establishing for Bourbon Naples the kind of controls over the church that were effected by the Gallican church in Bourbon France: revenues of vacant bishoprics and abbeys went to the crown, superfluous convents were suppressed, tithes abolished and the acquisition of new Church property by mortmain was forbidden. Royal assent was required for the publication in Naples of papal bulls and concessions were no longer considered eternal. The status of Naples as a papal fief, dating from the time of the Hohenstaufen, was denied: the king of Naples served at the pleasure of God only. Appeals to Rome were forbidden without the royal permission. Marriage was declared a civil contract. And by the order of Charles III the Jesuits were suppressed and expelled from the Kingdom of Naples in 1767, a move in which Tanucci was in general sympathy with other ministers at the Bourbon courts, as Aranda in Spain, Choiseul in France, du Tillot in Parma, and also with Pombal in Portugal. Pope Clement XIII responded with excommunication, whereupon Tanucci occupied the monasteries at Benevento and Pontecorvo, which were not returned to the Roman Church until after the pope's general order of dissolution of the Society of Jesus in 1773. The protests of the bishops against many of the new teachings in the schools after the expulsion of the Jesuits were dismissed as invalid. His policy in finance and in regard to the food taxes provoked popular revolutions on several occasions. When, in 1774, Maria Carolina of Austria, the Habsburg queen of Ferdinand IV, joined the Council of State, the power of Tanucci began to decline. In vain he endeavored to neutralize the queen's influence, but in 1777 he was dismissed and retired. He died in Naples in 1783. Notes External links Catholic Encyclopedia: Tanucci; a very severe review 1698 births 1783 deaths People from the Province of Arezzo 18th-century Italian politicians Bernardo