If those in the Vatican were offended that the Italian government was not doing more to pay homage to the new pope—the government's official bulletin refused even to mention his election—the anticlerical press was blasting Crispi for what it viewed as the excessive deference being shown the Holy See. The police had torn down public notices of planned demonstrations against the law of guarantees, and all anticlerical demonstrations were banned, as were all public gatherings deemed likely to offend Vatican sensibilities.43
But throughout the country the anticlerical forces were aroused. On February 24, before Leo's coronation, Rome's anticlerics succeeded in having a public meeting in a theater. Billed as a gathering of those opposed to the law of guarantees, it was justified to the police on the grounds that it was not a public but a private, invitation-only affair. Yet invitations were not hard to come by: tickets were given out freely in sympathetic bars and cafés.44
The meeting was called to order at noon. Among the dignitaries on the dais sat Giovanni Bovio, a champion of the extreme left in parliament. The first three speakers aimed their attacks at the law of guarantees and the government that enforced it. But the fourth speaker went further. "I spit on this putrefied cadaver that is the papacy," he thundered. Some applauded enthusiastically, but others seemed a bit uneasy. "Those who made the law of guarantees are enemies of the fatherland. We protest against the Vatican, but we protest as well against those who have made themselves their accomplices in wanting to maintain a state within a state in Italy." The orator concluded with a seditious call: "The monarchy and the papacy are in cahoots. We must kill off one to kill off the other!"
Next to speak was Bovio, who began by denouncing the Italian government for keeping parliament closed during the conclave to avoid risking any remarks being made that might offend the Vatican. "What servility!" he cried. "But the Vatican has one thing right, for it has posed the choice very clearly: either everything or nothing ... Conciliation of Church and State is impossible, because it is impossible to reconcile faith with intelligence." Today, concluded Bovio, was a historic day, because it was the day that everyone in Europe would be put on notice that "the people of Rome, gathered at the Corea amphitheater, demanded the separation of Church and State, proclaimed the principle of freedom of conscience, and protested against the government's servility toward the enemies of the fatherland." The gathering ended with a vote in favor of ending the law of guarantees. Although some hotheads called for blowing up the Vatican, the meeting ended peacefully. 45
Meanwhile, final arrangements were being made at the Vatican for the pope's coronation. Leo had initially given orders to prepare St. Peter's basilica for the ceremonies, and scores of workers labored hurriedly to set up the special platform and stands. An emissary was sent to speak with Manfroni about how Italian soldiers might protect those inside the basilica. It was a delicate topic for the Vatican, and the monsignor charged with the negotiations insisted that the Vatican's request be kept secret. But on March 2, just two days before the coronation, Manfroni learned—to his consternation—that the workers in St. Peter's had been ordered to dismantle everything they had just built. Someone—Manfroni speculated that it was one of the intransigents of the Curia—had leaked news to the press of the Vatican's request for Italian soldiers in St. Peter's, and the new pope, embarrassed, had immediately canceled plans to hold the ceremonies there. The rites would instead be held in the Sistine Chapel, with only the diplomatic corps, Church dignitaries, Roman noblemen, and a few other invitees attending.
If the coronation itself was not to be held in public in St. Peter's, Manfroni hoped that the pope would at least come to an internal balcony of the basilica immediately after the ceremonies in order to bless the crowd inside. Although the pope planned to do just that, and thirty thousand people crowded inside to receive his blessing, at the last minute he changed his mind. Immediately after the coronation ceremonies, Leo sent an observer to the basilica to size up the crowd and learned that the situation was too dangerous. But what the pope had not realized, Manfroni later complained, was that Italian police were scattered throughout the massive church and had the situation well in hand. "At the side of every fanatic, for or against, were police agents, ready to stop any intemperances, whether red or black."46
Rome's streets that night reverberated with anticlerical shouts. A crowd of thousands gathered outside the home of one of the city's foremost Catholic aristocrats, angered by the lights and decorations he had placed on the palace façade to celebrate the pope's inauguration. Perhaps a hundred, shouting "Long live Italy!" and "Down with the priests!" and "Down with the guarantees!," began to throw rocks at the palace's windows and lanterns. The police finally succeeded in dispersing them, arresting six young men.47 Such was Leo XIII's first night as pope.
12. Keeping the Bishops in Line
ON TAKING ST. PETER'S THRONE, Leo XIII was something of an enigma, both to the public at large and within the Church itself. Fears that he might try to make a deal with the Italian state coursed through many an intransigent's veins. At the same time, Europe's diplomatic community held its breath, hoping that the new pope might depart from his predecessor's path and find a way to reconcile the Church with modern times and make peace with Italy.
Five days after the conclave ended, the French ambassador to the Holy See advised his government that Leo XIII was a man who combined "prudence and firmness."1 The question, he said, was where this prudence would lead. Would the new pope be afraid to alienate the conservatives in the Curia, or would he see the need to be bold? The pontiff's first allocution, pronounced to a gathering of cardinals within a month of his coronation, gave liberals some hope. In contrast to his predecessor, he had devoted but a single sentence to protesting the loss of temporal power. "That Leo XIII could explicitly renounce temporal power, and immediately, and without even any sign of protest, no one could expect," wrote the Italian police inspector, Manfroni. But "milder, more bland than this, his protest couldn't be."2
If this was a trial balloon for the pope, it was soon punctured, for so loud was the indignation of the Church intransigents at the thought that he would change course that he quickly decided to take a step back. L'Osservatore Romano put out a series of articles insisting that the pope was committed to regaining temporal power. To demonstrate Leo's long-standing devotion to this principle, the Vatican daily republished a pastoral letter that he had sent to his diocese in Perugia in 1860. The letter concluded: "To take away the pope's temporal power is to wish to make his exercise of spiritual power impossible." The French envoy to the Holy See, in reporting these developments to Paris, noted that it had been the secretary of state who had, on orders from the pope himself, instructed the Vatican newspaper to reprint his earlier remarks. 3
Although the Jesuits of Civiltà Cattolica harbored deep doubts of their own about the new pope, they quickly joined in the chorus of Vatican protestations: "Hardly had the new Pontiff Leo XIII sat on Peter's throne than the liberal press began to spread confusion with its tales of a new direction," the Jesuit journal reported in late April 1878. "It kept repeating that the new pope, given his great intelligence, breeding, his knowledge of world conditions, and especially his moderate and pacific temperament, would reconcile himself to the century, would infuse new life into Catholicism and recognize the justice of the conquests of the modern State." But all these foolish speculations, the journal continued, had been shown to be groundless: "The fact is that the liberals—Jews and non-Jews—would like the pope to stop these protests, to be able to say that finally the Holy See relinquishes any right to temporal power ... But it is one thing to act like an ass, and another the ass's driver." A few months later, still exercised about accounts in the press of the new pope's interest in reconciliation, the journal reported: "Despite the solemn denials they have received, not only from L'Osservatore Romano but also and principally from the pope's Encyclical, his allocutions, and by His Holiness's own actions, they persist in spreading fables to bolster the
ir mendacious deception that, were he free to do what he liked, free from the pressure of the intransigents, he would easily and happily come to an agreement with the government."4
Leo found himself in a difficult spot, caught between his recognition that something new needed to be tried and the heavy pressure he felt within the Church not to do anything that might call into question the wisdom of his saintly predecessor's rejectionist stance. Among the forces exerting the most pressure were Italy's two major national organizations of Catholic laity, established under Pius IX—the Society of Catholic Youth and the Opera dei Congressi—both of which firmly supported the intransigent line.
But Leo was very different from Pius, as was clear to all who would but look. While Pius had barely let an occasion go by without denouncing the usurper state and heaping abuse on those, inside and outside the Church, who embraced the ideals of freedom of religion and freedom of speech and press, Leo was much more restrained. When he received groups of pilgrims he rarely strayed from his prepared text, he rarely got emotional, and he largely avoided political topics. As a result, at least in the first years, when memories of the warm and fiery Pius IX were still fresh, pilgrims found the new pontiff rather cold and uninspiring.5
One of the most eagerly watched signals of Leo's intentions was whether he would continue Pius's attempt to portray the pope as a prisoner of the Vatican. Might he, for example, signal a change by escaping Rome's summer heat and malarial air for the cooler, safer climes of the papal estate at Castel Gandolfo, something Pius IX had refused to do after 1870?6
The first real test of the new pope's commitment to the Vatican's stance came soon enough. The occasion was the decision by Umberto, Italy's new king, to set off on a grand tour of his kingdom. His father, Victor Emmanuel, had hated public ceremonies and loathed traveling from city to city to take part in them. The only city that Italy's first king had felt at all comfortable in was his old capital, Turin. But Italy's ministers were eager to build up popular enthusiasm around the new monarch, and he was amenable to the travels they planned for him.7
Umberto was not terribly impressive, lacking his father's brusque self-assurance and striking many as rather plain in contrast to his anything-but-ordinary-looking father. Like the Savoyards before him, Umberto had been trained for the military but not given any political responsibilities. Or, as his wife, Queen Margherita, would later put it, in the House of Savoy "one person reigns at a time."8
As colorless and quiet as his father was colorful and boisterous, he had a hard time becoming popular among the masses the way Victor Emmanuel was. Embarrassed by his own inadequacies, he waited until others left the room before he would sign documents put in front of him, or he found a way to go into another room to do so, ashamed of his difficulty in producing a suitably royal signature. He was an easy target for the canny Crispi, who, along with Depretis, wrote most of the speech that the king gave to parliament on his inauguration. It was they, too, who persuaded him not to follow his family's advice and become Umberto IV (the fourth in the Savoyard dynasty) but rather demonstrate his allegiance to the new kingdom by becoming Umberto I, the first to rule Italy. 9
Up at five o'clock every morning, the king took a hearty breakfast of roast pheasant covered with meat sauce. Although uncomfortable in the world of culture—he would flee at the approach of an intellectual or artist—he knew all there was to know about horses, uniforms, and—at least so he would like to think—women. His aides tried to protect him from the latter—or at least to do what they could to avoid public scandal—but they were worn out by the king's love of horses and riding, sometimes finding themselves sore from trying to keep up with his marathon rides, which could last fourteen hours without a break.
The new king did have one powerful advantage over his father: Queen Margherita. Blue-eyed, elegant, comely, bright, and politically astute, she had little in common with her husband beyond their shared sense of Savoyard pride. Victor Emmanuel's own wife, along with his mother, had both died in 1855, leaving a ceremonial vacuum that lasted almost a quarter of a century. The appearance of the new queen was thus all the more dramatic.
If marrying Margherita was the best thing that Umberto could have done, the wedding itself was a somewhat hasty affair. It appears that his 1868 marriage to the sixteen-year-old, Umberto's first cousin—the daughter of his father's brother—was intended to bolster the sagging popularity of Victor Emmanuel in the wake of the debacle at Men tana.
While pretending a close relationship for public consumption, Umberto and Margherita could barely stand each other. Umberto had met his true love, the Duchess Litta, said to be one of the most beautiful women of the nineteenth century, when he was eighteen and she twenty-five, and she remained his lover throughout his life. He installed her in a home next to his royal quarters in Monza, outside Turin, where she bore him a baby who died in childhood. When in Monza—which was a good deal of the time—he went to her every evening. Nor was Litta his only female companion, for in Rome he had relations with a series of women, arranging for them to be brought to an apartment set up for the purpose in a wing of the Quirinal, where, according to his close aide, he insisted on making the bed himself the next morning.10
Margherita wanted the royal couple to become the center of social and intellectual life in Rome, something Victor Emmanuel had disdained. They held regular banquets and formal balls at the Quirinal, sponsored charitable organizations, and held salons for the artistic elite. Margherita appeared as a vision of royal beauty: covered with jewelry, wearing a spectacular white dress with gold trim and a long train and a fur stole draped over her slender shoulders. While many observers were enchanted, others were less impressed, thinking her extravagance unseemly. Among those in the latter camp, the Frenchman Ernest Tissot complained that she dressed with "poor taste." At her frequent balls, she wore fifteen strands of pearls around her neck, huge pear-shaped earrings, and a corset covered with brooches and tangles of diamands. The queen, he remarked, "is adorned to look like a votive statue." Others, seeking to puncture the highly touted image of royal beauty, carped that the queen had short legs (which she tried to conceal by strategic dressing) and a hooked nose and that her supposedly blond hair was in fact simply mousy. Whatever her appearance, it was clear that the queen had an iron will joined to aristocratic, autocratic instincts, and she knew how to get her way.11
In addition to cultivating an image of the devoted wife and gracious queen, Margherita reveled in her reputation as a devout Catholic. A year after Umberto became king, the French ambassador to the Holy See reported that, at the queen's urging, the pope had lifted the ban on holding mass in the Quirinal. "The Queen," wrote the ambassador, "is very pleased by the decision and she plans to hold mass every morning." At Margherita's appearances at Church functions, cries of "Long live the Catholic Queen!" greeted her. By contrast, although Umberto went to mass often enough—believing it appropriate for a king to do so—he had a visceral distaste for the Vatican, the Church, and the priests. A close aide described him as a pretofobo, a priestophobe, reporting that Umberto once told him that all priests should be castrated.12
From the Vatican's perspective, the new king had no right to rule anywhere other than northern Italy, along with the island of Sardinia, and even this claim was undercut by the Savoyard monarchy's treachery in robbing the pope of his domain. While Umberto sought the legitimacy that would come from rituals of the sort that the Church had been furnishing monarchs for many centuries, the Vatican was eager to deprive him of any such support. Yet, maddeningly for Leo, this proved impossible, so fiercely did so many of Italy's bishops resist his orders.
In the short time between Umberto's accession to the Savoyard throne and Leo's own coronation, the Vatican had already begun to feel pressure from the Italian bishops. In one such case, the bishop of Parma wrote to the secretary of state for instructions: "I am under great pressure to order the singing of a Te Deum [a prayer of thanksgiving] in my cathedral ... to mark Umberto's elevation t
o the throne." He added that he had also heard rumors that the new king would soon be paying a visit to Parma and noted that he would be expected to appear with other dignitaries to pay his respects.
"I have referred your queries to the Pope," responded the secretary of state, writing on the very day that Pius IX died. The bishop was not to take part in any Te Deum rites, and he was ordered to refrain "from any act of homage that might be interpreted as a sign of adherence to the current order of things." The reasoning was clear: "The king's voyage will clearly be aimed at better entrenching the work of the revolution, which today no longer aims merely at undermining the legitimacy of the deposed Princes, but at undermining the rights of the Church and of the holy Pontiff himself." It was therefore imperative, wrote the secretary of state, "for the bishops to abstain from any act that could contribute to the attainment of such a perverse goal."13
By the time the bishop received this letter, the Church and the whole Catholic world were in mourning, and for the next few months the pope's death and funeral, the conclave to elect his successor, and the period of the new pope's settling in would overwhelm all else. But by summertime the issue of what to do about the new Italian monarch came once again to preoccupy the Vatican, as news arrived of Umberto's plan to visit each of the cities in his domain.
Prisoner of the Vatican Page 20
