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

by Eamon Duffy

  The Law of Separation was unjust and arbitrary, and it unilaterally revoked an international treaty: the Concordat. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of French bishops believed that the Church had no choice but to accept it, if it was to continue its work in France. The pope took a different view. To accept the separation of Church and State anywhere was to acquiesce in robbing Christ of his crown rights over society, ‘a grave insult to God, the Creator of man and the Founder of human society’. Moreover, the whole principle of the Associations Culturelles was anti-Christian, for they challenged the hierarchical structure of the Church. Lay people, he considered, had no business ‘managing’ the Church’s property or affairs. On 11 February he issued the encyclical Vehementer Nos, denouncing the Law of Separation as a violation of natural and human law, contrary to the Divine constitution of the Church and her rights and liberty. A fortnight later he reiterated his rejection of the Law when he consecrated fourteen new bishops in St Peter’s, chosen by himself, for the Church of France.

  This condemnation left the French bishops almost no room for manoeuvre. They tried to modify it along the lines laid down in 1864 by Dupanloup in his pamphlet on the Syllabus, accepting the condemnation of the Separation in principle, but devising practical working arrangements so that Church life could go on, the clergy be paid, the churches kept open. The Associations Culturelles might be renamed Associations Canoniques et Légales, and put under the tacit supervision of clergy. Rome would have none of this. In August 1906 the pope issued another encyclical, Gravissimo Officii Munere, in which he seized on the bishops’ dutiful endorsement of the papal condemnation of the Law, and under the pretence of supporting ‘the practically unanimous decision of your assembly’, ordered them to have no truck or compromise with the Law. When the plight of the French bishops was explained to the pope as part of a plea for political realism, he was unsympathetic and unyielding: ‘They will starve, and go to heaven,’ he declared.9

  As his canonization in 1950 demonstrated, Pius X set a pattern of papal behaviour that went on influencing his successors. Since the definition of Papal Infallibility, the mystique of the papacy had intensified, though it manifested itself in different ways – in the regal detachment of Leo XIII, in the startling authoritarianism of Pius X’s personal style. At the very beginning of his pontificate, the Swiss Guard, as was customary, went on strike for gratuities to mark the new reign: the new pope listened, and then abruptly announced the dissolution of the Guard, a decision from which he was only dissuaded with much pleading. His successors would emulate him, keeping their advisers and court standing round them while they sat, acting without consultation or consulting only an inner circle. Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pius XII in 1939 and a much gentler figure than either Pius X or Pius XI, declared that ‘I do not want collaborators, but people who will carry out orders’. Now with the growing papal monopoly of episcopal appointments, the system of papal nuncios, sent to Catholic countries all over the world, directing policy, over-riding local decisions, decisively influencing the choice of bishops, became an evermore powerful instrument of centralization within the Church. In an age in which monarchies were tumbling everywhere, the popes had become the last absolute monarchs.

  III THE AGE OF THE DICTATORS

  The election of Giacoma della Chiesa as Benedict XV (1914–1922) to succeed Pius X was as explicit a reaction against the preceding regime as it was possible to get. Della Chiesa was a wisp of a man with one shoulder higher than the other – his nickname in the seminary had been ‘Piccoletto’ (‘Tiny’) – and none of the papal robes kept in readiness for the election was small enough to fit him. He was a Genoese aristocrat trained as a papal diplomat, who had served Cardinal Rampolla as Under Secretary of State to Leo XIII. He had initially been retained in post under Merry del Val and Pius X, but the pope distrusted him as a protégé of Rampolla’s, and in 1907 he had been kicked upstairs as Archbishop of Bologna. The pope made clear the nature of this ‘promotion’ by withholding till 1914 the cardinal’s hat that went automatically with the job, and della Chiesa became a cardinal only three months before the Conclave that made him pope. Della Chiesa was to have his revenge, for immediately after his election as pope, Merry del Val was sent packing from his post as Secretary of State without so much as time to sort his papers. The Conclave took place one month into the First World War, and the choice of della Chiesa was a recognition that blundering if saintly intransigence would not do in wartime.

  War was to dominate and to blight Benedict’s pontificate. He was a compassionate and sensitive priest, horrified by the realities of modern warfare, passionately committed to diplomatic solutions of international conflicts. He bent all his efforts to persuading the combatants to seek a negotiated peace. He refused to take sides, judging that the Holy See would only be listened to if it preserved a strict neutrality. In a war where public opinion was stoked by stories of atrocities of the ‘babies-on-bayonets’ type, he refused to condemn even documented outrages. The result was that each side accused him of favouring the other. Hurt but undeterred, he went on condemning the ‘senseless massacre’ and ‘hideous butchery’ being perpetrated by both sides. In 1917 he proposed a peace plan which involved all concerned agreeing to waive compensation for war damage. Most of this damage had been done by Germany in victim countries like France and Belgium, and they not unnaturally saw the pope’s plan as favouring Germany. They also drew their own conclusions from the fact that Germany approved the scheme, and had offered to help the pope recover Rome in the wake of the defeat of Italy. In France even the clergy spoke of him as ‘the Boche Pope’.

  The continuing confrontation with Italy over the Roman question further paralyzed Benedict’s efforts for peace. By a secret agreement in 1915 Italy persuaded her allies, including England, not to negotiate with the pope, for fear he would attempt to bring international pressure on Italy to recover Rome – as indeed he had hoped to do. To his bitter disappointment, he was excluded altogether from the Peace negotiations of 1919, and he was highly critical of what he took to be the ‘vengeful’ character of the Versailles settlement. In hard terms, therefore, his contribution to the amelioration of war was confined to the money he lavished on relief work for the wounded, refugees, and displaced people – 82,000,000 lire, leaving the Vatican safes empty.

  In the aftermath of war however, his diplomatic skills came into their own. He recognized that the war had thrown much of the political structure of Europe into the melting-pot, and that the position of the Church everywhere from France to the Balkans, from Spain to Soviet Russia needed to be secured. He threw himself and his hand-picked helpers into a flurry of negotiation to secure new Concordats, sending the Vatican Librarian Achille Ratti, destined to be his successor as Pius XI, to the newly resurrected Poland and Lithuania, and sending Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, to Germany.

  Benedict XV was as conciliatory as his predecessor had been confrontational, and in many ways his policies can be seen as a resumption of the course drawn out for the papacy by Leo XIII. As we have seen, he dismantled the machinery of Integralist reaction, dissolving the Sodalitium Pianum and calling a halt to the anti-Modernist witch-hunt. He prepared the way for reconciliation with the state of Italy by lifting in 1920 the Vatican ban on visits by Catholic heads of state to the Quirinal. He tacitly lifted the ‘Non Expedit’ ban on involvement in Italian electoral politics for Catholics by giving his blessing to the new Partito Popolare, the Catholic political party led by the radical priest Don Luigi Sturzo. In another reversal of Pius X’s policy, he encouraged Catholics to join the trade union movement. Most spectacularly, he inaugurated a reconciliation with France. Ironically, he was helped here by the war he had hated so much. The abrogation of the Concordat had meant that French clergy and seminarians lost their immunity from military service. 25,000 French priests, seminarians and religious were called up and went to the trenches, and their participation in the national suffering – in sharp contrast to the non-combatant status o
f chaplains in the British army – did a great deal to dissolve inherited antagonisms between Church and nation. The pope signalled the new spirit of reconciliation by canonising Joan of Arc in 1920, a highly imaginative symbolic gesture: 80 French deputies attended, and the French government sent official representatives. By the time of his death in 1922 Benedict had greatly increased the papacy’s diplomatic standing, and twenty-seven countries had ambassadors or similar representatives accredited to the Vatican.

  Nobody was ready for another Conclave in 1922, for Benedict XV was still in his sixties and died after only a short illness. No one could predict the outcome of the election, and the outcome in any case was astonishing. Achille Ratti, who took the name Pius XI, (1922–39) was a scholar who had spent almost all his working life as a librarian, first at the Ambrosiana in his native Milan, and then at the Vatican, where he replaced a German as Prefect at the outbreak of the First World War. He was a distinguished scholar of medieval paleography, and had edited important texts on the early Milanese liturgy. He was also a keen mountaineer, and the author of a readable book on alpine climbing. He had been mysteriously whisked out of his library by Benedict XV in 1919, consecrated titular Archbishop of Lepanto, and sent as Nuncio to Poland, which had just emerged from Tsarist rule and where the Catholic Church was in process of reconstruction. Why Benedict of all people should have given this delicate mission to a man like Ratti, utterly without any relevant experience, is a mystery. He was a gifted linguist, and his German and French proved useful, but he had no Slav languages at all. His time in Poland was extremely eventful, for Polish bishops resented and cold-shouldered him as a spy for a pro-German pope. The Revolution in Russia raised the spectre of a Bolshevik takeover of the whole of Eastern Europe. The Nuncio, who refused to flee, was besieged in Warsaw in August 1920 by Bolshevik troops. The experience left him with a lasting conviction that Communism was the worst enemy Christian Europe had ever faced, a conviction which shaped much of his policy as pope.

  He returned from Poland to appointment as Archbishop of Milan, and the cardinal’s hat, but he had been in office only six months when he was elected pope, on the fourteenth ballot in a Conclave deadlocked between Benedict XV’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Gasparri, and the intransigent anti-Modernist Cardinal La Fontaine. Gasparri had been Ratti’s immediate superior when he was Nuncio in Poland, and when it became clear that his own candidacy could not succeed, he was instrumental in securing Ratti’s election. It was certain, then, that the new pope would continue Benedict XV’s (and Gasparri’s) policies. Despite the new pope’s choice of name, there would be no return to the Integralism of Pius X.

  Benedict XV had been preparing the ground for a settlement of the Roman question, and Pius XI’s first act as pope made it clear that he intended to carry this through. Having announced his papal name, he told the cardinals that he would give the blessing Urbi et Orbi from the balcony in St Peter’s square, and a window closed against Italy for fifty-two years was opened.

  The instant announcement that he would use the balcony into the square for his blessing was characteristic of the decisiveness of the new regime, a decisiveness soon revealed as nothing short of dictatorial. The mild and obliging scholar-librarian from the moment of his election became pope to the utter degree. He remained genial, smiling and apparently approachable. The Vatican filled with visitors, especially from Milan, he spent hours in public audiences, he met and blessed thousands of newly-weds, he had expensive display-shelves built for the tacky gifts the simple faithful gave him. Nonetheless, an invisible wall had descended around him. He ruled from behind it, and he would brook no contradiction. He accepted advice, if at all, only when he had asked for it, and he soon became famous for towering rages which left his entourage weak and trembling. Even visiting diplomats noted that the key word in the Vatican had become ‘obedience’.

  The obedience was directed towards a vigorous development of many of the initiatives of Benedict XV. These included the rapprochement with France signalled by the canonization of the Maid of Orléans. The way here, however, was blocked by the intransigent hostility of many Catholics to the French Republic. A key influence here was Action Française, an extreme anti-republican movement with its own eponymous newspaper, edited by Charles Maurras. Maurras, a cradle Catholic, had long since abandoned belief in God, but he admired the organization of the Church, and saw it as the chief and indispensable bastion of conservatism in society. Christianity, he thought, had fortunately smothered the ‘Hebrew Christ’ in the garments of the Roman Empire. Religion, he declared, ‘was not the mystery of the Incarnation, but the secret of social order’. Royalist, anti-Semitic, reactionary, Maurras had an immense following among Catholics, including some of the French episcopate. In 1926 the Catholic youth of Belgium voted him the most influential contemporary writer, ‘a giant in the realm of thought, a lighthouse to our youth’. Maurras’ views had long caused unease in the Vatican, but he championed the Church, and Pius X had protected him: he told Maurras’ mother ‘I bless his work’.10

  Pius XI was made of sterner stuff. Catholics excused Maurras’ work on the grounds that it was politics pressed into defence of the Church. Ratti believed that in fact Maurras exploited religion in the service of his politics, and that in any case all politics went rotten unless inspired by true religion. Maurras was a barrier in the way of the political realism in France which Pius, like Benedict XV and Leo XIII, thought essential for the well-being of the Church. Despite stonewalling by the Vatican staff (the crucial file went missing, till the pope threatened all concerned with instant dismissal) in 1925 he moved against Maurras and his movement, first by instigating episcopal condemnation in France, then by placing Action Française and all Maurras’ writings on the Index, and finally, in 1927, by a formal excommunication of all supporters of the movement.

  The suppression of Action Française was a measure of Pius XI’s strength of character and singleness of mind. He was accused of betrayal of the Church’s best friend, of siding with Jews, Freemasons and radicals. From the French clergy he met with a good deal of dumb resistance. The Jesuit Cardinal Billot, who had been a key figure in the anti-modernist purges and was the most influential theologian in Rome, sent Action Française a note of sympathy, which of course they published. Billot was summoned to explain himself to the pope, and was made to resign his Cardinalate. Pius was equally ruthless with all who resisted the suppression. Support for Maurras was strong among the French Holy Ghost Fathers, one of whom was the rector of the French Seminary in Rome where the students had a strong Action Française group. Pius sent for the ancient, bearded superior of the Order, and told him to sack the rector. The old man replied, ‘Yes, Holy Father, I’ll see what I can do’, upon which the pope grabbed his beard and shouted ‘I didn’t say, see what you can do, I said fire him’.11

  Pius also extended Benedict XV’s concern with the renewal of Catholic missions. Benedict had published in 1919 an encyclical on missions, Maximum illud, in which he had identified three priorities for future Catholic missionary activity: the recruitment and promotion of a native clergy, the renunciation of nationalistic concerns among European missionaries, and the recognition of the dignity and worth of the cultures being evangelized. These anti-imperialist guidelines became the basis for Pius XI’s policy. He himself published an encyclical on missions in 1926, and in the same year put theory into practice by consecrating the first six indigenous Chinese bishops in St Peter’s, and a year later the first Japanese Bishop of Nagasaki. He was later to ordain native bishops and priests for India, Southeast Asia and China. Once again, this was a policy which met with widespread resistance, and once again Ratti doggedly persisted. At his accession, not a single missionary diocese in the Catholic Church was presided over by an indigenous bishop. By 1939 there were forty, the numbers of local-born mission priests had almost trebled to over 7,000, he had created 200 Apostolic Vicariates and prefectures in mission territories, and missiology was an established subject for stud
y and research in the key Roman Colleges. It was a dramatic internationalization of the Catholic Church in an age of growing nationalism, and it was only achieved by the maximum exertion of papal muscle.

  In diplomacy too, Ratti followed in his predecessor’s footsteps. From his first year as pope a stream of new Concordats were concluded, to secure freedom of action for the Church in post-war Europe: Latvia in November 1922, Bavaria in March 1924, Poland in February 1925, Romania in May 1927, Lithuania in September 1927, Italy in February 1929, Prussia in June 1929, Baden in October 1932, Austria in June 1933, Nazi Germany in July 1933, Yugoslavia in July 1935. Behind them all, was a concern not merely to secure Catholic education, unhampered papal appointment of bishops, and free communication with Rome, but to halt as far as was possible the secularizing of European life which the popes had been resisting under the label ‘Liberalism’ for more than a century. So, his encyclical of 1925, Quas Primas, inaugurating the new Feast of Christ the King, denounced the ‘plague of secularism’, and asserted the rule of Christ not merely over the individual soul, but over societies, which precisely as societies, and not as aggregates of individuals, must revere and obey the law of God proclaimed by the Church.