Some in the Catholic press, gleeful at the king's premature demise, trumpeted the point that the elderly pope had outlived him. But the pope himself was in no position to celebrate, for he was a very sick man.
Far from reconciling himself to his loss of temporal power, in his last years the pope had grown even more combative.17 Among his strongest denunciations of the Italian state was that contained in one of his last formal allocutions, on March 12,1877, an address that some saw as announcing a new Catholic crusade against Italy. The following year, shortly after the pope's death, Civiltà Cattolica cited this speech, calling it a kind of last testament. "After having proclaimed the necessity of temporal power for the independence of the apostolic ministry," the Jesuit journal recollected, "he declared that in Rome the Head of the Church must either be ruler or prisoner."
The intransigent mood of the Vatican in Pius's last months was reflected in an incident in October 1877. The famed Jesuit scholar and journalist Carlo Maria Curci, one of the founders of Civiltà Cattolica and once very close to the pontiff, was suspended from the Jesuit order by papal directive. In March he had written a public appeal to the pope to make peace with the Italian state and abandon the call for reestablishing the Papal States. Under Pius IX, such language was blasphemous.18
When Victor Emmanuel died, the elderly pope had been too sick to celebrate mass for over a month. Although a brief reprieve from his suffering allowed him to say mass on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his first communion on February 2, he quickly took a turn for the worse, and on the morning of Thursday the seventh, his doctors warned that the end was near. The pope himself, under no illusions, asked for the last rites. Dressed in white nightclothes and propped up on his bed by pillows, he alternately rested, prayed, and talked with one or another of the cardinals who came to comfort him. Just before noon, the man whom he had recently appointed as his chamberlain, Cardinal Gioacchino Pecci, asked Pius to bless all the cardinals. "Yes," the failing pontiff replied, "I bless the Sacred College, and pray that God will enlighten you to make a good choice." Grasping the small wooden cross that he always carried with him, he held it up and added, "I bless the whole Catholic world."
Shortly after noon that day, Francesco Crispi summoned Rome's police commissioner to his home to discuss the situation. He wanted to be notified the moment the pope died. At 4 P.M., the French ambassador to the Holy See, realizing that a conclave to choose a new pope was imminent, sent a telegram to Paris: "It is indispensable for the French cardinals to leave for Rome as quickly as possible." An hour and a half later, Pius IX, who had served as pope longer than any of his 255 predecessors, died. Catholics throughout the world went into mourning, although the news was greeted with relief, if not delight, in some of Europe's capitals. When Bismarck received word of Pius's death at one of his rural estates, it is reported, his spirits immediately brightened: "Let's drink to that!" he said, and told his servant to fetch a bottle of schnapps.19
The following day, at 3 P.M., all of Rome's church bells rang out in an hourlong funereal chorus. Even the bell tower of the Campidoglio, Rome's municipal headquarters, joined in, if only for twenty minutes. The curious poured into St. Peter's Square, which by afternoon was mobbed although remarkably quiet. Having been criticized the previous night for not closing the theaters as a sign of respect, the government shut them down. On the evening of the eighth, the pope's doctors embalmed his body, placing the heart and intestines in a special urn and injecting a preservative into the veins.
Ordinarily, the pope's body would then lie in the Sistine Chapel for public viewing, but large crowds were expected to pay their last wishes to Pius IX, and the cardinals were not willing to allow the Italian police or military into the midst of the Vatican to help maintain order. As a result, arrangements were made for the body to be on display in St. Peter's, under the protection of Italian forces. On the evening of Saturday, February 9, the holy cadaver, dressed in white papal robes, was placed on a litter to transport it into the basilica. Beside the body lay a golden miter. The pope's hands were folded across his chest, one clutching an ebony cross, the other a cross made of ivory. Clergy bearing torches led the procession, striding slowly between two lines formed by the Swiss Guard. Behind them came the funeral litter, surrounded by the Noble Guard, who in turn were followed by the clergy of the basilica, holding burning candles, and then the members of the pontifical family. The cardinals marched two by two, carrying torches and chanting psalms, followed by a gaggle of princes and others of the Roman aristocracy. The body was placed behind a grate, with the pope's feet poking outside so that mourners could kiss them. There it remained on display from the morning of Sunday, the tenth, through Tuesday, the twelfth. An immense crowd packed St. Peter's Square and the surrounding streets, an endless line winding out of the vast basilica. 20
For the government, it was crucial to show that the papal ceremonies could proceed smoothly. As early as September 1871, a year after Rome had been taken, the minister of the interior had sent a long list of instructions to Rome's police commissioner about what to do should the pope die. The police were to surround the Vatican, checking all those who entered. If such obvious surveillance proved to be a problem, plainclothes police were to be used as much as possible. "No demonstration, whether peaceful or not, will be tolerated either in the immediate vicinity of the Vatican or in the larger area around it... Newspaper and book vendors will not be permitted to shout out anything that offends religion and the papacy, or that offends public decency or in any other way is inopportune under the circumstances."
Many cardinals were opposed to allowing the Italian forces into St. Peter's, yet, aware of the immense crowd seeking entrance, they faced the choice of trying to keep out all but a relatively small number of guests or having to seek help from the government whose legitimacy they rejected. On the evening of Saturday, the ninth, a Vatican representative met secretly with Giuseppe Manfroni, the police inspector in charge of the Vatican, and told him that police were to be permitted in St. Peter's to help maintain order, but no Italian soldiers would be admitted. Manfroni, though, feared that more than a simple police guard was needed to ensure order. He would station Italian military forces outside the basilica doors, but, he said, the Vatican would have to permit him to allow the military to enter the church if needed.
Manfroni was under great pressure, as he later recalled: "My work was enormous, my position difficult. It was the first time that the body of a pontiff had been displayed to the public under the custody not of his own soldiers but of a force that the papacy insisted on considering an enemy." Veterans from opposing sides of the battles of Mentana and Porta Pia would be standing face to face, and emotions were running high.
On the morning of the tenth, with the huge crowd pushing toward the basilica's door, Manfroni told his Vatican contact that there was no way of maintaining order without sending soldiers inside. The crowd, despite the triple cordon of soldiers outside the gate and the large number of carabinieri and papal guards inside, was becoming increasingly difficult to control. Reluctantly, the monsignor agreed to let the Italian troops enter St. Peter's.21
In fact, order was preserved, and even the Vatican newspapers complimented the Italian forces on their dignified behavior and effective work.22 Nor was the prime minister, Depretis, slow to trumpet this fact. At 2 A.M. on February 11, he circulated a notice to all foreign governments: "Today the solemn exposition of the deceased pope began at St. Peter's. In agreement with the ecclesiastical authorities, police agents were stationed inside the church and perfect order was maintained. The greatest tranquility reigns in the city."
Manfroni estimated that at least three hundred thousand people filed into St. Peter's to view the pope's body. Among them, or so the French ambassador reported in a telegram sent in midafternoon on the twelfth, was Queen Margherita herself, King Umberto's notoriously Catholic wife, who had gone to kiss the foot of the dead pontiff, "a curious and gripping sight." The rumor, a great embarrassment to th
e Italian government, prompted Crispi to send his own telegram to the Italian embassy in Paris three hours later, to be passed on immediately to the French foreign minister. The report of the queen going to kiss the foot of Pius IX was utterly fallacious, Italy's minister of the interior wrote. "The Queen did not even leave the Quirinal Palace."23
On Wednesday evening, following a solemn procession of cardinals and the clergy of St. Peter's and accompanied by the singing of the basilica's choir, the pope's body, clad in white papal vestments and covered by a red silk cloth, was placed in its temporary tomb inside St. Peter's. There it would remain for three years.24
Pius IX was dead. The object of greater adulation in the Catholic world than any pope in history, he had died a martyr in the eyes of millions of devoted Catholics, a deeply religious figure who would not trade his principles for political expediency, a man seen as God's champion on earth. In death, as in life, he was the saintly prisoner of the Vatican. 25
But the pope's popularity was far from universal. Not only was he widely reviled in Italy for his continuing opposition to Italian unification, he had angered most of Europe's political elite as well. At his death, the Kulturkampf, the German government's attack on the Catholic Church, was still in full swing, as was a campaign against the Church in Switzerland. The Austrians were angered by the pope's refusal, a month earlier, to receive a member of the emperor's family who was in Rome for Victor Emmanuel's funeral. In France an anticlerical party had just come to power, and in Belgium the ruling party showed little love for the Vatican. Nor was the situation in Spain much better.
Following his predecessors' example, Pius IX had identified the Church with the monarchs of Europe and with the battle against civil liberties. But many of the monarchs with whom he had been most closely identified had been deposed and discredited, and he himself died as a self-styled prisoner of the Vatican. The question now facing the Catholic faithful, as well as the Italian government and others throughout the Christian world, was, what would his successor be like? Were things about to change or would the new pope, too, piously await the day when God would drive the revolutionaries from Rome and restore His vicar on earth to his rightful place?26
11. Picking a New Pope
WITHIN MONTHS OF occupying Rome in 1870, Italy's leaders had concluded that the Holy See would never make peace with the Italian state as long as Pius IX was alive. So it meant that a great deal was at stake in the choice of the new pope. Would he be more politically realistic and willing to stand up to the zelanti, as the intransigents were called? Or would he himself be drawn from their ranks, ushering in another decade of hostility toward the state?
In the years that followed, Italy's ambassadors met secretly with the leaders of Europe's other governments to try to devise a plan to influence the selection. In June 1871, for example, Marco Minghetti met with the Austrian foreign minister, Count Beust. Since a vacancy on St. Peter's throne could come at any time, Minghetti suggested that Europe's powers work together to ensure "that the new pope is a man of moderate and conciliatory spirit."1 The following month, Italy's foreign minister, Visconti, urged the Italian ambassador in Paris to raise the question of a papal successor with the French prime minister. "The question of the future pope," Visconti wrote, "is of tremendous importance for both political and religious interests. Governments should waste no time in smoothing the way for the election of a pope who is well disposed to conciliation, not only with Italy, but with all of modern society."2 At the same time, the Austrian and French foreign ministries were in direct contact with each other. Beust warned the French that, under the current circumstances in the Vatican, "the candidates of the party of conciliation had no chance, and a pope chosen from among the infallibilist cardinals would be a danger for all governments." Preventive action was crucial. 3
The Portuguese government also wanted to be involved. In early 1872, the Portuguese were amassing historic documentation aimed at proving that they too had a right to cast a veto in papal elections. They would have a hard time getting anyone to heed them. The veto had long been the prerogative of Austria's emperor and the kings of Spain and France by dint of their claim to being the successors of Charlemagne, who as Emperor of the West had enjoyed such a right. They had exercised such a veto often over the past centuries.4
The Portuguese agreed with the Italian plan. As their foreign minister put it, according to a February 1872 report from the Italian ambassador in Lisbon, a prior agreement by the European powers would be extremely useful, "above all to eliminate the candidates for the pontificate well known for their membership in and devotion to the party of the irreconcilables." It would also be well to agree in advance on the election of a cardinal, he said, who, "if not the most liberal—who in current circumstances would have little chance of success—was at least one of the cardinals ... well disposed to reconciliation." Italy, the Portuguese minister warned, was in a dangerous position. The Vatican, he said, "is doing all it can ... to isolate Italy and to bring victory to the royalists in France and—with Henry V [then being championed by the French royalists] on the French throne together with a new pope hostile to Italy—reestablish temporal power."
The Italian leaders shared these fears. A few months later, Visconti told his ambassador to Paris that, while it was too much to hope for the election of a liberal pope, "it would be a most useful result to exclude the election of cardinals who are known for their intolerant viewpoint and their membership in the Jesuitical party." But he urged caution. The Italian government must not be seen to be the initiators of these secret European discussions.5
In a confidential memo dated May 10,1872, Visconti set out the government's concerns about a future conclave, to be used in briefing Italian ambassadors abroad. At the moment, what most preoccupied him was not so much who the new pope would be but how he would be selected. Two rumors had him worried. One was the proposal, favored by a number of influential cardinals, to elect the next pontiff presente cadavere, that is, as soon as Pius IX had died and even before he was buried. It would mean choosing the new pope without a conclave. The other was the plan to hold the conclave outside Italy, on the grounds that the cardinals could not deliberate freely in Rome. "Any deviation from the canonical form can only diminish the authority of St. Peter's new successor," Visconti warned. 6
Germany and Chancellor Bismarck were also involved in these secret discussions. In late May 1872, the German foreign minister had called in Italy's ambassador and read him a confidential message that Bismarck had written. It was extremely important, the chancellor wrote, for the European governments to ensure the regularity of the upcoming conclave, not least so that they would be in a position to use their veto. Its importance was now far greater than it had ever been, given the recent proclamation of papal infallibility: "How much more precious has this right become," Bismarck wrote, "after the dogmas that have recently been proclaimed! Following these dogmas, the bishops have lost all of what independence had been left to them vis-à-vis the Holy See. They have become the Pope's employees."7
The spring of 1873 found Visconti engaged in frenetic correspondence with his ambassadors, orchestrating confidential discussions of the next papal vacancy, now widely assumed to be near. The Austrian foreign minister charged that Cardinal Antonelli was pushing for a conclave to be held outside Italy (in this the Austrian was almost surely wrong) and urged that the European powers do everything possible to prevent it. The Italian ambassadors in France, Germany, Austria, Portugal, and Spain were all reporting that those governments wanted the next papal election to be held in Rome and wanted a moderate named as pope. But Visconti suspected that something else was going on. On May 20, he wrote a long letter to his ambassador in Vienna.
"Behind our back and unbeknownst to us," he told him, "agreements are being made dealing with the papal question that are against our interests." Above all, Visconti distrusted the French. Our goal, wrote Visconti, must be "to paralyze, at least in part, that action, unfavorable to us, that Franc
e would like to carry out."8 He then turned to the prospect of a conclave outside Italy. Such a gathering, he wrote, would represent a triumph for the reactionary faction of the Church, for in such a gathering the election of one of their own number would be a foregone conclusion. And once elected outside the country, it was hard to imagine that the new pope's first act would be to return to Rome, for to do so would be to admit that he was free to come and go as he pleased and so was not the prisoner of the Vatican as Pius IX had claimed. Having the new pope outside Italy, Visconti argued, would prove a great boon for fanatics, who would use it to arouse popular anger. It would mean a new Crusade, led by the pope himself. And the impact on Italy would be enormous: "All of Italy's policies would be dominated by the need for defense. Everything would be driven to the extreme." Visconti accepted as fact the reports that Antonelli was pushing for a conclave outside Italy, but he noted that Austria and the other Catholic powers—working against France—could fight the plan, profiting from the reluctance of most of the Roman cardinals to leave the Holy City, frightened as they were by the prospect of exile. 9
Evidence that the zelanti in the Vatican were indeed plotting to have the next pope elected outside Rome comes from a strange visitor, received by the Austrian emperor at the beginning of September 1873. The visit also suggests that it was not Antonelli but cardinals trying to work around him who were behind the plan. For the man presenting himself as the special, secret emissary of Pius IX was not the papal nuncio to Vienna (who was directly under Antonelli's authority) but Monsignor Francesco Nardi, one of the most notorious of the zelanti, a fervent champion of the pope's temporal power who had grown very close to Pius IX in his last years.
Prisoner of the Vatican Page 17
