Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition

by Eamon Duffy

  The Paris divorce, however, had convinced Napoleon that the Pope could be circumvented. If Pius would not institute Napoleon’s nominees to the vacant bishoprics (now mounting up all over French-occupied Europe), then the metropolitan archbishops could make good the Pope’s neglect, granting institution after an interval of six months. He summoned a national council of the imperial bishops to Paris in June 1811 to approve this solution, but to his fury the Council, although led by his own uncle Cardinal Fesch, refused. Even Fesch resisted the anti-papal rhetoric of the Emperor’s agenda, which the bishops thought was too redolent of the Synod of Pistoia and the Civil Constitution. They would not act in defiance of the Pope, who must approve any decision of the Council, and even its agenda, before it could be acted upon. Fuming, Napoleon dissolved the Council, imprisoned some of its ringleaders, and instead put pressure on the bishops individually. Deprived of the moral backbone provided by mutual support, eighty-five of them eventually agreed that institution by the Metropolitan was acceptable. Napoleon reconvened the Council, which now accepted the proposal, subject to the Pope’s approval.

  Armed with this vote, Napoleon despatched a deputation of bishops to Savona. They emphasised the Council’s deference to his authority, the Emperor’s concern for souls in the vacant dioceses, and the weight of episcopal opinion in favour of the proposal. The Pope, always ready to doubt his own opinion, reassured by the Council’s protestations of loyalty and cut off from any advisers other than the Emperor’s stooges, at last agreed. He insisted, however, on rewriting the Council’s decree as his own, and he excluded the bishoprics of the Papal States from the arrangement.

  Napoleon was furious. The exclusion of the Papal States touched a raw nerve, and the Emperor foolishly insisted the Pope must surrender on these bishoprics too. Saved from his own mistaken concession by Napoleon’s truculence, Pius now refused to budge at all. The stalemate continued, but Napoleon announced that the Concordat was abrogated, and the powers of the papacy suspended. He determined to deal with the Pope himself, and ordered that he be brought to Fontainebleau. This time, however, there would be no kneeling crowds, no demonstrations of loyalty. Dressed as an ordinary priest, his white satin slippers blackened with ink, the Pope was whisked away from Savona under cover of night on 9 June 1812. The twelve-day journey became a nightmare to rival the worst sufferings of Pius VI. En route the Pope developed a chronic urinary infection. Crossing the Alps the carriage had to stop every ten minutes to allow him to relieve himself. His doctor feared the worst, and the Pope was given the last sacraments.

  He reached Fontainebleau more dead than alive, only to find that the Emperor had already set out for Russia. As summer turned to autumn the Pope convalesced, relentlessly badgered by the ‘red’ cardinals and court bishops, allowed no news of the outside world, no contact with any adviser. When the Emperor finally came to Fontainebleau on 19 January 1813, he came as a defeated man, his army dead in the snows of Russia. But Pius knew nothing of this, and on his own he was no match for Napoleon. For six days the Emperor alternately wheedled and stormed at the Pope – he is said, somewhat improbably, to have smashed crockery, to have shaken Pius by the buttons of his cassock. And eventually the Pope gave in, and signed a draft agreement on a scrap of paper for a concordat which totally surrendered the temporal power. The Pope would be sovereign of Rome no longer, and the seat of the papacy remained to be decided, for Napoleon planned to move the papacy to France. Bishops henceforth would be granted investiture by the metropolitans within six months of nomination if the Pope declined to act, the Papal States alone excepted. In return, the Pope would receive financial compensation for the surrender of the patrimony, and the ‘black’ cardinals would be restored to favour.

  Pius immediately regretted this surrender, but Napoleon, ignoring the fact that it was a only a draft, had it proclaimed as an achieved concordat, and ordered the singing of the ‘Te Deum’ all over the empire. Pacca and Consalvi, released at last, rushed to Fontainebleau, unable to believe the appalling news. They found the Pope a broken man, haggard and guilt-ridden, lamenting that he had been ‘defiled’, bitter against the red cardinals who had ‘dragged him to the table and made him sign’. With Consalvi restored as secretary of state, and Pacca adding stiffening to his spine, Pius rallied. He defied the advice of the majority of cardinals, and wrote to Napoleon in his own hand, repudiating the so-called ‘Concordat of Fontainebleau’, declaring that his conscience now revolted against it. He had signed out of ‘human frailty, being only dust and ashes’.

  Napoleon suppressed the Pope’s letter, but the writing was now on the wall for him and his dreams of empire. In January 1814 he offered the Pope full restoration to Rome and a peace treaty. It was clear, however, that Napoleon was no longer in a position to deliver any such thing. The Pope moved to Savona, and then to Rome, the journey increasingly taking on the character of a triumph as he went. On 12 April, Napoleon abdicated. On 24 May the Pope’s carriage reached the gates of Rome. He was welcomed by King Carlos IV of Spain: the horses were removed from the shafts, and thirty young men from the best families of Rome drew him in triumph to St Peter’s.

  The reconstruction of Europe which was finalised at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 restored to the papacy almost all the lands it had lost. The sufferings of two successive popes at the hands of the Revolution, and Pius VII’s dignified resistance to Napoleon, now stood the institution he represented in good stead. The papal negotiator at the Congress was Cardinal Consalvi, a consummate statesman, and, though he failed to recover Avignon, he persuaded the powers that it was to their advantage to return the Legations and the Marches of Ancona to the Pope, along with the territory immediately around Rome. The policy of papal neutrality so rigorously maintained by Pius VII and Consalvi now paid off, and Britain and France welcomed a strong papal presence in central and northern Italy, to prevent Austrian monopoly in the peninsula.

  This restoration of the Papal States is the single most important fact about the nineteenth-century papacy. For more than a thousand years, since the time of Pepin, the security of the papal office had been linked to the defence of the Patrimony of Peter. In the nineteenth century, however, that link took on a new and all-devouring importance. As pressure built up for the unification of Italy, the Papal States, dividing the peninsula and enclosing its natural capital, became more and more of an anomaly. The papacy became the largest single obstacle in the way of the national aspiration of the Italian people. In the light of the Napoleonic era, however, it was entirely natural that the popes should identify the defence of the Papal States with the free exercise of the papal ministry. On the lips of Napoleon the call for the Pope to lay down his temporal sovereignty and to rely solely on spiritual authority had been blatant code for the enslavement of the papacy to French imperial ambitions. Without his temporal power, Pius VII had been reduced to saying his prayers and mending his linen, and he had come within a whisker of signing away even his spiritual authority. If the Pope did not remain a temporal king, then it seemed he could no longer be the Church’s chief bishop. That perception coloured the response of all the nineteenth-century popes to the modern world.

  There was an immense work of reconstruction to be done. All over Europe the structure of the Church of the ancien régime lay in ruins. Napoleon’s conquests in Germany had redrawn the map. The great prince–bishoprics on the left bank of the Rhine – the electors of Cologne, Trier and Mainz, the prince-bishops of Speyer and Worms – had been swept away or reduced to powerlessness, and in 1806 the Holy Roman empire itself ceased to be the ancient elective office which had begun with Charlemagne, and was wound up. Henceforth, the Emperor was merely the hereditary ruler of Austria. As a result of all this, there was a massive transfer of German lands and political influence from Catholic to Protestant hands. And everywhere the religious orders had been decimated, dioceses lay empty, seminaries closed, priestly vocations dried up, Church property confiscated, communications with Rome destroyed. Wherever French rule ha
d prevailed, civil marriage, divorce, a religiously free press and religious toleration remained as abiding – and to the papacy obnoxious – reminders of the apostasy of the state. Pius’ determination to set this to rights was signalled by his restoration of the Society of Jesus on 7 August 1814.

  If the churches of Europe were to be revived, however, the Pope would need more than the Jesuits to help him. He had to have the support of the rulers of post-Napoleonic Europe. Deals would have to be struck. The nineteenth century was to be the age of concordats, as the popes bargained with the monarchies of Europe and beyond to secure freedom for the Church’s work: with Bavaria and Sardinia in 1817, with Prussia and with the Upper Rhine Provinces in 1821, with Hanover in 1824, with Belgium in 1827, with Switzerland in 1828 and again in 1845, with the Two Sicilies in 1834, and so on into the rest of the century, more than two dozen such agreements.

  These concordats sometimes secured more for the Church than anyone expected. In Bavaria, the Pope got guarantees of free contact with the bishops, security for surviving Church endowments, the reopening of monasteries and the establishment of seminaries, Church censorship of books and educational rights in schools. But the consistent feature of most of these concordats was the growing control of secular rulers over the appointments of bishops. Secular rulers in Bavaria had never appointed the bishops, but after 1817 they did. The Revolution had taught the rulers of Europe that they could not rule without the help of the Church: bishops and priests were needed to preach obedience and contentment. Bishops and priests cost money, however, and, because the Church had lost its endowments in the Revolution, it needed state funding to pay its ministers. The state valued the clergy, but demanded the right to appoint the men it paid, and Rome had no choice but to agree, even when the governments were Protestant (as in Prussia). By 1829, no fewer than 555 of the 646 diocesan bishops of the Roman Catholic Church were appointed by the state – 113 in the Two Sicilies, 86 in France, 82 in Habsburg Germany, 67 in Sardinia and the Italian duchies, 61 in Spain and its possessions, 35 in Spanish America, 24 in Portugal, 9 in Brazil, 9 in Bavaria. Another 67, in the USA, Ireland, Prussian Germany, the Upper Rhine, Belgium and Switzerland were locally elected by cathedral chapters or some similar arrangement. The Pope, acting as sovereign of the Papal States, not as bishop of Rome, appointed seventy bishops. As pope, he appointed directly only twenty-four, in Russia, Greece and Albania.

  This massive transfer of episcopal appointments to the state had of course been well under way before the Revolution, but the Revolution altered the terms on which it was taking place. In the high Middle Ages the reform papacy had struggled to destroy the system of ‘proprietary churches’, by which laymen had appointed bishops, and since the Second Lateran Council (1139) the ‘normal’ method of episcopal appointment had been election by the cathedral chapter. For financial reasons, the later medieval papacy, especially at Avignon, had slowly eroded this situation by the use of ‘provisions’, to capture more and more episcopal nominations for itself. Theoretically, however, capitular election remained normative, and from 1814 until the 1860s, wherever the popes were free to do so, they preferred capitular election to other methods of appointment. But many cathedral chapters had been swept away in the storm after 1789, and, where they were restored, the concordats often ignored or removed their electoral powers. In effect, the concordats, and state payment of bishops, were recreating the proprietary system.

  In post-Napoleonic Europe, religion was allied with reaction. The principles of 1789 – liberty, fraternity, equality – were inescapably associated with the guillotine, the pagan ‘religion of humanity’, the destruction of the Church. Bishops and preachers tumbled over themselves to emphasise the common foundations of throne and altar, and censorship, imprisonment of radicals, suppression of democracy, all had the blessing of churchmen. The situation was worst in France under the morbidly religious Charles X, and especially in Spain under King Ferdinand VII, who reintroduced the Inquisition. This meant that after the Revolution of 1820 liberal opinion in Spain would be violently anti-religious, the Church fatally compromised by its identification with coercion and tyranny.

  The papacy did not mindlessly endorse these trends. The conservative Pope Leo XII (1823–9), for example, outraged Spain by circumventing the crown and appointing ‘vicars apostolic’ (missionary bishops) for areas of Latin America like Colombia and Mexico which were in revolt, befriending in the process rebel leaders like Simon Bolivar. Leo was acting on the advice of Cardinal Consalvi, who took the view that if legitimate monarchs could exert their authority in such areas within a reasonable time (he allowed fifteen years) well and good. But the Church could not leave bishoprics vacant for ever, for in the meantime the country might be ‘filled with Methodists, Presbyterians and new Sun-worshippers’. Pastoral necessity came before political alliances.7

  Yet there were ideological as well as pragmatic forces at work to impel the papacy into alliance with the conservative monarchy. Catholicism in the age of Enlightenment had no place in its heart for the papacy. The Pope’s spiritual authority was acknowledged, but minimised, and it was imagined in juridical or administrative terms. It belonged to the ordering of the Church, not to the essence of the faith. Reform-minded Catholics saw nothing wrong in the prince or the state placing restrictions on the interference of popes.

  The Revolution changed this. State control of the Church might look rational and benign in Joseph II’s Austria or Leopold’s Tuscany. It looked altogether different after the Terror, the government-induced schism of the Constitutional Church, and the attempts of Napoleon to turn Church and Pope into instruments of empire. Reforms based on reason now began to look like the disastrous blundering of a sorcerer’s apprentice, unleashing forces which could not be controlled. All over Europe, thinkers reflecting on the solvent and destructive power of naked reason began to rediscover the value of ancient institutions, established authorities, tradition.

  In 1819, the Sardinian Ambassador to St Petersburg, Count Joseph de Maistre, published his treatise Du Pape. Born out of an almost paranoid reflection on the horror of the Revolution, De Maistre’s book argues for the absolute necessity of the papal office as the paradigm of all monarchic power. Historically, he claimed, the papacy had created the empire and the monarchies; it was the source from which all other authorities flowed. Since the sixteenth century, however, human society has been undermined by a rebellious questioning of legitimate authority. The symbolic focus of that challenge was first the Reformation, and now the Revolution. Once start to question, and there is no stopping: the stability of human society demanded the underpinning of an absolute authority. Catholicism provided just such an underpinning, and Catholicism needed an infallible pope: ‘There can be no public morality and no national character without religion; there can be no Christianity without Catholicism; there can be no Catholicism without the Pope; there can be no Pope without the sovereignty that belongs to him.’8 De Maistre exalted the papacy to provide a basis for conservative political society. He deplored Gallicanism and Josephism, not because he wanted to minimise royal authority, but because attempts to limit papal authority unwittingly subverted royal authority too. Yet, despite the political motivation of De Maistre’s theory, his teaching had immense religious impact. As the century unfolded, the exaltation of the papacy as the heart of Catholicism, ‘Ultramontanism’ as it was called, would increasingly dominate Catholic thinking.

  And here, once again, the Revolution helped. All over Europe, the Revolution destroyed the independent institutions of the clergy, and subjected them to the control of the state. Stripped of the local privileges, customs and rights which had given them autonomy, the clergy increasingly looked to Rome for protection. The Revolution had also swept away the great prince-bishoprics of Germany, the strongholds of episcopal resistance to papal power. Europe had now only one prince-bishop, the Pope, and he stood increasingly high as the visible centre of a Church which felt less local, more universal.

  As r
uler of the Papal States, however, king as well as bishop, the Pope himself embodied the combination of throne and altar. The government of the Papal States earned the popes the reputation of being the most reactionary prince in Europe. Consalvi had achieved the return of the most prosperous part of the patrimony, across the Apennines on the Adriatic, the Legations and the Marches, which included Ferrara, Bologna and Ravenna and the port of Ancona, in return for promises of a modernisation of papal government there. The promise was necessary. For twenty years the Legations had been out of papal control, and had experienced the modernising force of French government. Antiquated legal systems had been replaced by the Napoleonic Code, the civil service had been opened for the first time to laymen, local communities had been allowed representative government. This experience permanently altered the political consciousness of the people of the Legations. The areas round Rome, by contrast, were still archaic, ruled by priests, with no provision for elected lay involvement. To attempt to return the Legations to this mode of government would be folly, and Consalvi had undertaken to let the French innovations stand insofar as they were compatible with canon law.