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

by Eamon Duffy

  It became clear, however, that Bismarck would do nothing to help Leo recover Rome. The Pope turned, therefore, to France. Most French Catholics were monarchists, sworn enemies of the principles of 1789. Most of the clergy were Ultramontanes, convinced that France should intervene to get the Pope his temporal power back. But from 1879 Republican anti-clericals were in the majority in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, and the government launched a campaign, like the Kulturkampf, to reduce the Church’s influence in national life – restrictions on the religious orders, introduction of divorce, Sunday working permitted, prayers and processions abolished on state occasions, religionless funerals encouraged. Throughout the 1880s Church and government were at each other’s throats, Church newspapers denounced the Republic, Catholics involved themselves in royalist plotting. It was the Syllabus given nightmare reality, and a total breach between the Church and French political culture seemed inevitable.

  All through the 1880s, Leo did what he could to prevent this polarisation, and to conciliate the French state. He wrote a mild letter to the President in 1883, he published an encyclical to the bishops of France, Nobilissima Gallorum Gens, in 1884, expressing his love for France, recalling its ancient faithfulness to the Church, urging an end to hostilities, praising the Concordat of 1801, encouraging the bishops to stand firm on fundamentals but urging them to abandon extreme opinions for the sake of the common good. In 1885 he issued an encyclical on the nature of the state, Immortali Dei, arguing that Church and state are distinct but complementary societies, each with their own authority and freedoms. The state is truly free only when it supports the Church, and the Church is the best bulwark of a peaceful state. Liberty of religions, the press and oppression of the Church by the civil power are all damaging to society. But he insisted that no one form of government is privileged by the Church, and he urged Catholics to take a full part in the public life of their societies. With his eye on the ferocious divisions between liberal Catholics and Ultramontane royalists in France, he urged Catholics to put aside their differences in a common loyalty to papal teaching.33

  Everyone thought the Church was the propaganda wing of the royalists, and papal utterances by themselves would not change that. The Pope made the Archbishop of Lyons and the Archbishop of Paris cardinals, and asked them to write a letter encouraging Catholics to support the Republic. Grinding their teeth, they wrote a diatribe against the government so bitter that he had to suppress it. So he summoned the great missionary Bishop Cardinal Lavigerie of Algiers, who had long believed that it was suicidal for the Church to make war on the state, and who needed French imperial support for his missionary efforts in Africa. On 12 November 1890, at a banquet for the mostly rabidly royalist officers of the French Mediterranean fleet, Lavigerie made an electrifying speech. To rescue the country from disaster, he said, there must be unqualified support for the established form of government (the Republic), which was ‘in no way contrary to the principles … of civilised and Christian nations’. He was certain, he went on, that he would not be contradicted ‘by any authorised voice’.

  The ‘toast of Algiers’ was a failure, and not merely in the eyes of the scandalised sailors who heard it. Everybody knew Lavigerie had been put up to it by Leo, and a few French Ultramontanes swallowed their horror and rage and said they would be loyal. Most, however, were too deeply alienated from the Republic to respond, and in any case the notorious Dreyfus affair was soon to unchain the worst of Catholic right-wing opinion and anti-Semitism, and further polarise French public life. Leo went on trying to force French Catholics into constitutional politics, but to little effect, for he was asking them to abandon attitudes and instincts rooted in a century of bitterness and conflict, and endorsed by several of his predecessors. His attempt to persuade the Catholics of France to ‘rally’ to the Republic, in fact, served only to demonstrate the limitations of papal influence, even over Ultramontanes.

  Nevertheless, the Pope’s campaign in favour of ralliement did help exorcise suspicions that Catholicism and democracy were incompatible. It evoked from him a series of encyclicals which registered the Church’s acceptance of the legitimate autonomy of the state, and the compatibility of Catholicism with democratic forms of government. There was nothing strictly new about this teaching, and it did little more than codify the compromises with democracy which the popes had been making in practice since the Concordat of 1801. In many cases, his teaching repeats that of more uncompromising papal utterances like Mirari Vos or Quanta Cura and the Syllabus. But the tone of voice was utterly different and, having stated the ideal, he added the pragmatic qualifications. Libertas Praestantissimum, for example, the encyclical on liberalism published in 1888, reworks all that Mirari Vos and the Syllabus had to say in denunciation of freedom of religion, of conscience, of the press – and then goes on to say that the Church can nevertheless live with religious toleration, a free press, and the rest of the modern ‘false liberties’, ‘for the sake of avoiding some greater evil’. It was as if Bishop Dupanloup had become pope.34

  The papacy had a bad record on social reform. The posture of reactionary condemnation into which it had been frozen since the publication of Mirari Vos in 1832 made it suspicious of any schemes for the transformation of society. From the early years of Pio Nono socialism was a particular bogey. The call of Lamennais, Henri Lacordaire the Dominican priest and political activist, and of Count Montalambert to the popes to ‘turn to the democracy’ had been rejected. Papal rhetoric was concerned with the obligation of obedience, the rights of princes and popes, it had nothing to say to people whose lives were captive to the market forces of laissez faire capitalism, and who had no stake in the political process of the societies that fed off their labour.

  Other Catholics, however, felt the urgency of the social question. Industrialisation and urbanisation had brought massive hardship for the proletariat of Europe, and a widespread and deepening alienation from organised Christianity in both its Catholic and its Protestant forms. In England, Germany, Belgium and France, sensitive Christians wrestled with the plight of working people, and with the need for the Church to move beyond exhortation and almsgiving, to questions of justice, and to a Christian vision of society. This sensitivity was found among both Ultramontanes and liberals. In Germany such movements were represented by Bishop Ketteler, in England by Cardinal Manning, in France by Count Albert De Mun and the industrialist Lucien Harmel.

  Harmel was a practical visionary. He had launched an experiment in social partnership at his factory in Val-des-Bois, where he introduced model housing, saving-schemes, health and welfare benefits, and workers’ councils to share in policy-making for the business. Harmel wanted other Catholic employers to follow suit, but was unable to persuade them. He decided to enlist the Pope. In 1885 he took 100 of his workforce on pilgrimage to Rome. Leo was impressed. Two years later 1,800 came, in 1889 10,000 came. These pilgrimages of working people, living proof that democracy and the Pope might shake hands, caught Leo’s imagination, and helped persuade him that industrial society need not be conflictual, that social peace under the Gospel was a possibility.

  Leo took a close interest in the American church, for there was a society where the ‘liberal’ doctrine of a free Church in a free state seemed not to be code for anti-Christian attacks on religion. In America, Catholic labour was organising in bodies like the Knights of Labour, which did not seem to be communistic or irreligious. Leo began to hope that in Europe, too, Catholic labour organisations might offset the communist unions.

  From 1884 Catholic social thinkers from France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland met annually at Fribourg to discuss the social question. The working papers of this conference accumulated as a summary of and stimulus to Catholic reflection on the condition of the working class. In 1888 Leo received members of the Union of Fribourg and discussed their ideas with them. Out of this conversation emerged the idea of a papal document which would address the social issue. The result was Leo’s most fam
ous encyclical, Rerum Novarum, published in 1891.35

  Rerum Novarum opens with an eloquent evocation of the plight of the poor in industrial society, in which ‘a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke which is very little better than slavery itself’. From this misery socialism offers an illusory release, fomenting class hatred and denying the right to private property. Defending this right to ownership, the Pope argues that class and inequality are perennial features of society, but need not lead to warfare. The rich have a duty to help the poor, and this duty goes beyond mere charity. Christianity is concerned with the healing of society as well as of individual souls, and in that healing the state must play a part. The state depends on the labouring poor for its prosperity, and must therefore protect the rights of labour, both spiritual and material. This protection extends to regulating working conditions, and ensuring that all receive a living wage, which will allow the worker to save and so acquire property and a stake in society. Labouring people have a right to organise themselves into unions, which ideally should be Catholic. Though the Pope thought strikes were sometimes the work of agitators, he thought they were often the result of intolerable conditions. He accepted the right to strike, but thought the state should legislate to remove the grievances that provoke strikes.

  Rerum Novarum is one of those historic documents whose importance is hard now to grasp. Enough of what it had to say was couched in the traditional language of paternalism to allow conservatives to evade its radical thrust, and to pretend that nothing new had been said. Such people seized on passages like that in which Leo said suffering and inequality were part of the human condition, or exhorted the poor to be content with their lot. The Pope’s social analysis was elementary, and what he had to say about the unions was timid, and wrapped up in romantic tosh about medieval craft gilds. The Anglican Christian Socialist Henry Scott Holland said the encyclical was ‘the voice of some old-world life, faint and ghostly, speaking in some antique tongue of long ago’.36 Many Christians, many Catholics, in the 1880s and 1890s were saying more penetrating and more challenging things.

  For the successor of Pio Nono to say these things, however, was truly revolutionary. Leo’s attack on unrestricted capitalism, his insistence on the duty of state intervention on behalf of the worker, his assertion of the right to a living wage and the rights of organised labour, changed the terms of all future Catholic discussion of social questions, and gave weight and authority to more adventurous advocates of Social Catholicism. Without being either a democrat or a radical himself, Leo opened the door to the evolution of Catholic democracy.

  Rerum Novarum demonstrated that Leo was a more advanced social thinker than most nineteenth-century Catholics. With hindsight, he has come to be seen as a liberal pope, a courageous revolutionary transforming the Catholic intellectual and moral landscape, equipping the Church to deal with the modern world. As evidence for this view, one can put alongside Rerum Novarum a whole series of measures which reversed the policies of his predecessor, and nudged the Church out of the rigid posture into which the reign of Pio Nono had frozen it.

  A clear case in point is Leo’s reversal of papal policy towards the Eastern Catholic churches, and towards Orthodoxy in general. Leo called a halt to the drive to Latinisation and uniformity which had been such a feature of Pio Nono’s treatment of Eastern Rite Catholics. In 1882 Leo stopped the offensive practice of naming Latin titular bishops to churches in Orthodox territory. In the same year he founded a Melkite seminary in Jerusalem, in 1883 an Armenian seminary in Rome. In 1894 he issued the encyclical Praeclara Gratulationis, which praised the diversity of churches and rites within a single faith, and the brief Orientalium Dignitatis, which emphasised the need to preserve the integrity and distinctiveness of the Eastern Rite churches. In the following year he regulated the relations between Eastern Rite bishops and patriarchs and the Apostolic Delegates, a matter which had been the source of endless friction and offence under his predecessor. Many of these measures were in fact frustrated by unrepentant Latinisers among missionaries, the papal diplomatic corps and the Curia. Leo’s own intentions, however, were abundantly clear, and were the opposite of his predecessor’s.

  Theology had suffocated under Pio Nono. Great and original theological work was done far from Rome in the German Catholic universities, and by isolated and idiosyncratic figures like John Henry Newman in England. In Rome itself, however, a rigid, defensive and largely second-hand scholasticism dominated, and everything else was viewed with suspicion. Leo was determined to change this. In 1879 he made Newman a cardinal, an extraordinarily eloquent gesture given that Cardinal Manning believed, and often said, that Newman was a heretic. The Roman authorities disliked and feared modern historical enquiry, which they thought was anti-Catholic and sceptical. In 1881 Leo opened the Vatican Archives to historians, including Protestant historians. The scholarly world recognised the revolutionary nature of this step, and applauded a liberal pope.

  But, above all, Leo believed that the key to a renewal of Catholic theology lay in a return to the greatest of the scholastic theologians, St Thomas Aquinas, and with the encyclical Aeterni Patris of 1879 he initiated a renaissance in Thomistic and scholastic studies to break the straitjacket of the Roman schools. He established an Academy of St Thomas in Rome, imported distinguished theologians, philosophers and textual scholars, and encouraged the establishment of Thomistic studies at the Catholic University of Louvain. From 1882 the future Cardinal Mercier was appointed to lecture on St Thomas at Louvain, where his classes became the focus for a theological renaissance in the university and beyond.

  All these measures infused new life and confidence into Catholic theology, and the 1880s and 1890s saw a flowering of scholarship in biblical studies, Church history and philosophy which had all suffered from the paranoia and narrowness of Pio Nono’s later years. The foundation of the Ecole Biblique under Dominican management in Jerusalem, the publication in 1893 of the encyclical Providentissimus Deus, which, however cautiously, accepted the legitimacy of scholarly study of the Bible using the resources of modern science and historical and textual criticism, and the establishment of the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1902, with relatively liberalminded personnel, all contributed to a sense of new openings.

  Leo’s preoccupation with St Thomas, however, points to the limits of his vision. St Thomas was indeed a transcendent genius, and the rediscovery of his teaching and his method opened a world of intellectual discourse and source-material which proved enormously fruitful. There were limits, however, to the usefulness even of Thomas in dealing with the intellectual problems of the late nineteenth century, yet Leo saw Thomism not as the starting point of theological enquiry, but as the end of it. In 1892 he sent a letter to all professors of theology, directing that all ‘certain’ statements of St Thomas were to be accepted as definitive. Where Aquinas had not spoken on a given topic, any conclusions reached had to be in harmony with his known opinions. Within a generation of the publication of Aeterni Patris, ‘Thomism’ had itself become an ossified orthodoxy in the Roman schools.

  The limits of Leo’s liberalism were shown also in the condemnation of Americanism. The intransigents and the party of ralliement in France had their counterparts in America. A substantial group of conservative Catholics, led by Archbishop Corrigan of New York and Bishop McQuaid of Rochester, campaigned for a complete withdrawal of Catholics from the state educational system in America. Others, led by Archbishop John Ireland of St Paul, wanted a compromise which would allow continuing Catholic participation in the public schools. Archbishop Ireland’s attitude reflected a more general openness to the distinctiveness of American social and religious culture, which was demonstrated by the participation of Cardinal Gibbons in the Chicago Parliament of Religions during the Exhibition there in 1892. For ten days Christian Churches and denominations took part with Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims in a public affirmation of ‘basic religious truths’. Gibb
ons closed the proceedings by leading the assembly in the Lord’s Prayer and giving the Apostolic Blessing – a sharing in public worship with Protestants and even non-Christians unheard of at the time, for which, remarkably, he had obtained permission directly from Leo XIII.

  Such a display of ‘indifferentism’ would have been inconceivable in Europe, and many in America were disturbed by it. Leo himself condemned ‘inter-Church conferences’ in 1895. The continuing eagerness of ‘progressive’ Catholics to participate fully in American life and to integrate Catholic values as fully as possible into the ‘American way’ led many to fear a dilution of Catholic truth. Monsignor Satolli, the Apostolic Delegate in the USA, having initially supported Ireland and the progressives, came increasingly to feel that there was ‘nothing of the supernatural’ about the American church. In 1899 these tensions came to a head when a French translation appeared of a life of Father Hecker, founder of the Paulist order and a leading figure in the progressive wing of American Catholicism. The biography was prefaced by an enthusiastic essay by Father Felix Klein of the Institut Catholique in Paris, which ‘out-Heckered Hecker’ in recommending the adaptation of Catholic teaching to the modern world.

  Critics fastened on this preface, and besieged Rome with demands for condemnation. The outcome in 1899 was Leo’s letter Testem Benevolentiae addressed to Cardinal Gibbons, condemning the ideas that the Church should adapt her discipline and even her doctrine to the age in order to win converts, that spiritual direction was less important than the inner voice of the spirit, that natural virtues like honesty or temperance were more important than the supernatural virtues of faith, hope and charity, and that the active life of the virtues was more important than the contemplative and religious life.