Prisoner of the Vatican
Page 25
Rome remained tense. The funeral fiasco had fanned the intransigent flames in the Vatican, and now no rhetorical flourishes were being spared. In a long, combative article on August 4, L'Osservatore Romano called for the government to give the Holy City back to the pope. "No, Italy has no need of Rome as its capital. Italy can stay in Florence or go to Naples, it could be in Milan or Ravenna." The pope was a prisoner in today's Rome, the paper charged; "his imprisonment has been shown to be truer and more complete than ever. And so the dream of conciliation between the Papacy and the New Italy is impossible." The paper's language could hardly have been more melodramatic: "The pope is a prisoner, the Italian government his jailer." The article ended with a thinly veiled warning: "The Kingdom of Italy presents itself as if it were made of granite, but its base is made of clay, and the night of July 13 proved that at any moment the rock might slide off the mountain and will deal it the fatal blow."21
In this overheated atmosphere, the police tripled the guard around the Vatican, having heard rumors of plans by anticlerical groups to destroy what they called "the vipers' nest." At the same time, known anticlerical agitators were ordered to be tailed.22
The police also learned that a huge anticlerical meeting was planned for Sunday, August 7, at the vast Politeama Theater, a meeting that would gain international attention. The government had banned all outdoor political demonstrations and rallies, but to ban an indoor meeting risked both undermining its claim to be supporting basic political freedoms and angering the more anticlerical of its supporters. The organizers provocatively addressed invitations to "all patriots, all former political prisoners from the reign of Pius IX, and all the relatives of the victims of the former pontifical government." In the evenings before the event, anticlerical youths covered the walls of the Holy City with epithets directed at Leo XIII and Pius IX, and several images of the Madonna and assorted saints on the streets were smashed or defaced.
The ingredients for another public relations disaster for the government had been assembled. The Italian ambassador to Vienna, who had been busy trying to repair the damage done by the funeral disorders, wrote to Mancini on August 4 to warn him about further demonstrations. "There is no point," he argued, "hiding the fact that the Vatican, taking advantage of the events of the night of July 13, which they so ably provoked, is trying to trigger Catholic agitation against Italy." While the Austrian government had so far resisted this campaign, he reported, "it is no less true that given current circumstances inside the Empire, clerical agitation could create serious embarrassment for the Government." 23
Three thousand people crowded into the Politeama Theater, in Rome's Trastevere neighborhood, on the morning of the seventh for an event such as the Holy City had never seen. At ten-twenty the leaders climbed onto the stage. The chair was Giuseppe Petroni, a lawyer from Bologna who had spent seventeen years as a prisoner of the Papal States; he had originally been sentenced to death for his role in organizing an abortive uprising in 1853 and only released from prison when Rome was taken in 1870.24 A variety of other anticlerical heroes accompanied him, including the old Garibaldian firebrand Alberto Mario, along with two of Garibaldi's sons—Menotti and Ricciotti—and three members of parliament. Enthusiastic applause greeted them.
Petroni opened the meeting and helped set its tone. After recounting the hardships that he and his comrades had endured in prison, he turned to the law of guarantees. "While we thought we would have guarantees of freedom, of civil progress," Petroni told them, "we found instead the guarantees of despotism, obscurantism, and corruption." The law of guarantees, he insisted, must be abolished.
Petroni proceeded to read two telegrams. The first, from Garibaldi himself, was short but powerful: "I support the abolition of the Guarantees and the Guaranteed"—the latter referring to the pope himself. In fact, just the year before, angry at the government he believed had betrayed the ideals on which the nation was based, Garibaldi had re-signed his seat in parliament. He explained his action in a letter to his constituents: "I cannot continue to serve any longer in the legislature of a country where freedom is trampled and the law serves, in practice, only to guarantee the freedom of the Jesuits and of the enemies of Italian unity."25 The second telegram that Petroni read, from France, offered Victor Hugo's support: "French democracy is forever united with Italian democracy in combating the Vatican."
But the meeting's highlight was the speech by Alberto Mario, the editor of Rome's most fiercely anticlerical newspaper and Garibaldi's close friend and comrade. Mario was not to be equaled in his vilification of the papacy. The day after the funeral procession, in his paper, he praised the attack on Pius IX's "carcass" and added that "we would have applauded even more if the remains of that great fool had been thrown from the Sant'Angelo bridge into the Tiber." 26 At the Politeama, Mario quickly warmed to his theme. "The Vatican," he said, "is a refuge and sanctuary for evildoers beyond the reach of the police." The government had allowed "Signor Pecci—at this disrespectful reference to the pope the delighted crowd laughed heartily—the freedom to publish letters and allocutions in such a way that Signor Pecci and his clergy are at the head of a separate state of 100,000 well-organized men. It is for this reason that suppressing the law of guarantees is a humanitarian act: for fourteen centuries the papacy has been eating away at Italy and Europe." What had the popes done to the pioneers of science and freedom? Mario asked. They had Giordano Bruno burned in Campo dei Fiori and forced Galileo to deny that the earth moved around the sun, "a truth that the Church has still not officially recognized." As for Pius IX, it was he "who called on four foreign powers to reduce Italy to slavery in order to prop up his tottering temporal rule, and who issued the Syllabus to combat modern civilization."
"Every people has its role in history," Mario proclaimed. "Italy's is to suppress the papacy and with the abolition of the guarantees we will reach this goal."
Mario then turned to the pope's threats to leave Italy: "Have you read the allocution Signor Pecci gave yesterday? It appears that he is considering fleeing." To this the audience responded with laughter, sharp whistles, and shouts of "Would that it were so! Into the river!" Mario continued: '"To the enemy who flees, a golden bridge,' goes the saying, and if he would only let us know the day he is leaving Rome, all of Rome would be there to wish him a pleasant journey." A sea of "Yes! Yes!" drowned out his next words.
Mario reminded the crowd of the polemics over Pius IX's funeral procession. "The pope has told a lie," he said. A voice called out, sarcastically, "But the pope is infallible!" "He is an infallible liar," replied Mario, to the crowd's delight. "Signor Pecci has said that a few of the faithful, praying, accompanied Pius IX's body. And herein is the lie. It was the clerical party, who took advantage of the opportunity of transporting Pius IX's body to mount a demonstration hostile to Italy. But in illuminating the carcass of Pius IX, they shed light on the whole history of this despicable pontiff."27
Adriano Lemmi, long a friend and financial supporter of Mazzini's and soon to become national head of the Italian Freemasons, followed Mario to the podium. Lemmi began to read the resolution that was to be voted on. It began with a preamble: "Considering that the papacy and Italian unity are mutually contradictory historically and politically—the popes called in foreign forces 35 times—" Here Lemmi was interrupted by a loud, angry shout: "Assassins!" And considering, he continued, that the papacy undermined national sovereignty, "the people of Rome want that law [of guarantees] abolished and the Apostolic palaces occupied."
But in calling for the taking of the Vatican, Lemmi had gone too far. A police official who, with a cadre of officers, had been monitoring the meeting, rose and tried to silence him. Pandemonium followed. "Long live the Inquisition," one outraged anticleric shouted; others whistled. Petroni got up and tried to restore order, but his voice could not be heard over the din. Ricciotti Garibaldi stood on two chairs and tried to get people's attention but failed. Finally, one of the meeting's less illustrious leaders, who, however,
surpassed his comrades in vocal volume, cried out. He recited the rest of the proposed motion and concluded by putting the question simply: "Do you want the abolition of the guarantees and the occupation of the Apostolic palaces?" A storm of applause and whistles of approval were only partially drowned out by the efforts of the police to clear the room. A squad of police reinforcements arrived, and by noon the Politeama was empty
The next day, the newspapers that published the rally's speeches were confiscated by the police. Among the offices raided were those of the Vatican's Osservatore Romano, for its edition had contained excerpts—with suitable outraged commentary—from the speeches. And so, much to his consternation, the director of the Vatican daily found himself condemned by court order for having violated article 2 of the law of guarantees: he stood charged of offending the pope.28
14. Rumors of a French Conspiracy
IN THE WAKE OF THE EVENTS of July 12–13, the Vatican ratcheted up its stark imagery of a besieged Church battling the forces of evil. Typical was Civiltà Cattolica's language: "There are two Romes: one pagan or, more precisely, apostate, the other Christian; the one that oppresses, the other that is oppressed, the one composed almost wholly of foreigners, the other composed of the descendants of the true Romans." While pagan Rome "has its parliamentarians, its laws, and its materialist, atheist schools, Christian Rome has as its head Peter's successor, who since 1870 has been a prisoner in the Vatican ... For more than a decade these two Romes have stared each other in the face. The one curses the Pontiff, the other goes reverently to kiss his feet; the one insults, the other weeps and prays."1
Just where the battle between the anticlerics and the Church would lead was not clear. On August 17,1881, the British envoy, reporting from Rome, wrote ominously to the foreign minister in London: "I regret to inform your Lordship that, whether with or without the connivance of the authorities, the quarrel between Papists and anti-Papists is daily assuming more important dimensions, and, if allowed to continue, may lead to consequences far more serious than the Italian government appears to have the necessary sense to foresee." Rumors of the pope's impending departure had again begun to spread, although in the envoy's view, Leo had little desire to leave, and the Italian government had every interest in his staying. Only should things get worse, he reported, would the pope flee, his likely destination being Austria.2
In preparing the circular to the nuncios on the papal funeral procession in late July, the pope had consulted with the cardinals of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, and they again raised the question of departing from Rome. Cardinal Camillo Di Pietro, arguing that it was futile to send out yet more protests against the sorry situation to which the Holy See had been reduced, suggested that the pope immediately seek asylum in another country The cardinals were divided about the wisdom of such a move, but they urged that the possibility of flight be further explored and debated whether it would be helpful for the pope to use the threat of departure in his upcoming allocution.3 In the end, the circular included just such a threat.
Following the instructions in the circular, the papal nuncio in Vienna met with Austria's assistant foreign minister. Impatient with the minister's generic expressions of sympathy, the nuncio invoked the specter of papal flight. As he recounted in his report to Jacobini: "I could not help but add that the future looked rather bleak, and if things continued to go the way it looked like they were heading following the important events of July 13, it was not unlikely that considerations of his own dignity and security would prompt the Holy Father to leave Rome."
The Austrian official was not impressed. "Ah! No!" he replied. "We hope that such an eventuality will not come to pass and that such deplorable events as occurred on July 13 will never be repeated."4
The pope's supposed plans to leave Italy quickly became the subject of animated discussion in the press, a weapon used by all sides. On August 10, just three days after the Politeama protest meeting, the Roman daily newspaper II Diritto, widely viewed as the unofficial mouthpiece of Depretis himself, reported that Leo had in fact made the fateful decision to leave Rome. The pope, the long article continued, had made up his mind shortly after the funeral procession disorders and had communicated it to a number of foreign powers. Leo had also decided where he would go—to Malta. The cardinals, who were consulted on the matter, were in full accord. "Political circumstances may speed up or delay his departure," II Diritto related, "but it seems that it is unlikely that they will prevent it."
The Vatican press was not denying these rumors. On August 10, the French Catholic news agency, Havas, angered the Vatican by reporting that the pope had decided to stay in Rome. In recent days, the agency claimed, "the pope has declared to many members in his retinue that he is resolved not to abandon Rome unless made to do so by force. Instructions have been sent to the nuncios telling them to reply in this fashion if they are asked." L'Osservatore Romano dismissed the story curtly: "We are in a position to state that the whole content of this article is pure invention." But in the wake of the funeral disaster, the Vatican paper itself was brandishing the threat of papal departure, observing: "History teaches us that every time that the pope, forced by the tyranny of either the plebes or governments, left Rome defeated and humiliated, he returned there triumphant and covered with glory."5
Although the Italians were then accusing the French of plotting the pope's departure as part of their efforts to weaken the Italian state, French diplomatic correspondence makes it clear that such charges were groundless. In response to the new wave of stories about the pope's leaving Rome, the French foreign minister sent instructions on August 14 to his envoy to the Holy See. "The pope's abandonment of the traditional seat of the papacy would have the most unfortunate consequences," he wrote. "His departure from Rome would become the signal for a popular uprising against Catholic institutions in Italy which the royal government would most likely be unable to quell. This revolutionary movement would be very dangerous for Italy itself without thereby benefitting the papal cause. It is impossible in any case to predict how long the agitation that would follow might last, what course it would take, and how long the period of exile would be to which the papacy would have condemned itself." The foreign minister also worried about the impact that the pope's departure would have elsewhere in Europe, for Catholic sentiment would everywhere be inflamed. He concluded by telling his envoy to convey these thoughts—unofficially—both to the pope and to the cardinals he knew.6
In fact, unknown to most Italians, their government was then in the early stages of forming a Triple Alliance, aligning with Germany and Austria, aimed in good part against France. This action was in some ways unexpected, for it was France that had helped the Savoyard monarchy unite Italy by fighting against Austria, the main foreign foe of unification. That it was a government of the left that engineered the alliance against the French also had much to say about the abandonment by men like Depretis, Crispi, and Mancini of their old republican principles, for they were now taking the side of a German king and an Austrian emperor against republican France.
But various developments in 1881 helped push the Italian government into the Triple Alliance, which would be sealed in a treaty the following year, its secret provisions becoming public only many decades later. The anticlerical disorders of the summer, identified with the republicans, whose fondness for the Savoyard monarchy was only slightly greater than their regard for the papacy, frightened Umberto and his court. The central powers seemed to offer protection against the threat to the monarchy. Forming an alliance with Austria and Germany also meant removing the danger that either one of these major powers might take the Vatican's side against Italy. Another big factor was the aggressive foreign policy then being pursued by France. Depretis himself had become prime minister in 1881 only because the previous government had fallen in the spring after the French occupation of Tunisia, which Italians viewed as properly a part of their own sphere of influence. In this atmosphere, it was easy to st
ir up patriotic sentiment against the French.7
On August 15, the French ambassador to Italy sent his foreign minister copies of two recent Italian newspaper stories accusing France of plotting with the pope against Italy. He was especially alarmed by the piece in La Riforma, a paper viewed as under Crispi's control. France was planning a war against Italy, the paper reported, and was preparing "to lead the pope back into Italy in the midst of the French army!" Of course, it would first be necessary for the French to get the pope out of Italy, and, according to La Riforma, this was exactly what the French ambassador to the Holy See was secretly working to do. It was he, the paper charged, who had been behind the arrangements for Pius IX's funeral procession, knowing that the resulting chaos would offer Leo XIII a pretext to declare that he could no longer live in Rome. "Crispi's newspaper," the ambassador reported, "ended its article by asking that the Italian army be readied."8
At the Vatican, the summer's events had left everyone on edge. Eager to demonstrate that most Italians were on the pope's side, various Catholic associations organized pilgrimages to the Vatican, an effort that continued throughout the next decade. The tension was palpable. A secret police report told that, following the disorders, "the wall near the Vatican gardens was being guarded for fear that it would be