by Will Durant
In ecclesiastical reforms Leopold received powerful co-operation from Scipione de’ Ricci, bishop of Pistoia and Prato. A harsh custom in Tuscany required all dowerless women to take the veil; Ricci joined the Grand Duke in raising the minimum age for taking the vows, and turning many convents into schools for girls. Provision was made for secular education by substituting lay for Jesuit schools. Ricci celebrated Mass in Italian, and discouraged superstitions, much to the displeasure of the populace. When it was rumored that he intended to remove as spurious the famous “girdle of the Virgin” at Prato, the people rioted and sacked the episcopal palace. Ricci nevertheless called a diocesan synod, which met at Pistoia in 1786 and proclaimed principles recalling the “Gallican Articles” of 1682: that the temporal power is independent of the spiritual (i.e., the state is independent of the Church); and that the pope is fallible even in matters of faith.
Leopold lived simply, and was liked for his unassuming manners. But as his reign progressed, and the hostility of the orthodox pressed upon him, he grew suspicious and aloof, and employed a multitude of spies to watch not only his enemies but his aides. Joseph advised him from Vienna: “Let them deceive you sometimes, rather than thus torment yourself constantly and in vain.”10 When Leopold left Florence to succeed Joseph as emperor (1790) the forces of reaction triumphed in Tuscany. Ricci was condemned by Pope Pius VI in 1794, and was imprisoned (1799-1805) until he retracted his heresies. The advent of Napoleonic government (1800) restored the liberals to power.
Goethe hurried through Tuscany to Rome. Hear him, writing on November 1, 1786:
At last I have arrived at this great capital of the world.... I have as good as flown over the mountains of the Tirol. … My anxiety to reach Rome was so great … that to think of stopping anywhere was out of the question. Even in Florence I stayed only three hours. Now, … as it would seem, I shall be put at peace for my whole life; for we may almost say that a new life begins when a man once sees with his own eyes all that previously he has but partially heard or read of. All the dreams of my youth I now behold realized before me.
What a dizzy mixture it was, that eighteenth-century Rome, swarming with beggars and nobles, cardinals and castrati, bishops and prostitutes, monks and tradesmen, Jesuits and Jews, artists and criminals, bravi and saints, and tourists seeking antiquities by day and cortigiane by night. Here, within twelve miles of city walls, were pagan amphitheaters and triumphal arches, Renaissance palaces and fountains, three hundred churches and ten thousand priests, 170,000 people, and, around the Vatican citadel of Catholic Christianity, the most turbulent, lawless, and anticlerical rabble in Christendom. Scurrilous pamphlets against the Church were hawked about the streets; buffoons parodied in public squares the most sacred ceremonies of the Mass. Perhaps Winckelmann, a timid and tender soul, exaggerated a bit:
In the daytime it is pretty quiet in Rome, but at night it is the devil let loose. From the great freedom which prevails here, and from the absence of any sort of police, the brawling, shooting, fireworks, and bonfires in all the streets, last during the whole night. … The populace is untamed, and the governor is weary of banishing and hanging.11
Even more than Paris, Rome was a cosmopolitan city where artists, students, poets, tourists mingled with prelates and princesses in the salons, the galleries, and the theaters. Here Winckelmann and Mengs were proclaiming the revival of the classic style. And here the harassed, beleaguered popes were struggling to mollify the impoverished populace with bread and benedictions, to hold back ambassadors pressing for the abolition of the Jesuits, and to keep the whole complex edifice of Christianity from crumbling under the advance of science and the assaults of philosophy.
But let us go on, with Goethe, to Naples. He thought he had never seen such jote de vivre.
If in Rome one can readily set oneself to study, here one can do nothing but live. You forget yourself and the world; and to me it is a strange feeling to go about with people who think of nothing but enjoying themselves. … Here men know nothing of one another. They scarcely observe that others are also going on their way, side by side with them. They run all day backward and forward in a paradise, without looking about them; and if the neighboring jaws of hell begin to open and to rage, they have recourse to St. Januarius.12
Don Carlos, leaving Naples for Spain in 1759, had bequeathed the kingdom of Naples and Sicily to his eight-year-old son Ferdinand IV, with the Marchese di Tanucci as regent. Tanucci continued that war against the Church which he had begun under Carlos. He suppressed many convents and monasteries, and willingly followed the directive of Charles III of Spain to expel the Jesuits. Shortly after midnight of November 3-4, 1767, soldiers arrested all members of the order in the realm, and escorted them, with no possessions but the clothes they wore, to the nearest port or frontier, whence they were deported to the Papal States.
Ferdinand IV, reaching the age of sixteen (1767), ended Tanucci’s regency. A year later he married Maria Carolina, pious daughter of Maria Theresa. She soon dominated her husband and led a reaction against Tanucci’s anticlerical policies. The Marchese’s reforms had strengthened the Neapolitan monarchy against the feudal barons and the Church, but they had done little to mitigate the poverty that left to the populace no hope but in another life.
Sicily followed a similar curve. The erection of the cathedral of Palermo (1782-1802) was of far more moment to the people than the attempt of Domenico di Caraccioli to tame the feudal lords who controlled the land. He had served many years as Neapolitan ambassador in London and Paris, and had listened to Protestants and philosophers. Appointed viceroy of Sicily (1781), he laid heavy taxes upon the great landowners, reduced their feudal rights over their serfs, and ended their privileges of choosing the local magistrates. But when he dared to imprison a prince who protected bandits, and decreed a reduction of two days in the holidays honoring Palermo’s patron St. Rosalia, all classes rose against him, and he returned to Naples in defeat (1785).13 The philosophers had not yet proved that they understood, better than the Church, the needs and nature of man.
II. POPES, KINGS, AND JESUITS
The power of the Catholic Church rested on the natural supernaturalism of mankind, the recognition and sublimation of sensual impulses and pagan survivals, the encouragement of Catholic fertility, and the inculcation of a theology rich in poetry and hope, and useful to moral discipline and social order. In Italy the Church was also the main source of national income, and a valued check upon a people especially superstitious, pagan, and passionate. Superstitions abounded; as late as 1787 witches were burned at Palermo—and refreshments were served to fashionable ladies witnessing the scene.14 Pagan beliefs, customs, and ceremonies survived with the genial sanction of the Church. “I have arrived at a vivid conviction,” wrote Goethe, “that all traces of original Christianity are extinct here” in Rome.15 There were, however, many real Christians left in Christendom, even in Italy. Conte Caissotti di Chiusano, bishop of Asti, gave up his rich inheritance, lived in voluntary poverty, and traveled only on foot. Bishop Testa of Monreale slept on straw, ate only enough to subsist, kept only 3,000 lire of his revenues for his personal needs, and devoted the remainder to public works and the poor.16
The Church responded in some measure to the Enlightenment. The works of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Helvétius, d’Holbach, La Mettrie, and other freethinkers were of course placed on the Index Expurgatorius, but permission to read them might be obtained from the pope. Monsignor Ventimiglio, bishop (1757-73) of Catania, had in his library full editions of Voltaire, Helvétius, and Rousseau.17 The Inquisition was abolished in Tuscany and Parma in 1769, in Sicily in 1782, in Rome in 1809. In 1783 a Catholic priest, Tamburini, under the name of his friend Trauttmansdorff, published an essay On Ecclesiastical and Civil Toleration, in which he condemned the Inquisition, declared all coercion of conscience to be un-Christian, and advocated toleration of all theologies except atheism.18
It was the misfortune of the popes, in this second half of the eig
hteenth century, that they had to face the demand of Catholic monarchs for the total dissolution of the Society of Jesus. The movement against the Jesuits was part of a contest of power between the triumphant nationalism of the modern state and the internationalism of a papacy weakened by the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the rise of the business class. The Catholic enemies of the Society did not openly press their chief objection, that it had persistently upheld the authority of the popes as superior to that of kings, but they were keenly resentful that an organization acknowledging no superior except its general and the pope should in effect constitute, within each state, an agent of a foreign power. They acknowledged the learning and piety of the Jesuits, their contributions to science, literature, philosophy, and art, their sedulous and efficient education of Catholic youth, their heroism on foreign missions, their recapture of so much territory once lost to Protestantism. But they charged that the Society had repeatedly interfered in secular affairs, that it had engaged in commerce to reap material gains, that it had inculcated casuistic principles excusing immorality and crime, condoning even the murder of kings, that it had allowed heathen customs and beliefs to survive among its supposed converts in Asia, and that it had offended other religious orders, and many of the secular clergy, by its sharpness in controversy and its contemptuous tone. The ambassadors of the Kings of Portugal, Spain, Naples, and France insisted that the papal charter of the Society be revoked, and that the organization be officially and universally dissolved.
The expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal in 1759, from France in 1764-67, from Spain and Naples in 1767, had left the Society still operative in Central and North Italy, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Catholic Germany, Silesia, and Poland. On February 7, 1768, they were expelled from the Bourbon duchy of Parma, and were added to the congestion of Jesuit refugees in the states of the Church. Pope Clement XIII protested that Parma was a papal fief; he threatened Duke Ferdinand VI and his ministers with excommunication if the edict of expulsion should be enforced; when they persisted he launched a bull declaring the rank and title of the Duke forfeited and annulled. The Catholic governments of Spain, Naples, and France opened war upon the papacy: Tanucci seized the papal cities of Benevento and Pontecorvo, and France occupied Avignon. On December 10, 1768, the French ambassador at Rome, in the name of France, Naples, and Spain, presented to the Pope a demand for the retraction of the bull against Parma, and for the abolition of the Society of Jesus. The seventy-six-year-old pontiff collapsed under the strain of this ultimatum. He summoned for February 3, 1769, a consistory of prelates and envoys to consider the matter. On February 2 he fell dead through the bursting of a blood vessel in his brain.
The cardinals who were called to choose his successor were divided into two factions: zelanti who proposed to defy the kings, and regalisti who favored some pacific accommodations. As the Italian cardinals were almost all zelanti, and soon gathered in Rome, they tried to open the conclave before the regalist cardinals from France, Spain, and Portugal could arrive. The French ambassador protested, and the conclave was deferred. Meanwhile Lorenzo Ricci, general of the Jesuits, compromised their case by issuing a pamphlet questioning the authority of any pope to abolish the Society.19 In March Cardinal de Bernis arrived from France, and began to canvass the cardinals with a view to ensuring the election of a pope willing to satisfy their Catholic Majesties. Later rumors20 that he or others bribed, or otherwise induced, Cardinal Giovanni Ganganelli to promise such action if chosen have been rejected by Catholic21 and anti-Catholic22 historians alike. Ganganelli, by common consent, was a man of great learning, devotion, and integrity; however, he belonged to the Franciscan order, which had often been at odds with the Jesuits, both in missions and in theology.23 On May 19, 1769, he was elected by the unanimous vote of the forty cardinals, and took the name of Clement XIV. He was sixty-three years old.
He found himself at the mercy of the Catholic powers. France and Naples held on to the papal territory they had seized; Spain and Parma were defiant; Portugal threatened to establish a patriarchate independent of Rome; even Maria Theresa, hitherto fervently loyal to the papacy and the Jesuits, but now losing authority to her freethinker son Joseph II, answered the Pope’s appeal for aid by saying that she could not resist the united will of so many potentates. Choiseul, dominating the government of France, instructed Bernis to tell the Pope that “if he does not come to terms he can consider all relations with France at an end.”24 Charles III of Spain had sent a similar ultimatum on April 22. Clement, playing for time, promised Charles soon to “submit to the wisdom and intelligence of your Majesty a plan for the total extinction of the Society.”25 He ordered his aides to consult the archives and summarize the history, achievements, and alleged offenses of the Society of Jesus. He refused to surrender to Choiseul’s demand that he decide the issue within two months. He took three years, but finally yielded.
On July 21, 1773, he signed the historic brief Dominus ac Redemptor Noster. It began with a long list of religious congregations that had, in the course of time, been suppressed by the Holy See. It noted the many complaints made against the Jesuits, and the many efforts of divers popes to remedy the abuses so alleged. “We have observed with the bitterest grief that these remedies, and others applied afterward, had neither efficacy nor strength to put an end to the troubles, the charges, and the complaints.”26 The brief concluded:
Having recognized that the Society of Jesus could no longer produce the abundant fruit and the great good for which it was instituted and approved by so many popes, our predecessors, who adorned it with so many most admirable privileges, and seeing that it was almost—and indeed absolutely—impossible for the Church to enjoy a true and solid peace while this order existed, … we do hereby, after a mature examination, and of our certain knowledge, and by the plenitude of our Apostolic power, suppress and abolish the Society of Jesus. We nullify and abrogate all and each of its offices, functions, administrations, houses, schools, colleges, retreats, refuges, and other establishments which belong to it in any manner whatever, and in every province, kingdom, or state in which it may be found.27
The brief went on to offer pensions to those Jesuits who had not yet taken holy orders, and who wished to return to lay life; it permitted Jesuit priests to join the secular clergy or some religious congregation approved by the Holy See; it allowed “professed” Jesuits, who had taken final and absolute vows, to remain in their former houses provided they dressed like secular priests and submitted to the authority of the local bishop.
For the most part, and excepting a few missionaries in China, the Jesuits took the papal sentence of death for their Society with apparent docility and order. Anonymous pamphlets, however, were printed and circulated in their defense, and Ricci and several assistants were arrested on charges, never proved, that they were in correspondence with opponents of the decree. Ricci died in prison November 24, 1775, aged seventy-two.
Clement XIV survived the edict by little more than a year. Rumors multiplied that in his last months his mind broke down. Physical ills, including scurvy and hemorrhoids, made every day and night a misery to him. A cold contracted in April, 1774, never left him; by the end of August the cardinals were already discussing the succession; and on September 22 Clement died.
After many delays and intrigues the conclave raised to the papacy (February 15, 1775) Giovanni Braschi, who took the name of Pius VI. He was a man of culture rather than a statesman. He collected art, charmed everyone by his kindliness, improved the administration of the Curia, and effected a partial reclamation of the Pontine marshes. He arranged a peaceful modus vivendi for the Jesuits with Frederick the Great. In 1793 he joined the coalition against Revolutionary France. In 1796 Napoleon invaded the Papal States; in 1798 the French army entered Rome, proclaimed a republic, and demanded of the Pope a renunciation of all temporal power. He refused, was arrested, and remained in various places and conditions of imprisonment until his death (August 29, 1799). His successor, Pius VII,
made the restoration of the Society of Jesus (1814) a part of the victory of the coalition against Napoleon.
III. THE LAW AND BECCARIA
The morals and manners of Italy remained a mixture of violence and indolence, vendetta and love. The fourteen-year-old Mozart wrote from Bologna in 1770, “Italy is a sleepy country”;28 he had not learned the philosophy of siesta. His father, in 1775, was of the opinion that ‘Italians are rascals all the world over.”29
Both Mozart and Goethe commented on Italian crime. In Naples, wrote Mozart, “the lazzaroni [beggars] have their own captain or head, who draws twenty-five silver ducats from the King each month for nothing more than to keep them in order.”30 “What strikes the stranger most,” wrote Goethe, “is the common occurrence of assassination. Today the victim has been an excellent artist—Schwendemann. … The assassin with whom he was struggling gave him twenty stabs; and as the watch came up, the villain stabbed himself. This is not generally the fashion here; the murderer usually makes for the nearest church; once there he is quite safe.”31 Every church gave the criminal “sanctuary”—immunity from arrest so long as he remained under its roof.
