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

by Eamon Duffy

  Pius’ other reform measures all show the same practical orientation – the improvement of seminary syllabuses to produce a better-qualified pastoral clergy, the production of a new catechism which he hoped to see used throughout the world, and the closer scrutiny of the pastoral work of bishops through stricter enforcement of ad limina visits every five years. He cared passionately about the parish ministry, kept a statue of the patron saint of parish priests, the Curé d’Ars, on his desk, and on the fiftieth anniversary of his own ordination published an Apostolic Exhortation on the priesthood which is a classic of its kind. He was equally committed to raising episcopal standards, and devoted one encyclical, Communium Rerum (1909) to the qualities required in a good bishop. The increased emphasis on ad limina visits was designed to further this end. At them, bishops had to submit circumstantial accounts of the condition of their dioceses, based on a detailed questionnaire. The same growth of central supervision by the papacy was evident in Pius’ measures to secure better episcopal appointments by personal scrutiny of the files of every candidate for promotion to the episcopate, papal absolutism in the service of Tridentine-style reform.

  The dilemmas of a pastoral papacy in an age of intransigence are revealed in the relations of Pius X with the movement known as Catholic Action. The vigour of nineteenth-century Catholicism had produced a wave of Catholic activism and organizations devoted to good works, from charitable confraternities distributing old clothes to Catholic tradesunions and youth organizations. Successive popes had encouraged such groups, but had also displayed a marked nervousness about the dangers of uncontrolled lay initiative within them. The popes were also anxious that the strictly confessional character of Catholic organizations be preserved, and Pius X was particularly emphatic about this. Catholic Action in Italy therefore had a strong ‘ghetto mentality’, aggressive towards the Italian state, strident and militant in tone. Since the 1870s Catholic voluntary organizations had been grouped together under the umbrella of the Opera dei Congressi, whose leader was appointed by the pope.

  Here, as in so much else, Leo XIII, without radical intention, had caused a shift in ethos. The relatively open atmosphere of Leo’s pontificate had encouraged the emergence of a ‘social Catholicism’ which engaged with the problems of modern society and sought solutions in social policies which had something in common even with socialism, and which did not flinch from calling itself Christian Democracy. In this more hopeful and upbeat atmosphere, and despite the condemnation of ‘Americanism’, Christian Democratic groups had emerged in France and Italy, which aimed to promote a new and more optimistic assessment of the relationship between the ancient faith and the new political order. These stirrings were reflected within even the traditionally hard-line Opera dei Congressi, some of whose members now sought more direct political involvement in the Italian state, and greater freedom from clerical control. Tensions flared within the movement within a year of Pius X’s election.

  Pius X himself passionately believed in an active laity as the key to the success of the Church’s mission in society, but he was deeply suspicious of all ‘Christian Democratic’ movements which were even remotely political. As Patriarch of Venice he had insisted that Christian Democracy ‘must never mix itself up in politics’, and that Catholics writing about the conditions of the working classes and the poor must never encourage class animosity by speaking ‘of rights and justice, when it is purely a question of charity’.3 This was a definite retreat from the position mapped out in Rerum Novarum. He was equally clear that all lay action must be unquestioningly obedient to clerical direction. In July 1904 he dissolved the Opera dei Congressi, and in the following year issued an encyclical, Il Fermo Proposito, setting out the principles of Catholic Action. He encouraged Catholic organizations to pool their energies ‘in an effort to restore Jesus Christ to his place in the family, in the school, in the community’, but insisted that all such associations must submit themselves ‘to the advice and superior direction of ecclesiastical authority’. As he wrote elsewhere, ‘The Church is by its very nature an unequal society: it comprises two categories of person, the pastors and the flocks. The hierarchy alone moves and controls … The duty of the multitude is to suffer itself to be governed and to carry out in a submissive spirit the orders of those in control’.4

  II THE ATTACK ON MODERNISM

  Encouraged by the freer atmosphere of Leo XIII’s pontificate, Catholic theologians and philosophers in Germany, England, France and Italy had tried to adapt Catholic thought to a new age. Official theology seemed to many to have become locked into a rigid formalism, dependent on a biblical fundamentalism which had long since been discredited, insisting that the truths of Christianity were externally ‘provable’ by miracles and prophecies, suspicious of the whole movement of ‘romantic’ theology and philosophy which pointed to human experience, feeling and ethical intuition as sources of religious certainty. In the last years of the nineteenth century Catholic biblical scholars and historians began to explore the early origins of Christianity with a new freedom, Catholic philosophers to engage creatively instead of defensively with the currents of thought which stemmed from Kant and Hegel, and Catholic systematic theologians to explore the nature of the Church not as a timeless and rigidly disciplined military structure centring on the pope, but as a complex living organism subject to growth and change.

  But the reign of Pius X was to see all these movements ruthlessly crushed. Deeply hostile to intellectualism of every kind, Pius X and the advisers he gathered round him saw in every attempt at the liberalization of Catholic theology and social thought nothing but heresy and betrayal. In his first pastoral as Patriarch of Venice he had declared that ‘Liberal Catholics are wolves in sheep’s clothing, and therefore the true priest is bound to unmask them … Men will accuse you of clericalism, and you will be called papists, retrogrades, intransigents … Be proud of it!’5 As pope, he acted on this obligation to ‘unmask’ the rot of liberalism which he saw everywhere in Catholic intellectual life.

  Confrontation came over the work of the French priest and biblical scholar, Father Alfred Loisy, Professor at the Institut Catholique in Paris. Loisy’s book, The Gospel and the Church, was designed to defend the Catholic faith by demonstrating that the findings of radical biblical criticism dissolved traditional Protestant reliance on Scripture alone, over and against the tradition of the Church, and made impossible any naive biblical literalism. In the New Testament, Loisy argued, we do not have a picture of Christ as he actually was, as many Protestants imagined, but as he was understood within the Early Church’s tradition. There was therefore no getting behind the tradition of the Church to an unmediated Christ. We know him and can relate to him only through the developing life of the Church. Christ had proclaimed the Kingdom of Heaven, and what came was the Catholic Church.

  Loisy’s book was a sensational success. Many Catholics saw in it conclusive proof that modernity, in the shape of the latest theological scholarship, worked for and not against the Church. Even the pope himself remarked that here at any rate was a theological book that wasn’t boring. But the remark implied no approval. He and his conservative advisers believed that Loisy’s argument was based on a corrosive scepticism about biblical facts which would erode all religious truth and certainty. This subjectivism must be stamped on. Loisy was silenced, and in 1907 Pius issued a decree against the Modernist heresy, Lamentabili Sane, and two months later, the ninety-three page encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, lumping a miscellaneous assortment of new ideas together under the blanket term ‘Modernism’, and characterizing these new ways of thinking as a ‘compendium of all the heresies’.6 Pascendi had been drafted by Joseph Lemius, a curial theologian who had spent years obsessively collecting doctrinal propositions from the works of contemporary Catholic theologians, and assembling them into the elaborate anti-doctrinal system which he believed underlay all their works. There was more than a hint of fantasy and conspiracy theory behind all this, and the encyclical itself was
characterized by extreme violence of language. The Modernists were denounced as not only mistaken, but as vicious, deceitful, and disloyal: ‘enemies of the Church they are indeed: to say they are her worst enemies, is not far from the truth … their blows are the more sure because they know where to strike her. All Modernists are motivated by a mixture of curiosity and pride.’

  No one ever subscribed to all the views condemned by Lamentabili and Pascendi: at one level the Modernist heresy was a figment of the pope’s imagination (or that of his ghost-writer). Yet it cannot reasonably be doubted that the pope was responding to a genuine crisis within Catholic theology, as a host of thinkers wrestled, sometimes unsuccessfully, to appropriate for Catholicism new methods and discoveries in the natural sciences, in history and archaeology, and in biblical studies. To some extent, however, the crisis was of the papacy’s own making. The increasingly narrow orthodoxy of the nineteenth-century Roman Schools left Catholic philosophers and theologians little room for manoeuvre, and the enforced secrecy and isolation of much of the work being done meant that new thinking could not be properly integrated into the tradition. Despite the liberalizing trends of Leo XIII’s pontificate, many of the best theologians of the period felt themselves to be working as outcasts, against the grain of official Catholic theology. Inevitably there were casualties, and there were those whose work took them well beyond the limits of any recognizably Catholic or even Christian framework of thought. By the time he published L’Evangile et L’Eglise, for example, Loisy himself had long since ceased to believe in the divine character of the Church, or in any supernatural revelation.

  In condemning Modernism, therefore, Pius X not unreasonably saw himself as exercising the papacy’s traditional responsibility of ‘vigilance’ on behalf of the Church, sounding a warning against the disastrous false direction in which he believed many theologians were leading the faithful. The trouble lay in the undiscriminating character of the condemnation, its unfocused severity and paranoia. If the pope had a duty to warn against error, he also had a duty to care for the erring, and to discriminate real error from legitimate freedom of reflection and investigation. No such discriminations were made, and little quarter was shown to those suspected of straying beyond the allowed limits. The encyclical was simply the opening shot in what rapidly became nothing less than a reign of terror. The pope’s denunciation not merely of ideas but of motives unleashed a flood of suspicion and reprisal. Liberal Catholic newspapers and periodicals were suppressed; seminary teachers and academics suspected of flirting with new ideas were disgraced and dismissed from their posts. A secret organization designed to winkle out theological deviants, the Sodalitium Pianum, (‘The Society of St Pius V’) led by Mgr. Umberto Benigni, was personally encouraged by the pope. It lied to, spied on and harassed suspect theologians. Private letters were opened and photographed, clerical agents provacateurs lured unwary liberals into incriminating themselves and, ludicrously, over-zealous seminary professors even denounced their students for heresy, on the basis of essays written in class. The blamelessly orthodox Angelo Roncalli, future Pope John XXIII, taught Church history in the obscure seminary at Bergamo. He was secretly denounced for encouraging his students to read a suspect book, the Vatican’s informant even checking out the records of the local bookshop to see who was buying what (the book was Louis Duchesne’s masterly The Early History of the Christian Church). Roncalli, on a routine visit to the Vatican, was duly frightened out of his wits by a heavy warning from one of the most senior curial cardinals. Great scholars were sacked, compliant nonentities promoted. No one was safe, and distinguished bishops, even curial cardinals found their every action and word watched and reported. Merry del Val, the Cardinal Secretary of State, an uncompromising opponent of the new heresy often blamed for the campaign of repression himself, became alarmed by the extremism of these measures. He tried unsuccessfully to restrain Benigni, who in turn accused him of spineless over-caution.

  The Sodalitium Pianum never had more than fifty members, but its influence and spirit was far more widespread than its mere numerical strength. A new intransigence became the required mark of the ‘good’ Catholic. ‘Real’ Catholics were ‘integralists’, accepting as a package-deal everything the pope taught, not picking and choosing in the ‘pride and curiosity’ of their intellect. In September 1910 the general atmosphere of suspicion was institutionalized when a lengthy and ferocious oath was devised to impose a straitjacket of orthodoxy on suspects, and subscription to this oath became a routine and repeated part of the progress of every cleric’s career, from the lowliest priest to the most exalted cardinal. The ‘Anti-Modernist Oath’ shattered public confidence in the integrity and freedom of Catholic academic standards. Only in Germany did the bishops succeed in having university professors exempted from subscription to the oath.

  The worst features of the anti-Modernist purge were suspended at the death of Pius X in 1914. It was rumoured that one of the first documents across the desk of his successor, Benedict XV, was a secret denunciation of himself as a Modernist, which had been intended for Pius X’s eyes. However that may be, the new pope’s first encyclical formally renewed the condemnation of Modernism, but in fact dismantled the witch-hunt against it. He insisted on freedom of discussion where the Church had not formally pronounced on an issue, and called for an end to name-calling by the Integralists. When, a generation later, the cause of Pius X’s canonization was put forward, detailed evidence of the pope’s personal involvement in this witch-hunt was published. It revealed his own passionate commitment to the campaign, shocking many Catholics who admired Sarto’s warmth and humanity. Some people, he had declared, want the Modernists ‘treated with oil, soap and caresses, but they should be beaten with fists.’7

  The canonization went ahead. But the impact of the Modernist crisis on Catholic intellectual life was catastrophic, and persisted almost to the present. The anti-Modernist oath remained in force into the 1960s, a feature of the intellectual formation of every single Catholic priest, creating a stifling ethos of unjust and suspicious hyper-orthodoxy, and discouraging all originality. Catholic biblical studies withered, shackled to absurd and demonstrably false claims like the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch or the unity of authorship of the whole book of Isaiah. Catholic philosophers and theologians were forced into silence or into token parroting of the party line. Obedience, not enquiry, became the badge of Catholic thought. It was to be a generation before anything approaching an open and honest intellectual life was possible for Catholic theologians.

  The confrontational attitudes which underlay the Modernist purges also informed Pius X’s political actions. He had announced the motto of his pontificate as being ‘To restore all things in Christ’. For him, though he denied he was a politician, that motto had an inescapably political meaning, for what he sought was a society which reflected Catholic values. The pope, he declared in his first papal allocution to the cardinals, ‘is absolutely unable to separate the things of faith from politics’. The pope is ‘head and first magistrate of the Christian Society’, and as such he must ‘confute and reject such principles of modern philosophy and civil law as may urge the course of human affairs in a direction not permitted by the restrictions of eternal law.’8

  Within a few years, in pursuit of this mission to ‘confute and reject’ secular laws that conflicted with Church teaching, Pius had demolished the diplomatic achievement of Leo XIII. In contrast to his predecessor, Pius saw papal diplomatic activity not in terms of the art of the possible, of compromise, but in confrontational – or perhaps he would have said prophetic – terms. Professional papal diplomats were replaced as Legates and Nuncios by bishops and heads of religious orders, who would act as mouthpieces for the pope’s fiery and apocalyptic views of the modern world. The problems of this policy of confrontation were laid bare in the collapse of relations between Church and State in France in 1905, and the subsequent confiscation by the Republican government of all Church property in 1907.

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bsp; This disaster was not, to begin with at least, Pius’ fault. Relations between the Church and the French state had been rocky for twenty years, growing anti-clericalism expressing itself in a succession of government measures of a depressingly familiar kind – the suppression of religious instruction in schools, attacks on and eventual expulsion of religious orders from France. Matters came to a head with the accession as Prime Minister in 1902 of Emile Combes, a rabid anti-clerical who had once been a seminarian, and was all the more bitter against the church that had refused him ordination. Even the expert diplomacy of Leo XIII and his secretary of State Cardinal Rampolla could do nothing to restrain Combes, who flouted the informal arrangements which had made the Concordat workable for a century, and he nominated unsuitable bishops without any consultation with Rome. By the time Pius X became pope, France and the Vatican were eyeball to eyeball over these bishops. The problem deepened when the pope demanded the resignation of two bishops accused of immorality and freemasonry. M. Combes refused to accept their resignations, on the grounds that the pope’s action constituted an infringement of government rights.

  This situation would have been hard for any pope to handle, but the political inexperience and clumsiness of Pius and his Secretary of State now proved fatal. When the French President paid a state visit to Rome in May 1904 and called on the King, Merry del Val issued a routine diplomatic protest against this recognition of the Italian State in papal Rome. Foolishly and offensively, however, the Secretary of State circulated a copy to of this protest to all governments, and these copies contained a sentence claiming that the papacy was only maintaining relations with France because the fall of the Combes Ministry was imminent. Here was a blatantly public political act by the papacy, apparently designed to bring about or at any rate speed up the fall of the French government. French public opinion was at frenzy pitch, the French ambassador was withdrawn from the Vatican, and, though Combes’ government did indeed eventually fall, in December 1905 a law abrogating the Concordat of 18 01 and separating Church and State was promulgated. The state would cease to pay clerical stipends, Church buildings and property would be passed to the state, and managed for the use of the Church by religious associations of lay people, known as Associations Culturelles.