Prisoner of the Vatican

by David I. Kertzer

  The pope had his secretary of state send similar replies to the archbishops of Cagliari and Sassari in Sardinia, as well as to the archbishop of Bari on the southern mainland. No local circumstances could justify having a member of the ecclesiastical hierarchy engage in normal relations with the king.

  Meanwhile the king continued on his royal progress, which took him from Rome through the northwest—Genoa, Turin, Milan—east to Venice, then down through Tuscany and central Italy before entering the South in Puglia. In the smaller cities his train stopped only long enough for the authorities to pay their respects and for Umberto to salute the throngs eager to catch a glimpse of their new monarch. In the larger cities he was the guest of honor at a frenetic round of banquets, special displays, reviews of the troops, and receptions where town councilors and assorted dignitaries jostled for the honor of addressing him.

  The embarrassment felt by the archbishops and bishops who failed to pay homage to the king when he passed through their cities is clear from messages that the king received from them, explaining their absence. When Umberto was in Florence, on November 6, he received a letter from the archbishop, explaining that he was constrained not to make any display of greeting in public due to the conflict between church and state but assuring the king that, were he free to follow his own feelings, he would not have failed to participate in the celebrations honoring him. The day before, the bishop of Parma had sent the king a similar note, explaining that he was distraught that he could not personally pay his respects to the king and promising him that, just as soon as the longed-for reconciliation of church and state occurred, the king would find that he had "in the bishops one of the strongest sources of support of his Power." 28

  Urged on by the ministers of the left, who were eager to link the king's legitimacy to the devotion of his subjects, Umberto spent a full three weeks traveling in November. But the highlight of this national consecration of his new reign, and of the kingdom itself, was planned for November 17 in Naples, the old capital of the South, when the king was scheduled to make a triumphal entrance through the city with Benedetto Cairoli, the prime minister, at his side.

  That evening, the shocking news of what happened that day spread through the country. A telegram from the minister of the interior told the story:

  A little after the royal procession had left the Naples train station, a young man of sinister appearance threw himself on the carriage of His Royal Majesty, trying to stab His Majesty in the chest with a sharp knife whose handle he kept covered in a small red flag. He succeeded in grazing the skin of the King's upper left arm and lightly wounding the right thigh of the Prime Minister, while His Majesty with his usual quick thinking and iron nerves struck him on the head with his saber and the Honorable Cairoli, with similar energy and alacrity, grabbed him and held him by the hair. The assassin was meanwhile wounded as well by the Captain of the guard who handed him over to the Police. The name of the assassin is Giovanni Passanante, a cook, aged 29 and a native of Salvia, province of Potenza.29

  The government acted swiftly to use the assassination attempt to generate popular sympathy for the king. Again the Vatican found itself in an awkward position. Having long warned that the Savoyard kings were putting themselves at the mercy of the revolutionaries who had robbed the pope of his temporal throne, papal defenders took an I-told-you-so attitude. Civiltà Cattolica, in its account, reported: "Now they understand that you shouldn't play with fire." The Jesuit journal gave its version of what had happened: "A villain, a bit dimwitted certainly, but filled with the principles of the socialist diatribes against the King and the Emperors, decided to gain everlasting fame for himself by killing His Majesty, King Umberto, in broad daylight." Passanante had used a kitchen knife—not being able to afford anything special for his task—covered with a red cloth on which he had written: "Long Live the International Republic!" Civiltà Cattolica informed its readers that since the revolutions of 1848, there had been twenty-eight major assassination attempts against emperors, kings, and other heads of state. "Now among all of these assassins and regicides," the journal pointed out, "one would search in vain for a clerical. They are all the work of liberals."30

  The pope faced a ticklish problem. The narrowly avoided royal assassination produced an overpowering desire among the king's subjects to thank God for having saved him, and throughout the country, people were demanding that churches hold special services of thanksgiving. On the day after the bungled attempt, the secretary of state issued instructions to the cardinal vicar of Rome: "The Holy Father, after having taken into consideration all the reasons ... regarding the singing of the Te Deum, has ordered me to inform you that Your Eminence may tolerate the singing of the Te Deum in the Church of St. Silvester at the simple request of private persons." He went on to explain that the Te Deum could not be chanted in any of Rome's other churches, given the risk that such ceremonies would be turned into political demonstrations on behalf of the usurper state.31

  No prelate was placed in a more difficult position by these orders than the archbishop of Naples. On November 18, the archbishop sent the secretary of state an urgent letter describing his "exceptional and precarious position." Naples was in turmoil. The streets were filled with one demonstration after another, denouncing the attempt made on the king in their midst. "Now the craving has come for the Te Deum to be sung. Ever since yesterday, I have been bombarded by requests to permit this rite." The archbishop had received the pope's orders but, he said, obeying them would invite disaster. "To avoid the danger of scandalous pressure, to avoid noisy demonstrations in the churches, and to protect me and my Clergy from any violence, this morning, after a meeting that I had with all of Naples's parish priests ... it was decided that tomorrow we will sing a Te Deum to thank God for having saved Naples from a bloodbath, which would have flooded all the city's streets if the assassination had been successful." The archbishop quickly added that to ensure that the masses were not misinterpreted, he had arranged for various newspapers to explain why he was authorizing them.

  Two days later, having not heard the pope's reaction to his letters, he wrote to the secretary of state again with further exculpatory details. The archbishop hastened to assure the pope that he had refused to participate in any of the Te Deum services himself, forbidden the chanting of the Te Deum in the city's cathedral, and prohibited the saying of the traditional prayer for the king. "I place my hands together and beg your Excellency," he pleaded, "to write me as soon as possible to let me know if I have earned Your Excellency's approval, just as, should the opposite be the case, I am ready to humbly receive any criticism, should you decide that it is merited." On the twenty-second the secretary of state responded, telling the archbishop how much the pope appreciated his refusal to take part in the Te Deum himself but studiously avoiding any similar support for the decision to allow such ceremonies to be held in the city.32

  The would-be assassin remained in jail awaiting trial. Not connected to any revolutionary or republican organization, Passanante shared an old anarchic streak that had long marked southern Italy's poor. Amid all the poverty and misery, the king's opulence was, in his eyes, an affront that had to be avenged, a feeling likely nourished by the propaganda against the monarchy then being spread in anarchist and socialist circles in Naples. At the conclusion of his trial in March 1879, unmoved by the defense attorney's pleas for mercy, the court sentenced Giovanni Passanante to death. His appeal rebuffed, the date for his execution was set. But at the last minute the king himself, in an act of royal benevolence, commuted the sentence to a lifetime of hard labor. Yet Umberto was clearly shaken, living the rest of his life in fear that another assassin lurked in the crowds that always surrounded his carriage, commenting—prophetically, it turned out—that one day a would-be assassin would trade in Passanante's knife for a revolver, to deadly effect.33

  The pope, meanwhile, continued to be torn. While under heavy pressure from the intransigents in the Church and trying—not altogether successfully—
to keep Italy's bishops in line, he realized that something new had to be tried.

  Among the pillars of Pius's rejectionist policy was the non expedit, the papal ban on the participation of Catholics in Italian national elections. The status of this prohibition on running for parliament and on voting had been a bit murky in the immediate aftermath of the taking of Rome, but in 1874 Pius IX emphatically stated that no good Catholic could enter the Italian parliament, not least because doing so required taking an oath of loyalty to the usurper state.34 The negative side of a Catholic boycott of national elections was obvious, and early in his papacy, Leo wondered whether it would not be wise to allow loyal Catholics to take part in national politics. Might it not be helpful to form a Catholic party, as had recently occurred in Germany, which could then be used as leverage in demanding concessions from the leaders of the Italian state?

  It was a delicate matter. In May 1878, when newspapers reported that the pope had sought the opinions of several bishops on this subject, L'Osservatore Romano immediately published a denial. But in October the pope had his secretary of state send secret instructions to the archbishop of Turin to pass on to the editor of that city's Catholic newspaper, L'Unità Cattolica. The editor, Father Margotti, was told that he should begin to habituate Catholic opinion to the possibility that the non expedit would be lifted, that under certain circumstances the pope might want to encourage Catholics to vote and to run for office. Margotti was chosen because he had come up with the famous phrase linked to the non expedit policy: "né eletti né elettori," Catholics should be neither elected nor electors.

  Margotti lost little time acting on these instructions, on October 29 publishing an article of his own on the subject, altering the paper's previous embrace of the non expedit and raising the possibility that the Vatican might lift the ban. Fie was dumbfounded the next week when, instead of getting the papal praise he expected, he got a severe reprimand from Cardinal Nina via the archbishop of Turin. "From reading the article," the secretary of state wrote, "I noticed, not without surprise, that he had not exactly followed the instructions he received, which were to the effect that there was to be a gradual evolution of the theory that he had proclaimed of 'neither elected, nor electors,' so that, bit by bit, the Catholics would be prepared to embrace the new program." This goal, Nina went on to suggest, might have been accomplished by such means as publishing "a letter from some Catholic who questioned the matter . . to which, responding, he would have been able to prepare the way for a change in ideas." But "instead, the valiant writer proclaimed, all of a sudden, the contrary political theory in a way that was too explicit and too decisive." Rather than risk the intransigents' ire, the pope ordered a hasty retreat. Margotti was instructed to publish no more on the subject until further notice. 35

  Leo XIII was clearly wary about taking the plunge, but he did not give up. Within weeks he called on a commission of cardinals to study the matter and offer advice. Presided over by Cardinal Nina and including the pope's own brother, Giuseppe—whom he would make a cardinal the following year—the commission met in November and, it appears, advised Leo to reverse the Vatican's policy and allow Catholics to participate in parliamentary elections. Excitement about a possible papal change of direction grew when, on December 28, Leo released an encyclical stressing the importance of harmony between the religious and the political spheres if social disorder was to be avoided, a message that was interpreted by many enthusiasts as calling for an agreement between Catholics and moderates in the government.

  By the beginning of 1879, encouraged by these signs of a new era, a group of Catholic nobles and others of Italy's Catholic conservative elite were meeting secretly to plan a new Catholic political party. Yet their hopes were short-lived. For reasons still not entirely clear, on February 22,1879, in an address to a group of journalists from the Catholic press, Leo surprised many by energetically demanding the restoration of temporal rule and lashing out at those who presumed to take any action that contradicted his expressed wishes. The Catholics who had been feverishly working to launch a conservative Catholic party, in the expectation of receiving the pope's blessings, were flabbergasted.

  Clearly the pope was having second thoughts about where a political party might lead. The promoters wanted a national party that, while devoted to the Holy See, would not be directly under papal control. What he apparently had in mind was something like Germany's Center party, which covered a broad political spectrum, united not by economic interests or political philosophy but by its devotion to the Church and its interests. Yet many promoters of the plan envisioned a Catholic conservative party that would fight alongside other conservatives in parliament against the left. The pope had another fear as well, one that he could never voice publicly. To field a Catholic party blessed by the Vatican, the pope realized, meant putting to the test the Holy See's oft-repeated claim that the majority of Italians were for the pope and against the new state. He feared that such a party would in fact gain only a small minority of the vote. 36

  One of the casualties of the pope's change of heart was Cardinal Nina, known to be a proponent of the conservative party strategy. In October 1880, Leo dismissed Nina and replaced him with a figure more in tune with the rejectionist line, Cardinal Ludovico Jacobini, who became his third secretary of state in less than three years. Champions of Catholic involvement in Italian politics interpreted the pope's move as a final repudiation of their efforts.37

  The intransigents' triumph was evident in Civiltà Cattolica. In January 1881, Father Gaetano Zocchi put it this way: "There is the Rome of the Popes and the Rome of the Freemasons. There is the Rome that prays and the one that swears, Rome of the martyrs and Rome of the tyrants; blessed Rome and cursed Rome. There is the Rome made of granite and the Rome made of papier-màché, eternal Rome and the Rome that, born yesterday, is unsure it will see tomorrow. There is the Rome of Christ and the Rome of the Anti-Christ." Was there any chance of reconciliation between these two Romes? he asked. Only people lost in a fantasy world could think so. "And no conciliation between them being possible, which of the two will emerge as the winner of the battle?" the Jesuit journal asked. "Which will live on even more glorious and more beautiful and which will be smashed to pieces?" The question, of course, was rhetorical, the winner divinely ordained. And there could be no doubt of Leo XIII's resolve, Zocchi continued. "He is as firm as can be in continuing the glorious struggle sustained by his saintly Predecessor against those who call themselves Italy, but who are instead revolution, Freemasons, satanism."38

  13. The Pope's Body

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE he was elected pope, Gioacchino Pecci, in his role as chamberlain, called in the dead pontiff's relatives for a reading of his last testament, eleven sheets of paper written in Pius's hand, bound by a silk ribbon. To the surprise of some who heard it, Pius asked that he be entombed, not in one of Rome's great churches, but in the modest basilica of San Lorenzo, outside the city walls. He specified the exact location in the church that he had chosen and instructed that no more than four hundred scudi be spent to build the shrine. The inscription was likewise to be modest: "Here lie the bones and mortal remains of Pius IX," along with the dates of his papacy and the date of his death. The only symbol to be placed over the inscription was a death's head. In the meantime, as was the custom, the pope's body was placed in St. Peter's.1

  Just what it was that led Leo XIII to decide to hold the funeral procession three years after Pius's death remains unclear. It was customary to wait until the death of a pope's successor for such a reburial ceremony, but the three cardinals Pius had named as his executors were, for some reason, impatient. Yet in their haste to have his body taken to San Lorenzo, they recognized the risks they were running. Such a move would require a procession through the entire city. Given what Pius IX, the last pope-king, represented to the people of Rome, the prospect of provoking violent anticlerical demonstrations surely occurred to them. Nor was it clear initially that the Italian authorities would allow such a
rite, although the law of guarantees assured the pope the same honors as those given the king. Since 1876 the government had forbidden all outdoor religious processions in Rome, arguing that they threatened the public order. And, given the hostile climate, the Church leaders themselves had not been eager to face the taunts and worse of the anticlericals by marching through the city streets. It was for this reason that ever since 1870, even the annual Corpus Domini procession, normally one of the most impressive public rites in the Holy City, had been abandoned. 2

  Pius IX's executors could hardly have been better placed in the Church: Raffaele Monaco la Valletta, cardinal vicar of Rome, Giovanni Simeoni, Pius's secretary of state, and Teodolfo Mertel, who, along with Antonelli, was one of the last men to serve as a cardinal without ever having been ordained a priest. In the recriminations and finger-pointing that followed the funeral events, some charged the three cardinals with having pushed a reluctant pope into approving the procession. Whatever the case, in discussing the plans with the pope and his secretary of state, the executors concluded that it would be too risky to hold the procession in daylight. It also appears that the pope thought it best to keep the rite as secret as possible to minimize the risks of confrontation or violence on the city's streets.

  As cardinals, the executors could not enter into direct negotiations with the Italian authorities, so they deputized a layman, Virginio Vespignani, a Roman architect from a noble family, as their intermediary. On June 23, 1881, he wrote to Rome's prefect on their behalf asking for authorization to transport Pius IX's body from St. Peter's to San Lorenzo on a night between July 1 and July 16. On June 28, the prefect responded that as soon as they informed him of the specific night, he would make the arrangements. On July 5, the architect again wrote to the prefect, setting the date for midnight on Tuesday, July 12, and describing the route to be taken. According to the architect, the procession would be modest: "The cortège will consist of a wagon with the coffin covered with a funeral pall, drawn by four horses, and two or three carriages following. There will not be any external sign. All will proceed in a totally private fashion." With the date and route fixed and the pledge that it would be only a small, private ceremony, the prefect gave his approval. He would see that the necessary security was provided.3