24

Beleaguered, Infallible, and Prisoner Again

After Pius VII came the short pontificate of Leo XII (1823–1829) and the even shorter one of Pius VIII (1829–1830). Leo, pious but narrow-minded, was elected as the candidate of the most reactionary faction in the college, which wanted a break with the liberal policies of Consalvi. Immediately upon his election, the new pope dismissed Consalvi as secretary of state and set about dismantling some of his recent reforms in the States. He adopted an intransigent attitude toward heads of other nations that backfired so badly that he reinstated Consalvi and tried to regain lost ground. When Consalvi died in 1824, Leo lost an experienced and adroit counselor, who might have been able to hold him back from imposing on the city and the States a harsh police regime whose puritanical extremes would have been ludicrous had they not been so fanatically enforced. He put Jews back in the ghettos, whose gates were now fitted with locks, and made it illegal for them to own real estate. Such measures only increased the resentment against “the priests” that had long been smoldering. The short reign of Pius VIII did nothing to quell the unrest in the kingdom he called his own.

Only with the next pope, Gregory XVI, did the situation explode. The conclave lasted almost two months and was divided, as before, between the zelanti (zealots), who stood for uncompromising opposition to modern ideas, and others more moderate. The zelanti carried the day with the election of Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari, who began his ecclesiastical career as a monk in the strict Camaldolese order. The new pope never compromised the austere lifestyle he learned as a young man and was exemplarily devout. But his vision was small and in some regards obscurantist. As pope, for instance, he banned railroads in the Papal States as “hellish” (in a play on words, chemins d’enfer instead of chemins de fer, French for railroads).

Long before he was elected he published The Triumph of the Holy See and the Church against the Attacks of Innovators, 1799, a resounding proclamation of papal authority in both the spiritual and temporal spheres. The book did not attract much attention until the author became pope, after which it was frequently republished in the original Italian and also translated into other languages. By that time it played well with the Ultramontanist drumbeat sounded by de Maistre and others that became louder and more insistent as the century progressed.

Gregory was completely dedicated to the good of the church as he saw it. To his credit, he condemned the slave trade (but not slavery) in 1839. His most notable achievement, however, was his encouragement of missionary activity among the religious orders that were now fairly well on the road to recovery after the great downturn in vocations during the Revolution. During his pontificate he appointed some two hundred missionary bishops.

As the nineteenth century unfolded it became after the sixteenth the century of the greatest Catholic missionary activity. But the nineteenth was different from the sixteenth in two regards. First, Catholic missionaries now had to compete with their Protestant peers, a phenomenon practically unknown earlier. Second, both sets of missionaries carried with them a more sharply articulated sense of the superiority of Western culture and of “the white man’s burden” to impose it. The first was an ongoing problem for both Catholic and Protestant missionaries. The second would not backfire until the middle of the twentieth century after World War II.

But on the domestic front Gregory faced forces that he did not understand and could not control. Even before he was crowned a rebellion broke out in Bologna and spread through the States, threatening even Rome. The papal army could not put it down. With the Papal States on the verge of collapse, Gregory saved the situation only by the desperate measure of calling upon Austria to send troops to put down the rebels—and to stay thereafter to maintain order. France then sent troops to do the same, and the two armies did not withdraw until eight years later. The pope’s own subjects had revolted against him, and on his own he did not have the resources to contain them—an ominous situation.

For the pope the culprit responsible for this evil as well as the general depravity of the times was “the terrible conspiracy of impious men,” as he said in his first encyclical, Mirari Vos, issued in 1832 shortly after the rebellion was quelled. Among the false ideas that the “shameless lovers of liberty” spread were freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and separation of church and state. The solution to these evils was the inculcation of obedience to legitimate princes.

The silent target of the encyclical was the French priest Felicité de Lamennais, who proposed a form of Ultramontanism different from that of the royalist de Maistre. Lamennais believe the church, led by the pope, should ally itself with the people and baptize the Revolution. No more marriage of throne and altar. On the masthead of L’Avenir (“The Future”), the newspaper he founded, ran the inflammatory words “God and Freedom.” His position won him the enmity of the French Catholic elite and, no surprise, it infuriated Gregory XVI.

The long stay of the Austrians and French gave Gregory time to shore up his position, so that he did not have to face another full-fledged insurrection. But in 1845, the year before he died, there was an uprising in Rimini and the next year another in Ancona. Conspiratorial societies operated almost openly. The papal police were impotent to disband them, partly because the police were themselves often in sympathy with their cause.

Gregory’s successor would face formidable political challenges. Besides the unrest in the Papal States, the Risorgimento (resurgence, renaissance), the movement for Italian unification, had after the Congress of Vienna gained increasing momentum especially among intellectuals and the bourgeoisie. For the movement to be successful it of course had to persuade or force the smaller units like the Grand Duchy of Tuscany to join and surrender sovereignty, but it especially had to deal with the two greatest obstacles: Austria, which occupied much of northeastern Italy, and the papacy, which controlled the extensive States right in the middle of the peninsula and held the city that had to be the capital, Rome.

Pius IX was elected on the fourth ballot of a remarkably brisk conclave and elected as a moderate liberal, as somebody who would modulate the rigid policies of Gregory. He came from a noble, fairly well-off family that, surprising for its class, showed a sympathy, much qualified, for the new political and social ideals. He did not decide to become a priest until he was twenty-four, the result of a spiritual retreat, and he wanted nothing more than to be a pastor. Handsome, witty, and usually a pleasure to be with, he had sudden and severe mood swings that left his closest associates wary. Odo Russell, the British ambassador to the Holy See, was genuinely fond of Pius but remarked that he was intellectually limited.

Immediately upon his election Pius declared an amnesty, freed from prison everybody Gregory had put there on political grounds, and made some practical reforms in the States. He instituted broader consultation in the affairs of state and included laymen in it. He made gestures that suggested, or were interpreted as suggesting, that he favored Italian unification. He was certainly unhappy with the Austrian occupation in the north. He dismantled the ghetto in Rome, installed gas lighting in the streets, and set up a commission to introduce railroads into the Papal States.

For two years probably no one in Italy was more popular. Even the “Liberals,” the generic name for those who held modern ideas about politics and economics and who were also ardent Italian nationalists, felt they had in him somebody they could work with. Conservatives in Europe, like Metternich, the Austrian statesman and a chief architect of the reactionary Congress of Vienna, were horrified at the pope’s election and at his behavior in the early days of his pontificate.

When in 1848 Pius, as “father of all the faithful,” as he reminded the Italians, refused to join in a war to expel Austria, sentiment turned rapidly against him. In Rome and the States an economic downturn occurred just as a wave of liberal revolutions swept Europe. On November 13, his prime minister Count Pellegrino Rossi was assassinated in broad daylight. Matters went quickly from bad to worse. A week later, in disguise, the pope fled the city for Gaeta about eighty miles south of Rome. When a few months later the Romans declared a Republic, Pius appealed to the Catholic powers to restore him to his capital. In July 1849, the French sent troops, which enabled Pius to return to Rome a year and a half later, in mid-April 1850.

The first phase of Pius’s pontificate was over, the second begun. For the next ten years he was politically secure because he was able to rely on foreign support, which enabled him to act with considerable freedom. Whatever sympathy he may have felt for liberal ideas had now completely evanesced. Although somewhat more restrained than Gregory had been, he reverted to Gregory’s repressive policies. One of his chief confidants was the emotionally unbalanced Anglican convert, Monsignor George Talbot, whose unmitigatedly reactionary advice fanned Pius’s suspicions of John Henry Newman. In Italy Pius became the symbol of the intransigent churchman throwing obstacles against the unification of the country. He was seen perfectly to exemplify what the ultraconservative Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, archbishop of Westminster, called “the beauty of inflexibility.”

In Pius’s favor it must be said that the Liberals were notoriously anticlerical and many even anti-Christian, and the policies of the governments they installed were radically secularist, designed to eliminate the influence of the church. Pius’s fears of what they would do once they triumphed were well grounded. But his own views swung to the opposite extreme. He was scandalized, for instance, when the Grand Duke of Tuscany, yielding to pressure, allowed Jews to attend the university.

The Virgin Mary played a strong role in Pius’s spiritual life as she did in most Catholics in the nineteenth century. Devotion to her dates back at least to the Council of Ephesus, 431, which vindicated her title as Mother of God, and it was strong in the West through the Middle Ages, as the many images of her testify. It became even more popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and reached a new peak in the nineteenth. Mary began appearing to her devotees in France—to Catherine Labouré in Paris in 1830, to two shepherd children at La Salette in 1846, and to Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes in 1858.

The Franciscans in the fourteenth century promoted the idea that Mary was immaculately conceived in that her soul never bore “the stain” of Original Sin, that is, the sin passed onto the human race by Adam. A feast of the Immaculate Conception was subsequently instituted, with its own mass prayers and readings. The idea took popular root and was promoted by the cult of the Miraculous Medal, inspired by Labouré’s visions, on one side of which was an image of Mary with the inscription, “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.” The first medal was struck in 1832 and devout Catholics, male and female, soon began wearing copies.

In 1854 Pius IX on his own authority proclaimed the Immaculate Conception as dogma, to be believed by all Catholics as part of the apostolic faith. He had consulted the bishops of the world beforehand. Nonetheless, this was an innovation of the first order, something no pope had ever done before. The proclamation was greeted by most Catholics with jubilation and sparked an even further upsurge in devotion to Mary, now marked by a saccharin sentimentality typical of the century. Although the pope’s authority in the temporal area was shaky, he was fully capable of asserting his absolute authority in the spiritual, thus vindicating the thesis of the Ultramontanists.

But the proclamation also points up a new development in the papal job description. For the previous few decades the popes had moved more and more into the role of teacher, while of course still retaining their more traditional role as judge and dispenser of favors. The popes’ search for a mode in which to respond to the intellectual and cultural challenges of the day led to the development of the encyclical. They used that medium to propose, expound, and elaborate theological or doctrinal positions. By definition an encyclical is simply a circular letter and as such was used occasionally by popes and others from ancient times. But beginning in the eighteenth century with Benedict XIV’s Ubi Primum, 1744, it took on a new significance. Whereas earlier encyclicals were simply a mode of communication, they now became, at least in large part, a mode of authoritative teaching.

The premise for earlier genres like bulls and briefs was that the pope was a judge in matters of controversy or a dispenser of favors. Insofar as popes “taught,” they did so principally by condemning wrong teachings, as with Leo X’s bull Exsurge Domine anathematizing forty-one errors of Luther. In the modern encyclicals, however, popes elaborated on ideas as would a teacher in a classroom. They took over a function reserved since the Middle Ages to professional theologians in the universities. The pope’s increasing use of the genre is indicative of its growing importance. In twenty-four years Pius VI issued two, in twenty-three years Pius VII issued one, but Pius IX issued thirty-eight and his successor, Leo XIII, issued seventy-five. Today pontificates are largely defined by the encyclicals the popes produce, and their publication is eagerly awaited. The papal job description has shifted once again.

The development of the encyclical did not, however, spell the end of other genres. When on December 2, 1864, Pius IX issued his encyclical Quanta Cura he simultaneously issued one of the most famous papal documents of modern times, the Syllabus of Errors. In the Syllabus he condemned eighty errors of modern times. Condemned were rationalism, religious indifferentism, atheism, socialism, communism, Protestant Bible societies, secret societies, divorce, separation of church and state, the idea that the church ought not have temporal power, and many other aberrations. The final condemnation of the Syllabus brought it to a resounding and famous conclusion: “That the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself and make peace with progress, with Liberalism, and with modern culture.”

The world at large greeted the Syllabus with derision and most governments with a storm of indignation because of its categorical denunciation of many of the principles on which they had been operating for half a century. The French government, whose troops were at that moment the pope’s only defense against the seizure of Rome by the forces of the new Italian monarchy, banned the Syllabus in France.

But in fact “modernity” in the nineteenth century was an ideology that bore with it many ideas inimical to Catholicism. It espoused progress, which meant progress beyond revealed religion; it believed that reason and science could and would answer every question regarding human existence. Extreme though the Syllabus sounds, it was not entirely off the point. If Pius seems out of touch with the times, his enemies were out of touch with the deep religious sentiments of most of the people.

At about the time he issued the Syllabus, he began entertaining the idea of convoking an ecumenical council, which would be the first since the Council of Trent three hundred years earlier. In June 1868, he announced that a council would open in Saint Peter’s on December 8, 1869. Precisely what he originally hoped the council would accomplish is not clear, though some people speculated he wanted it solemnly to confirm the Syllabus. He may have wanted it as a show of Catholic strength worldwide against the church’s enemies, especially in Italy, where his political and military situation seemed fatally jeopardized.

As plans for the council developed a broad agenda opened up—the council would deal with canon law, with the missions, with religious orders, and so forth, but the idea that the council should define that the pope was infallible in matters of faith began to be broached more and more often. At a certain point Pius seized upon it as the essential item on the agenda.

The idea of holding a council in Rome was bold, given the pope’s precarious military situation. In 1860 the forces of the Risorgimento had captured the Papal States and incorporated them into the new kingdom. They were poised to move on Rome itself and to proclaim the city the capital of the new nation. Once again it was only the troops of Emperor Napoleon III that protected Rome and held the pope’s enemies at bay. Should the French ever withdraw, the city would certainly fall. The papal army was far too small to defend it.

To the end, however, Pius could never bring himself to believe that God would allow such a catastrophe to happen. He went ahead with the council, the first ever to meet in Saint Peter’s. To it came about seven hundred bishops from around the world, about a hundred of whom were from Asia and Africa, even though they were of European birth. About forty percent of the total assembly was from Italy. English-speaking bishops were, however, the third largest language group. The heads of state of Catholic countries were informed of the council and invited to pray for its success but, unlike previous councils, they were not invited to participate.

Despite the broad agenda that was anticipated, the council dealt with only two items. The first was the relationship between revealed truth and the powers of human reason, in which the council affirmed, principally against two German Catholic theologians, the distinction between the two spheres along with their compatibility. With that out of the way the council was to move to issues concerning the church, such as church-state relations and the role of bishops, but with the encouragement of Pius it bypassed them and moved directly to consideration of the papacy, under the two headings of primacy and infallibility (see fig. 24.1).

24.1: Pius IX

Pope Pius IX opens First Vatican Council, 1869. Photo: G. Dagli Orti. Palazzo Mastai, Senigallia, Italy.

© DeA Picture Library / Art Resource, NY

The popes had been proclaiming by word and deed their primacy over other bishops and their supreme jurisdiction in the church for at least fifteen hundred years. The purported reason for a solemn reaffirmation of it now was to lay to rest the already defunct Gallicanism, Febronianism, and Josephism that had recently challenged it, but Ultramontanist fervor is what really lay behind it. The terms in which the document proposed it could hardly be more absolute. “The Roman Pontiff has . . . full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole church, and this not only in matters of faith and morals but in everything that concerns the discipline and government of the church dispersed throughout the whole world . . . and over all and each of the pastors and faithful.”

Unlike the primacy, infallibility met with much more resistance from bishops for a variety of reasons, one of which was lack of clarity as to just what was meant by the term. Did it mean, for instance, that the pope was infallible in his person? Extremists like Cardinal Manning seemed to think that every word the popes uttered was infallible. Other bishops, convinced that the pope under certain circumstances could speak infallibly, opposed the definition on the grounds that, given the times, it was inopportune. Some simply did not believe it. Bit by bit in a debate that was long and sometimes bitter, the council arrived at sharper distinctions. There was no doubt how ardently Pius wanted the definition, and directly and indirectly he made his will known. Finally, on July 13, 1870, the vote was taken, which tallied at 451 in favor, eighty-eight opposed, and sixty-two in favor but with qualification. When the final, solemn vote was taken a few days later, about fifty-five bishops withdrew from the council rather than register a negative vote on an article that was sure to pass. The declarations on primacy and infallibility mark such a high point in papal claims that it is difficult to imagine any surpassing them.

On almost the very day the final vote was taken, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and Napoleon III was forced to withdraw his troops from Rome. The bishops dispersed. When Napoleon III lost a decisive battle at Sedan on September 2 and was taken prisoner, it was clear French protection was over. Eighteen days later, on September 20, the Italian troops breached the walls of Rome after not much more than a token resistance by the papal army. On that day almost a millennium and a half of history came to an end. Rome was declared the capital of the new kingdom of Italy, and shortly thereafter King Victor Emmanuel II took up official residence in the Quirinal Palace.

Pius and his advisers clung to the belief that Rome could not possibly fall, and after it did they clung to the belief that it was only a temporary situation. Rome had been seized before. The popes had always got it back. The heroic resistance to Napoleon of Pius VII was fresh in the memory of Pius and his inner circle. On October 20 the pope formally adjourned, but did not close, the council. He declared himself a “prisoner of the Vatican,” even though the Italians placed no restrictions on his movements. Since Pius would not deal with his enemies, they unilaterally through the Law of Guarantees tried to regularize the situation. The Law was generous in its provisions which, as compensation for seized properties, included an annual grant of three and a half million lire, which in those days was a lot of money.

Pius refused to accept the money, but he tacitly, and to some extent perforce, went along with other provisions of the Law. He hoped “the Catholic powers” would come to his rescue, but no help was ever forthcoming. Yet, for the last eight years of his life he was able to continue his work as supreme pastor without interference from the Italian government and to some extent because of benefits received from it.

In 1868, before the seizure of Rome but well after the seizure of the States, the Holy See had issued a Non Expedit (“It is not expedient”) that forbade Catholics to play any role in the new political arrangement. They could be Catholics or Italians, but not both. The popular motto expressing the idea was “Neither elected nor electors”—no holding of office, no voting. The decree was meant to underscore the illegitimacy of the government. In 1874 Pius renewed it, and it stayed in effect, with increasing qualifications, into the twentieth century. It was, for obvious reasons, only imperfectly observed.

The definition of infallibility set off a wave of anticlerical sentiment in many parts of Europe. It sparked the schism of the “Old Catholics” in Holland and Germany, small in number of adherents but significant in that it attracted the intelligentsia. It provided Bismarck with another excuse to launch his persecution of Catholics in the newly unified Germany, the Kulturkampf. Yet, once again, the papacy gained strength by its very defeat. Sympathy for Pius’s plight among rank-and-file Catholics throughout the world surged after he declared himself imprisoned. When he died, a cry arose for his canonization. His pontificate marked the beginning of an almost defining characteristic of Catholics today, a sense of personal relationship with the man occupying the see of Peter, which includes an obligation to be “loyal” to him as an individual and sometimes, it seems, loyal to his every word and gesture. This was new.