the scaffold a Cardinal, was absolutely debarred from depriving him of his prerogative to vote at a Papal election. It must therefore be the subject of no small surprise that this apparently inviolable principle should have been completely set aside in the Papal Brief of the 29th September of this year, against Cardinal Andrea. Although it would be out of place, in these pages, to enter into the controversy as to the canonical validity of the course pursued against this Cardinal, the precedent which would be established by this Papal statute, if finally accepted and acted upon, involves so great an innovation on what hitherto has been held the law in regard to the degree in which Cardinals can be dependent for their prerogatives on the Pope's mere goodwill, that it is necessary here to state the bare facts of