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Leo XIII: Searching for Solutions

The nineteenth century was not kind to the papacy. For Catholicism at large, however, it brought a remarkable resurgence of fervor, activity, and growth. This resurgence occurred despite obstacles placed in its way by anticlerical governments. In almost every Catholic country vocations to the priesthood climbed to pre-Revolutionary levels. The religious orders of men and women, some of which were virtually extinct in 1800, rebounded at an astounding rate, and a strikingly large number of new congregations of nuns were founded. Pilgrimages, which had almost disappeared in the eighteenth century, revived mightily, due in part to easier travel by railroads. As mentioned, missionary activity in Asia and Africa flourished, sometimes supported by governments that at home were anticlerical—missionaries were expected to carry and brandish the national flag.

Primary and secondary schools run by priests, nuns, and religious brothers sprang up wherever Catholics were present in sufficient numbers. Dioceses launched programs of catechetical instruction that by mid-twentieth century resulted in the best catechized Catholic population in the history of the church. Almost every diocese of any size published its own weekly newspaper. The religious orders began publishing an almost incalculable number of popular religious magazines as well as many learned journals. Although in Europe Catholics were opposed to the intellectual mainstream, some few among them were testing the new historical approaches to sacred subjects like the Bible and the liturgy that would bear fruit later.

Back in the Vatican, however, by 1870 the situation of the papacy looked bleak. Pius IX died on February 7, 1878, after the longest pontificate in history and certainly one of the most important. Just a month earlier King Victor Emmanuel II died in the Quirinal Palace a mile away from the Vatican, across the Tiber. The king and his family were devout Catholics yet committed to the cause of unification, caught as were so many Italian Catholics between conflicting loyalties. The royal family had more in common with the old papal nobility than with some of the king’s ministers. Consorting with the papal families was, however, not only politically impossible but carried with it the risk of a public snub from them. Pius quietly allowed the king’s chaplain to absolve him on his deathbed of the excommunication he incurred for his part in “the spoliation of the church,” and Victor Emmanuel II, “the Father of his Country,” died as a Catholic reconciled to the church.

The state funeral of the king was staged as a solemn public manifesto of the irreversible character of the new order of things. What would happen with the pope dying so soon afterward? Obviously, the Italian government would not allow any ceremony that suggested papal claims to the city. The Vatican officials did not want any ceremony that suggested acquiescence in the new order. Thus, though for diametrically opposed reasons, the obsequies for Pius were carried out in Saint Peter’s, safely in the Vatican, in a way that was satisfactory, under the circumstances, to both parties.

The death of Pius and the election of his successor dramatized how curious the relationship between the Vatican and the government was—and would long remain. Italian troops helped keep order in Saint Peter’s while Pius’s body lay in state. They were badly needed when three years later Pius’s corpse was transported by night from Saint Peter’s to its final resting place across the city in Saint Lawrence outside the Walls. A mob broke into the cortege and tried to fling the coffin into the Tiber.

What about the conclave? The cardinals were understandably anxious, but the government made clear it would keep order in the city and guarantee the cardinals all the freedom of action they needed to carry out their duties. With that, speculation that the conclave might be held outside Rome and outside Italy evanesced. The conclave opened in the Sistine Chapel just a week after Pius’s obsequies, it briskly, on the third ballot, elected the cardinal bishop of Perugia, Gioacchino Pecci, Leo XIII.

The new pope was sixty-eight years old and in seemingly fragile health, so it was assumed, and probably hoped, that his would be a short pontificate, a “breather,” after the long pontificate of Pius. Leo lived, however, for twenty-five more years. He had more native intelligence than Pius and was even more photogenic. Especially with his pontificate did Catholic institutions as a matter of course begin prominently to display photos of the pope, and some Catholic homes did the same, which was another sign of the growing “devotion to the pope.”

The coronation of Leo took place in the small space of the Sistine Chapel, not in Saint Peter’s, and afterward he did not appear on the balcony of the basilica to receive the acclamation of the crowds and impart his blessing. Once again, for diametrically opposed reasons, the arrangement was agreeable to both parties. The government did not want any gesture that might ignite the pro-papal sentiments of many Romans, and the Vatican (now the term can be correctly used of the papacy) did not want to suggest it gave a blessing to what happened in 1870.

Pecci was not well known in the curia. Cardinal Antonelli, Pius’s long-term secretary of state, suspected he held liberal views and had kept him at arm’s length. Although Leo, like Pius, came from an old aristocratic family, he grew up in a world more industrialized and more comfortable with certain new ideas than had Pius, born a half-century earlier. Nonetheless, despite what Antonelli thought, Leo was no liberal. He was a firm supporter of the Syllabus. He was no more ready to accept the loss of the Papal States as final than was Pius, and his foreign policy was dominated by wildly unrealistic hopes of persuading foreign governments to intervene in Italy for recovery of the States. At certain points in his pontificate, fearful without grounds of what the next move of the Italian government might be, he considered transferring the Holy See to someplace outside Italy.

But he had a more flexible personality and broader experience of the world than his predecessor. Gregory XVI had sent him as nuncio to Belgium in 1838, which entailed visits to Cologne, London, and Paris. He performed badly as nuncio, but for the three years of his appointment he had firsthand experience of the industrialized and parliamentary world of the north. He acquired some awareness of both its problems and its achievements.

As pope, he presided over and forwarded a remarkable expansion of the church outside Europe. Over the course of his twenty-five years he created 248 new sees, established a regular hierarchy in Scotland, North Africa, India, and Japan, and in Europe negotiated with Bismarck, at some cost, the end of the Kulturkampf. In 1892 he appointed to the United States the first Apostolic Delegate (papal representative in countries without diplomatic relations with the Vatican).

One of the first acts of his pontificate was to name to the cardinalate the distinguished English convert and theologian, John Henry Newman, whom many in the Catholic world viewed with suspicion because of his book arguing that doctrine changed over time, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1846. Cardinal Manning was known to regard Newman as a heretic. In 1881 Leo opened the Vatican Archives to all qualified scholars, no matter what their political or religious beliefs. Actions like these signaled that Leo was not Pius.

The most obvious aspect of Leo’s pontificate is the large number of encyclicals he produced—seventy-five over a twenty-five year reign, an average of three per year. The range of issues they covered was wide. Nine in succession dealt with some aspect of devotion to the Virgin Mary, another sign of the further blossoming of that aspect of Catholic life. He issued two encyclicals dealing with Protestantism and with the “return” of Protestants to the Catholic fold, the true church. He referred to them, however, not as heretics but as “separated brethren,” a term that did not take hold in Catholic circles until the Second Vatican Council in the middle of the next century.

The church-state issue continued to be troubling. Leo was of course opposed to separation of church and state on purely theological grounds, but he also realized that the term was often code for anticlerical and anti-Catholic ideology. Like almost all Catholics of his culture and class, he had an almost instinctual dislike and distrust of republican or democratic forms of government, yet he softened the strictures of his predecessors against them.

He directly and indirectly urged French Catholics to unite behind the Third Republic, an initiative known as the Ralliement (a rallying). Only in that way could its unjust anti-Catholic laws be undone. He allowed that in the abstract all three forms of government France had experienced in the nineteenth century—empire, monarchy, and republic—were good. In 1901, two years before his death Leo resolved a bitter dispute among Catholics by allowing the legitimacy of the term “Christian Democracy.” Even though he insisted on a restrictive definition of the term, Leo allowed the possibility that democracy and Catholicism were compatible.

In 1899 in his Apostolic Letter Testem Benevolentiae, addressed to the archbishop of Baltimore, Leo condemned “Americanism,” an ill-defined movement in the United States that is sometimes described as “the phantom heresy.” By the second decade of Leo’s pontificate the leaders of the American hierarchy were divided between those who believed strongly in the democratic process and the separation of church and state as practiced in the United States and those skeptical of the compatibility of the American experience and the church. The former favored a more open relationship with Protestants and, allegedly, exalted the “active” virtues over passives ones like obedience, and similarly exalted natural virtues like honesty over the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity. The Apostolic Delegate sided with the latter. Leo’s letter, moderate in tone, tried to set the record straight about aberrations. The supposed culprits inside and outside the hierarchy denied the aberrations existed as they were described in the letter.

Leo made two extremely important and lasting contributions to modern Catholicism through two landmark encyclicals—Aeterni Patris, prescribing and promoting the study of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, 1879, and Rerum Novarum, the first encyclical ever published on social questions like just wage and the right of workers to organize, 1891. No documents from the era illustrate more clearly the new role of teacher the papacy had now assumed. They are symptomatic of the strong emergence of the papal Magisterium, so characteristic of the contemporary papacy. In them Leo was not content simply to condemn modern philosophies, in the first case, or communism and laissez-faire economics in the second. He proposed remedies and argued the case for them.

While he was still bishop of Perugia he promoted the study of Aquinas by founding there in 1859 an Academy of Saint Thomas Aquinas. With the encyclical he hoped to establish a common vocabulary and set of principles with which Catholics, especially priests, could address the problems of the day. After an upsurge of interest in Aquinas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Scholasticism had fallen by the wayside. Aristotle’s “natural philosophy”—physics, astronomy, etc.—had been left behind by the new systems of the scientific revolution, and the whole philosophical enterprise had taken new turns, beginning with Descartes and culminating with Kant. The result had been even in Catholic schools and seminaries an eclectic approach.

Leo set out to remedy that. As he said about the situation as he found it, “A multiform system of this kind, which depends on the authority and choice of any professor, has a foundation open to change, and consequently gives us a philosophy not firm, stable, and robust like that of old but tottering and feeble.” Leo extolled the many benefits that would accrue to the church and society from a study of Aquinas, who was “the special bulwark and glory of the Catholic faith.” Among the benefits the political loomed large. Thomas provided guidance on the true meaning of liberty, for instance, and on the divine origin of all authority and “on the paternal and just rule of princes.”

Few papal pronouncements have had the success of Aeterni Patris in securing a course of action. The encyclical rode the tide of the nineteenth-century Romantic enthusiasm for the Middle Ages that was by no means confined to Catholics. It provided a stimulus for Catholics to claim the Middle Ages, now “the Ages of Faith,” as peculiarly their own. Thus the powerful Neo-Thomist movement in Catholicism got underway. Although it began as a conservative measure, it sparked research into the wide range of philosophies and theologies that characterized the Middle Ages and led to results unexpected by its originators, which included the discovery that those phenomena were much richer and more complex than originally envisaged. By the twentieth century the movement, now broadened far beyond Aquinas and sustained by a variety of disciplines, had produced outstanding scholars who could hold their own among the best of their peers. Through what at first seemed to outsiders like a cultural byway, Catholics tiptoed into the cultural highways.

When in 1881 Leo for the first time in history opened the Vatican Archives not only to Catholics but to all qualified scholars, a move not well received by many in his curia, he in the world at large got deserved credit for opening to scholarship an extraordinarily rich resource. The Archives, though understaffed, have continued down to the present to welcome scholars from around the world, and especially in the past forty years they on a daily basis have been filled with them to capacity. The Archives are less than a minute’s walk away from the Vatican Library, a similarly rich resource and similarly open.

About a dozen years after Aeterni Patris, Leo issued Rerum Novarum, literally “about the new situation,” but generally titled “On the Condition of the Working Class.” Leo’s papal predecessors knew only the agricultural economy of central Italy, which still operated largely on feudal models, and they treated socialism and communism more as abstract philosophies than as movements that held great attraction for the working classes. As is well known, the liberal philosophy and laissez-faire economics that held sway among industrialists and entrepreneurs had little sympathy with the plight of workers, whom they considered expendable. But Leo had seen, howsoever briefly, the reality and realized it had to be addressed. The church was in danger of losing the working classes to radically secularized socialist associations or to professedly atheistic communism.

Rerum Novarum is a long encyclical. It reaffirms previous papal condemnations of socialism and communism. But its tone throughout is serene, and free from rant. It insists that the church is solicitous not only for everyone’s eternal salvation but also for their well-being in this world because these two aspects of human life cannot be separated. While it proclaimed private property as a natural right, it insisted that it had its limits. That right cannot be allowed to harm the common good. If private property was a natural right, so was the right of the worker to a just wage and to humane working conditions. Most remarkable, the encyclical endorsed the right of workers to organize in order to obtain and secure their rights. The recognition that such organizations were legitimate carried the implication that the social order was to be formed by movements ascending from below as well as by power and authority descending from above.

Some Catholics were outraged and denounced the encyclical as a betrayal by the church, which was supposed to stand with the establishment and never countenance something as dangerous as workers organizing themselves. According to them, Leo overstepped the bounds of his office by addressing questions outside the realm of faith and personal morality. The church’s business, after all, was to get people to heaven, not to dictate rules about purely economic and social matters

Despite such criticism, Leo managed to make his voice heard, and he provided a model that subsequent popes—Pius XI, John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II would follow, to good effect. All these popes addressed “modern” questions in ways that were something other than condemnations of the status quo and hankerings for the good old days. When Leo’s encyclical was explained to workmen and used by them and their leaders to obtain their objectives, they felt reassured that they had a friend in the church.

In the final years of his pontificate Leo became more aware of the new developments taking place in scholarship and increasingly concerned about them. He reinvigorated the Congregation of the Index with new and stricter norms about what books were to be condemned, even though there was now no way of hindering access to them. Freedom of the press was here to stay. In 1893 he issued Providentissimus Deus, an encyclical on the study of the Bible in which he commended the time-honored methods and warned against the dangers of the new. In this long document he never once commended the reading of the Bible by the laity.

In 1902, the year before he died, he established the Pontifical Biblical Commission, whose function was to promote a thorough study of the word of God and ensure that it be shielded from even the slightest error. The Commission began issuing responses, universally conservative, to questions about specific interpretations. In 1906, for instance, it rejected the opinion that Moses was not the author of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, a question that had become almost a litmus test of orthodoxy for exegetes.

Leo saw the papacy as having the answers to all questions, and he did all in his power to underscore its absolute authority. In the theological textbooks of the time, the church was routinely described as a monarchy. Leo of course accepted that by-now accepted idea without question and put it into practice in great ways and small. He saw to it that the nuncios took precedence in protocol over all members of the local hierarchy. On a more mundane level, he insisted that the Catholics he received in audience kneel during the whole time, and he never allowed his own ministers to sit in his presence.

In Leo’s as in other pontificates there were lights and shadows. His was, moreover, the first pontificate in a millennium in which the problems of ruling the Papal States dropped out of the papal agenda, where it had often been number one on the list of concerns. His was in that extremely important regard the beginning of a new papacy. Neither he nor his immediate successors could bring themselves to admit that the new situation brought them any benefits. Yet of course it did.

Among them is one of extreme importance that is rarely mentioned. The new Italian government, secular in character, did not claim any rights in the nomination of bishops, which meant that the nominations to the 237 Italian sees slipped right into the pope’s hands. From this point forward the popes appointed the Italian bishops, no questions asked. The phenomenon promoted the idea that such appointments were the prerogative of the papacy, which therefore should prevail everywhere.

Perhaps partly because of the new political situation in which the papacy found itself, Leo died highly respected by Catholics and by most world leaders. Photos of him, in which he invariably had a gentle smile on his face, projected the image of a kind and intelligent man. His twenty-five years as pope, though not without their trials and tribulations, mercifully lacked the high drama of Pius VI’s, Pius VII’s, and Pius IX’s. They did not for that reason lack importance for the future of Catholicism.