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

by Eamon Duffy

  In 1816 he introduced a modified French system of administration for the whole of the Papal States. They were divided into seventeen delegations, ruled by clerical delegates (cardinals in the case of the Legations) but assisted by nominated committees of lay people. All but the highest levels of the civil service were open to laymen, but they wore cassocks at work. This system pleased nobody. It was too brutally centralised and not clerical enough for the ultras in Rome, it put a ceiling on lay promotion within the system, and it made no provision for elected local bodies. In the Legations, in particular, it was a constant source of friction. Hostility to clerical government, and to the papacy which required it, grew.

  Things might not have been so bad if that clerical government had not also been inefficient and reactionary. Consalvi’s modest reforms were frustrated at every turn by vested interests, and the realism and moderation which he brought to all he did was swept away after the election of Annibale della Genga as Pope Leo XII (1823–9) Delia Genga, a sickly sixty-three year old crippled by chronic haemorrhoids, disapproved of Pius VII’s and Consalvi’s policies, and wanted a stronger, more religious and more conservative regime in papal territory. He had been elected by the zelanti, the ‘religious’ cardinals, who were tired of seeing papal policy dictated by political prudence, and who wanted strong spiritual leadership. In 1814 della Genga had been humiliatingly sacked by Consalvi from the papal diplomatic service, after a spectacular row over his incompetence in negotiations over the return of Avignon. He now had his revenge, and Consalvi was dismissed as secretary of state. Leo came to appreciate Consalvi’s brilliance before the Cardinal’s death, but the reconciliation came too late for the Pope to derive much benefit from his political savvy.

  Leo was a contrast with Consalvi in every way. Pious, puritanical (though he shocked the cardinals by his passion for shooting birds in the Vatican gardens) and confrontational, he lacked political realism. Naples had long owed the papacy the feudal tribute of a palfrey (saddle-horse). The feudal dependency of Naples on the Pope was a sore point, and the palfrey had not been presented for decades. Consalvi had wisely commuted it for a cash payment raised by a tax on clerical salaries. Leo demanded the palfrey.

  The same lack of realism displayed itself in the internal government of the Papal States. Gaol sentences were introduced for people caught playing games on Sundays and feast days, tight-fitting dresses were forbidden for women. Encores and ovations in theatres were forbidden, since Leo and his advisers thought they provided the occasion for displays of seditious political feeling. For the same reason actors ad-libbing lines on current affairs were liable to imprisonment. The Roman bars were forbidden to serve alcohol, which instead had to be bought at grills fitted in the street, a disastrous and deeply unpopular measure which led to a huge increase in public drunkenness.

  The Jews, liberated by the Revolution, became a particular target of the reaction. They were ordered back into ghettos, which were enlarged for the purpose and fitted with walls and lockable gates, and they were forbidden to own real estate. Three hundred Roman Jews were required to attend special Christian sermons every week, and the hiring of Christian proxies was forbidden. Business transactions between Jews and Christians were forbidden. The subsequent exodus of wealthy Jews from the Papal States worsened the Pope’s already chronic economic problems.

  A pope is no better than his advisers, and Leo’s assistants within the Curia left a good deal to be desired. Cardinal Ravorolla, sent as legate to Ravenna, created a tyranny so extreme that he became a grim figure of fun. He closed inns, banned gambling, required anyone out at night after dark to carry a lantern before them, clamped down on freedom of speech, introduced imprisonment without trial, and installed a great iron-bound chest outside his residence into which people could put anonymous denunciations of their neighbours. In the south, Cardinal Palotta introduced martial law to deal with the huge numbers of brigands, abolished courts on the grounds that the judges might be intimidated, imposed huge fines on villages where bandits were discovered, and in 1824 introduced a decree permitting the summary execution of brigands within twenty-four hours of arrest. His policies were so hated that he was forced to resign within a month, and the local brigands paid for Masses of thanksgiving to be sung.

  The extent to which the papacy had become locked into the alliance of throne and altar became clear with the election of the austere Camaldolese monk, Dom Mauro Cappellari, as Pope Gregory XVI (1831–46). Cappellari, former Abbot of Gregory the Great’s monastery on the Coelian Hill, had emerged as a compromise pope after a long and deadlocked conclave, in which the Spanish crown’s veto had been exercised against one of the favoured candidates. He was in many ways a promising choice. A learned theologian, he was also an experienced administrator with a broad view of the Church and its needs. For the previous six years he had served as Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda, with immediate responsibility for the affairs of the Church in Great Britain, Ireland, the Low Countries, Prussia, Scandinavia, Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. His choice of papal name was a gesture of homage both to Gregory XV, who had founded Propaganda, and to Gregory the Great, the first and greatest of missionary popes. He had been born in Venetia, in Austrian territory, and was known for his conservative views. Predictably, his election was greeted with delight by the Austrian Chancellor, Metternich, though there is no reason to think Austria pulled any strings to have him elected.

  Gregory’s view of the papal office was both exalted and strictly monarchical. In 1799, the year of Pius VI’s death in prison at Valence, he had published a work defiantly entitled Il Trionfo della Sante Sede (‘The Triumph of the Holy See’). This was a vigorous attack on Josephism and Jansenist Episcopalism, arguing that the Church was a monarchy, independent of the civil power, and that the Pope is infallible when discharging his teaching office as chief pastor. The book made no great stir when it was first published, but it was rapidly reissued in a number of languages after his election, and it signalled to anyone who cared to read it a stern and uncompromisingly authoritarian cast of mind, and a view of the papacy which would brook no challenges.

  Gregorys election came at a moment of grave political crisis. Radical discontent had been growing throughout Italy over the previous fifteen years, focused on a widespread secret organisation known as the Carbonari (Charcoal Burners). These societies were allied to Freemasonry, and were dedicated to the pursuit of political liberty and the unification of Italy. There was a strong strain of anti-clericalism in them, though many clergy and devout Catholic laymen were also involved. The Carbonari had emerged as a formidable force in Naples in the wake of the Spanish Revolution of 1820, and had spread also to Piedmontese territory: they were ruthlessly suppressed by Austria.

  The Revolution of 1830 in France, which overthrew the reactionary Bourbon regime of Charles X and replaced it with the ‘bourgeois monarchy’ of Louis Philippe, reactivated radical forces in many parts of Europe. The new regime issued a statement that it would not tolerate intervention in Italian affairs by other powers – a clear signal that it would hamper Austrian repression of any risings. By the summer of 1831 much of central Italy was in revolt, seeking the ejection of foreign powers and the creation of a unified Italian state. Out of these ferments, Giuseppe Mazzini’s ‘Young Italy’ movement, and the national independence movement known as the Risorgimento, would emerge. More immediately, and within three weeks of Gregory’s election, many of the cities of the Papal States had been occupied by rebel forces.

  Gregory acted decisively. Ignoring the French non-intervention decree, he called for the help of Austrian troops to suppress the revolts. It was a fateful moment for the papacy, in which it threw its lot in with the big battalions, against a growing Italian desire for liberty and self-determination. The aftermath in the Papal States was disastrous. The papal prisons filled up, and liberal exiles schooled Europe in anti-papalism. The Secretary of State, Cardinal Benetti, raised a volunteer police force, in effect arming one element of the po
pulation against another, and the papal revenues were devoured by the machinery of repression. Gregory XVI was forced to negotiate a loan from the Rothschilds (which had at least the incidental benefit of easing conditions somewhat for the Jews). By his death the public debt was more than sixty million scudi.

  These experiences determined the course of Gregory’s pontificate, and his government became a by-word for obscurantist repression. Suspicious of all innovation, he would have nothing to do even with the railways (‘infernal machines’), and the clergy and clerical concerns continued to dominate the secular administration of the Papal States. But the impact went far beyond the government of the Papal States. All over Europe, there were Catholics who had come to reject the alliance of throne and altar as a formula for tyranny.

  In France, the priest Felicité de Lamennais had moved from an Ultramontanism derived from the teaching of De Maistre and a hatred of Enlightenment rationalism to a radical critique of the France of Charles X. To Lamennais the royalist church of France in the 1820s, staffed by state-appointed poodle bishops (‘tonsured lackeys’) was no better than the impotent state churches of eighteenth-century Europe, or even revolutionary France. For all its lip-service to Catholicism, the state, with its control of the episcopate, its restrictions on contact with the papacy and its monopoly of religious education, was manipulating religion for its own purposes, failing to allow it the freedom of expression and action which was fundamental to the Gospel. In the persisting Gallicanism of France, Lamennais saw not an ally of the Church but its opposite. The kings had had their day. To be itself, the Church must embrace the liberty which the Revolution had proclaimed, demand control of its own officers and its own affairs: ‘The Church is being suffocated beneath the weight of the fetters which the temporal power has put upon it; and liberty which has been called for in the name of atheism must now be demanded in the name of God.’9 The Church, led by an infallible pope, must baptise the Revolution, and side with the people against the forces of reaction and revolution. Lamennais and his supporters launched a newspaper, L’Avenir (‘The Future’), which had the slogan ‘God and freedom’ as its masthead, and which campaigned for the separation of throne and altar, a ‘Free Church in a Free State’.

  Lamennais was to a large extent inspired by events in Belgium, Poland and Ireland. In all these countries, Catholic populations lived under non-Catholic regimes: Poland partitioned between Orthodox Russia and Protestant Prussia; Belgium ruled by the Protestant King William I in the interests of Holland; Ireland ruled from Westminster. In such circumstances, ‘throne and altar’ politics were a recipe for oppression, and Catholics allied themselves with liberals in a common struggle. In Rome, such alliances appeared ‘monstrous’, as Cardinal Albani described the co-operation between Belgian Catholics and liberals. Freedom of religion meant freedom for irreligion: nothing good could come from slogans coined in the hell-hole of revolution. That perception led to the disastrous alienation of the papacy from Catholic aspiration in much of Europe, and the papacy had difficulty coming to terms with the successful Belgian Revolution of 1831, where Catholics accepted the separation of Church and state.

  The great papal failure was in Poland. Since 1825, Tsar Nicholas I had been systematically undermining Catholicism in Poland, attempting to force Eastern-rite Catholics (‘Uniates’) into union with the Russian Orthodox Church, hindering contacts between Rome and the Latin-rite bishops, and deposing the Primate of Poland in favour of an elderly government stooge. Rome had protested, but bad communications and the Pope’s overriding commitment to the support of monarchy meant that its protests were half-hearted and ineffective. In November 1830 Poland rose against Russia and briefly established a provisional government. By the autumn of 1831, however, the rebellion had been crushed, and Russia began a brutal campaign of reprisal without parallel anywhere else in Europe. In June 1832, while Poland was groaning under this savagery, Gregory issued the brief Superiori Anno, condemning the revolt, denouncing those who ‘under cover of religion have set themselves against the legitimate power of princes’, and warning the bishops to do their utmost ‘against impostors and propagators of new ideas’.10

  Gregory’s heartless response to the agony of Poland was conditioned by the rebellion of the Carbonari on his own doorstep. To appear to condone rebellion against Russian misrule would be to legitimate rebellion in Italy. His rejection of liberal values received more considered expression in August 1832, in the encyclical letter Mirari Vos, directed against Lamennais and the L’Avenir group. Lamennais’ pugnacious attacks on the conservative alliance of throne and altar in France had been heightened by the July Revolution of 1830. He called on the Church to abandon nostalgia for the Bourbons and to join with the people in creating a new and freer world. These sentiments outraged the French bishops, and episcopal opposition to L’Avenir grew. Unwisely, Lamennais decided to suspend publication and to appeal to Rome for support and vindication. They would go ‘to consult the Lord at Shiloh’, to prostrate themselves at the feet of the Vicar of Christ: ‘O Father, condescend to look down upon some of the least of your children, who are accused of being rebels against your infallible and mild authority … if even a single one of their thoughts deviates from yours, they disavow it, they abjure it. You are the rule of what they teach; never, no never, have they known any other.’11

  Lamennais’ extravagantly pro-papal writings had made him a popular figure at Rome under Leo XII: there had even been rumours of a cardinal’s hat. But Lamennais had long since moved away from the papalist version of throne-and-altar legitimism which had first caught Roman attention. The decision to appeal to the papacy at this point was suicidal, given Gregory XVI’s track-record and known opinions, and it would ultimately lead to Lamennais’ condemnation and his eventual abandonment of Catholicism. He arrived in Rome at the beginning of 1832 against a background of frantic lobbying by the bishops and the French government, urging the Pope to give no comfort to such rebellious spirits. Gregory received Lamennais and his colleagues cordially, but studiously avoided any discussion of religious matters with them. He established a theological commission to report on their teaching, a report which formed the basis for the encyclical Mirari Vos.

  The encyclical, when it finally came, was an out-and-out condemnation of everything the L’Avenir group stood for. Gregory repudiated ‘the poisonous spring of indifferentism that has flowed from that absurd and erroneous doctrine or rather delirium, that freedom of conscience is to be claimed and defended for all men’. He denounced the ‘detestable and insolent malice’ of those who ‘agitate against and upset the rights of rulers’ and who seek ‘to enslave the nations under the mask of liberty’. The Pope was particularly exercised by Lamennais’ suggestion that the Church was in need of restoration and regeneration to meet the challenges of a new age. The Church, he insisted, ‘has been instructed by Jesus Christ and his Apostles and taught by the Holy Spirit … It would therefore be completely absurd and supremely insulting to suggest that the Church stands in need of restoration and regeneration … as though she could be exposed to exhaustion, degradation or other defects of this kind.’12

  Mirari Vos is a landmark document. Though its violent tone and resolute opposition to any hint of liberalism were not entirely new – Pius VIII had condemned Freemasonry in much the same tone – Gregory’s encyclical set the register and to some extent the agenda for the key utterances of his successor, Pius IX. The papacy from now on was locked into an attitude of suspicious repudiation of modern political developments, and the current of ideas which underlay them. Gregory’s hostility to the campaign for a ‘Free Church in Free State’ which underlay most liberal Catholic work on behalf of the Church coloured the rest of his pontificate. He was therefore less than supportive to liberal Catholics like Lamennais’ former colleague Count Charles Montalambert and the French bishops who agitated for greater freedom of education in France in the 1840s, and he put up with the government’s expulsion of the Jesuits from France in 1845, despi
te its disastrous impact on Catholic schools.

  Elsewhere, the advent of liberal regimes more or less hostile to the Church moved the Pope willy-nilly towards the sort of independent action advocated by liberal Catholics. Throughout the 1830s and early 1840s Gregory was confronted by governmental action in Europe and beyond which threatened the liberties of the Church. His response was characterised at least as much by confrontation as co-operation. The most significant of these confrontations was the Cologne church struggle of 1837.

  Prussian custom dictated that in marriages between Catholics and Protestants the sons took the religion of the father, the daughters the religion of the mother. The Catholic Church wanted all children brought up as Catholics. It would not permit Catholic priests to preside at marriages unless they got a guarantee to this effect. This made life impossible for Catholic women. As prefect of propaganda Gregory had been instrumental in the evolution of a compromise, promulgated by Pius VIII in 1830, which forbade priests to bless such weddings, but allowed them to attend as observers.

  In practice, the German bishops co-operated with the Protestant government in stretching this papal directive, and they allowed priests to take an active part in the ceremonies. Rome was not informed. In 1837, however, the new Archbishop of Cologne, Clemens August Droste zu Vischering, announced that henceforth the papal directive would be followed to the letter. This was a red rag to an already anti-Catholic government, and in November 1837 the Archbishop was arrested and imprisoned without trial. Gregory issued a vehement protest, the conflict spread, and other bishops were suspended and arrested. The breakdown of relations between Church and government was healed only by the accession of a new king in Prussia, the romantically inclined Frederick William IV, whose fondness for the Middle Ages made him kindlier disposed to the Catholic Church. Gregory agreed to a compromise which involved the effective retirement of Clemens August. The conflict, however, served to raise Catholic consciousness all over Germany, hardened Catholics’ sense of confessional identity, and led to a vast expansion of the Catholic press and the mobilisation of Catholic opinion. It also struck a death-blow at the remaining vestiges of Josephinism. A handful of anti-papal Catholics broke away to form a patriotic ‘German Catholic Church’ as a result of the Cologne struggle, but this served only to highlight the fact that a new and less docile Catholic identity had formed around loyalty to papal directives. Ultramontanism was no longer a theory, but was taking flesh in the life of the Church.