Prisoner of the Vatican

by David I. Kertzer

  Wherever he stopped, Delia Chiesa heard the bishops and archbishops complain about the spread of religious indifference in their dioceses and the difficulty of getting good Catholics to stand up publicly for the restoration of the pope's domain.

  At Perugia, he went to see the man who had taken Gioacchino Pecci's place when he was elevated to the papacy. Given that the pope had spent so many years in Perugia, the picture painted by the new archbishop was not only unsettling, it was embarrassing.

  "The Holy Father," Perugia's archbishop told Delia Chiesa, "well knows the Umbrians' character, which is difficult in any case, and he would easily be persuaded that in Perugia one can do very little with regard to the Opera dei Congressi petition."

  Delia Chiesa disagreed, saying that the pope would certainly have special reason to expect some sign of affection from the people of Perugia. But the archbishop remained unmoved.

  "The Perugians may have affection for the Person of the current Pontiff," he responded, "but they are not very devoted to the institution that he represents."

  After returning to Rome for a rest, the papal envoy headed south, arriving at the small town of Aversa, just north of Naples, on October 21. There he heard some disturbing news: Catholic attempts to distribute their petition in Naples had prompted police intervention, threats, and fear. Responding to a newspaper report that the priests were distributing a call for the return of the pope-king, the police chief of Naples had paid a call on a nearby church. There he made the parish priest show him the petition so that he could check it for seditious content. Monsignor Caputo, the bishop of Aversa, told the envoy that once word of the police visit had gotten out, people had grown suspicious. What made things even worse, he said, was that in sending copies of the petition to the parish priests, the archbishop of Naples had not attached any letter of explanation. As a result, said Monsignor Caputo, "many priests doubted whether the petition had the pope's approval; indeed, they came to doubt that it even had the approval of the cardinal archbishop himself." A second story, carried by the liberal Neapolitan newspaper, Roma, had further scared off potential signers of the petition: "We have been assured," the paper reported, "that the government will denounce to the judicial authorities the authors and the signers of the petition calling for the reestablishment of temporal sovereignty in Rome. That petition is said to be viewed as an incitement to violate the basic laws of the state, and an offense directed against the person of the king of Italy."

  In any case, the bishop said, not much was to be hoped for from the dioceses of the South. There, he explained, "the terrain is not naturally well disposed to produce outbursts of zeal or manifestations of interest in the pope, because few there recognize the connection between temporal dominion and the Church's prosperity."

  Well then, said the envoy, it is clearly the clergy's job to teach the people why the pope's temporal power is so necessary.

  The bishop shook his head. The state of seminary training in the South was a disgrace, he said, and until it was radically improved, they could expect little of the priests. "If I were to call a Seminarian here and offer him free room and board," said Monsignor Caputo, "on the sole condition that he sign the petition of which we have been speaking, he would refuse."

  When the envoy met with the archbishop of Naples later that same day, he decided it best not to mention this earlier conversation. Cardinal Guglielmo Sanfelice painted a picture as bright as his Aversa colleague's had been bleak. When the archbishop assured Delia Chiesa that the petition "would have a brilliant result in Naples," his visitor, rather than mention what he had heard from Caputo, asked about the recent newspaper stories. Cardinal Sanfelice, shocked that the envoy knew about them, grew wary.

  "Is this the real reason that the pope sent you to Naples?" he asked.

  "By no means," Delia Chiesa replied, trying to reassure him, adding that he had just happened to have heard of it since arriving in Naples.

  Returning the archbishop's attention to the petition, he asked if the good Catholics of Naples had any problem with its wording.

  "Well," the cardinal acknowledged, "things might be going even better if the leaders of our lay organizations were more enthusiastic about it. They can't understand why the petition makes no mention of the need to restore the Bourbon king to power in Naples at the same time as the pope is restored in Rome." 7

  After his discouraging tour through the South, Delia Chiesa set out on the final leg of his mission, in central Italy. There, too, the news was not good. Bishops bemoaned the lack of religious spirit in their dioceses and complained that the Vatican was sending out mixed signals about reconciliation with the Italian state. Most depressing of all was the envoy's visit to Ravenna, formerly part of the Papal States and a hotbed of anticlericalism, where even the street names had been changed to eliminate all of the saints and popes and honored instead some of the Church's most notorious enemies.

  "Don't expect many people in my diocese to sign the pope's petition," the archbishop told him.

  "In a city of twenty thousand people," the archbishop lamented, "we have seventy-three different anticlerical clubs." Rare is the man in Ravenna, he added, who would risk the public humiliation of being seen entering a church.8

  18. Fears of a European War

  WHILE THE POPE, through the endless energy of his new secretary of state, was doing all he could to generate political support from the Italian clergy and laity in the fall of 1887, he knew that if he was to have any hope of regaining even part of the old Papal States, he needed to enlist the help of foreign rulers. After all, this was the way the Church had regained temporal power in 1814 and again in 1849. It wasn't the Italians who had returned Pius VII to power or made Pius IX pope-king again. These were not distant memories and, for some, offered a clear, divine blueprint of what would happen for a third time in the century.

  Leo had a two-pronged strategy: exert what direct pressure he could on foreign governments and, at the same time, follow the more indirect route of encouraging Catholics abroad to put pressure on their governments.

  On September 15, Rampolla wrote a letter to his nemesis in Vienna, Luigi Galimberti, instructing him to promote popular demonstrations in support of the pope. Following the publication in July of the pope's letter on the need for temporal power, the secretary of state reminded him, the Catholics of both Germany and Belgium had held rallies and other demonstrations on the pope's behalf. Rampolla explained: "It would be in keeping with the Holy Father's desires for the Catholics of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to find a way to make their voices heard in favor of the temporal dominion of the Holy See in consonance with the Catholics of the other States. It does not seem right that a Catholic country like Austria should remain behind Germany, a Protestant country." 1

  In late September, Crispi traveled to Germany and met with Bismarck on October 1. The pope was outraged at the news. Rampolla, never well disposed toward the Germans, tried to use the Crispi-Bismarck meeting to fan the flames of France's resentment against the Italians. The French lent him an eager ear, realizing that in Rampolla they had a strong ally. The French ambassador to the Holy See described the new secretary of state glowingly in a report to Paris: "Hostile to the House of Savoy, opposed to the Triple Alliance, which represents an obstacle to the papacy's claims, he looks upon France with feelings of sympathy, trust, and hope."2

  On October 7, Rampolla sent a telegram, in code, to the papal nuncio in Paris: "The conversation that has just taken place, not without a certain ostentation, between Signor Crispi and the Prince of Bismarck is a fact worth pondering, for it clearly shows Italy's solidarity with the Austro-German international policies to the detriment principally of France." Rampolla went on to explain how the crafty Bismarck had lured the Italians into his orbit. As long as Bismarck was at war with the Vatican, the Italians had had no cause to worry that the Germans would take the pope's side. But now that Bismarck had made peace with the Holy See, Italian leaders were nervous that a German-Vatican alliance m
ight take shape against them. As a result, Bismarck had been able to get them to agree to an alliance on terms favorable to Germany.

  Rampolla told his Paris nuncio that France's current weakness was its own fault, produced by its repudiation of the monarchy, its persecution of the Church within its borders, and its abandonment of its historic role as defender of the pope's claim to Rome. As a result, he argued, France today "finds itself humiliated and exposed to continuing dangers coming from the growing force of its neighboring enemy." Rampolla then gave the nuncio his instructions: "You will not fail to employ all of your intelligence and industry so that, citing Italy's hostile attitude, you ensure that the Roman question is constantly discussed by French public opinion and that the Italian government is never allowed to deprive this question of its eminently international nature." The nuncio was further told to "give the most absolute assurances" to the French government "that the Holy Father will not stop asserting his claim to full and effective independence."3

  Three days after receiving the telegram, the nuncio replied at length. It is clear, he began, "that the Prince of Bismarck has pulled Italy into his anti-French orbit and that therefore France must now, in the face of its new enemy, Italy, work toward the effective territorial freedom of the Holy Pontiff, in the sense of His Holiness's letter of this past June 15." As for French public opinion, the nuncio explained, there was some good news. "The liberal papers, acting from national malice directed against Italy's recent unification, and the Catholic papers, acting in addition in explicit defense of the Holy See's rights, never stop complaining about the occupation of Rome. As faithful executor, as always, of Your Eminence's orders, I will not fail to keep this sort of agitation in favor of the Holy See alive."

  While Rampolla was no doubt encouraged by these opening paragraphs, he could not have been pleased with the rest. The nuncio was dubious about his instructions, believing they were based on wishful thinking rather than a clear understanding of France's situation.

  There was little chance, he told Rampolla, that under the current conditions France would champion any drive on the pope's behalf to retake Rome. "I would observe that if this was unlikely in France after 1870, partly due to the more or less openly anti-Christian internal policy that the radical party has imposed on successive governments, and partly due to the fear of offending Germany, it now seems to me rather difficult, and I would say it would even threaten the very existence of France itself." The stakes could scarcely have been higher: "Italy could consider any kind of call or protest by the French Government directed to the Italian Government, to the effect that Rome should be the property of the pope, as grounds for war. France would then be attacked simultaneously by Italy and Germany." Such a war, the French nuncio warned, would quickly lead to "the virtual elimination of France, which on the east would lose additional provinces and on the south would see Italy take back Nice and Savoy."

  With the end of the battle against the Church in Germany, the nuncio reported, suspicions were growing that the Vatican was engaged in secret negotiations with Bismarck and Crispi at France's expense. Rumor had it that Bismarck's solution to the Roman question involved returning Rome to the pope and compensating Italy by giving it Nice and Savoy—Italian lands that had been ceded to France just a few decades earlier. Such a dramatic development would crown Bismarck as the master of all Europe, having put an end to the thorny Roman question and won favor among Catholics throughout the continent.

  "In the current serious circumstances," the nuncio wrote, "any French cabinet, of whatever stripe, will be reluctant to put itself in a compromising situation with Italy. Indeed, any attempt at all to move it in this direction could be taken as evidence of new machinations of the able Chancellor against France, which he would like to crush in the next war, but which, like the one in 1870, he would prefer started by being attacked first." The picture that the nuncio painted was not pretty: "Given the military and moral preponderance of Protestant Germany, which, after having reduced all of the Catholic nations to impotence, now threatens Europe with a Middle Ages in reverse, I rather doubt that official France has the courage to take an initiative that, humanly speaking, could prove to be fatal."4

  With tensions growing between France and the countries of the Triple Alliance and talk of war becoming increasingly common in the press, disagreements inside the Vatican were becoming ever more evident. At the center were the two antagonists: Galimberti and Rampolla. Galimberti favored Germany and especially Austria. He believed that reconciliation with Italy was essential and that temporal power was forever lost. By contrast, Rampolla championed France against Austria and Germany and was the principal architect of the pope's rejection of any deal with the Italian state that would abandon his claim to temporal power. Fearful that Galimberti was working against him—and undoubtedly aware that Galimberti, with the pope's approval, was reporting to the pope through messages sent to the Perugians—Rampolla was eager to collect any information that he could use against his rival. French diplomats obliged him with a satisfying staccato of complaints.

  On October 19, the Paris nuncio told Rampolla of a recent conversation he had had with Emile Flourens, the French foreign minister. The French government, the nuncio reported, would, despite all the dangers, be willing to initiate a joint action of all the Catholic powers on the pope's behalf "if it did not fear that it would not be listened to in Vienna, where the course of action followed by the pontifical representative there does not converge—in the opinion of Signor Flourens—with that of this nunciature."5

  Two days later, Flourens summoned a French prelate and told him that he was extremely concerned about Galimberti's attitude, which he said posed "a true international danger."

  "Have you not heard it said," Flourens added, "that he favors German interests to the detriment of Catholic interests, for this is what all the reports that I am receiving say."6

  Shortly after receiving these materials, Rampolla wrote directly to Galimberti. Crispi's recent meeting with Bismarck and the bolstering of the Triple Alliance, the secretary of state told him, along with Crispi's "insolent language" and his scurrilous attacks on the Holy See that had recently appeared in the liberal press, "show clearly that this alliance serves to consolidate Italian actions against the papacy's rights and independence." As a result of the Alliance, he wrote, "the Holy Father's sorry situation is being prolonged, as he is being cruelly abandoned to the mercy of the sects and the revolution." All this had deeply distressed the pope, who now felt "profound disgust," especially at Austria's betrayal of the cause of the Church. Austria, "a Catholic nation, always viewed with particular benevolence by the Holy See," had now allied itself with Italy, the Church's main persecutor. The pope, Rampolla wrote, feared that "rather than work to assist in the restoration of the Holy See's temporal dominion," Austria "would instead work to impede it." In this lamentable situation, he told Galimberti, it was incumbent on him to make known to the Austrian authorities "the disgust and unfavorable impression" that their alliance with Italy had produced in the Vatican.

  Finally, Rampolla turned directly to the reports about Galimberti's own behavior. "The Holy Father has been receiving repeated complaints about your attitude from the cabinet in Paris. Reports from Vienna lead them to believe that you have a hostile attitude toward France. Now it is in our interest, and you must realize this, to have good relations with the French Government, which has recently made satisfactory declarations favorable to the temporal dominion of the Holy See, to the point where they say they are disposed to take the initiative for a diplomatic action by the Catholic powers aimed at Italy as long as they can be sure of receiving support. For this and other reasons the Holy Father wants you to improve ... your personal relations with the French ambassador there and work to remove the sinister prejudices that weigh on Signor Flourens with regard to the hostile sentiments that are being attributed to you." Rampolla ended his letter with a postscript: "Take care not to entrust delicate matters either to the post or to the
telegraph service, as the Italian Government is extending its surveillance over us and is watching us from every direction." 7

  Stung, Galimberti hastened to defend himself. Waiting impatiently for the day when, he hoped, he would be called back to Rome for a cardinal's hat and the job that Rampolla now held, he knew he had to be careful.

  The accusation that he harbored hostile attitudes toward France and leaned too heavily toward Austria, he wrote to Rampolla, "was hurled at me other times as well, nor is it difficult to trace its origins." Over the past few years, the pope had assigned him various diplomatic tasks that were not to the French government's liking. "The negotiations with Prussia for religious pacification and my trip to Berlin," Galimberti argued, "were viewed negatively in France, which naturally would have preferred that the dispute between the Holy See and the Berlin Government had worsened, rather than be ended." And how, he asked, could he be blamed for Italy's alliance with Austria and Germany when it had originated well before he took up his post in Vienna?8

  Shortly after this exchange, the pope, still fuming about the lavish reception that the Germans had given Crispi a few weeks earlier, called in Austria's envoy to the Holy See for a dressing-down. "Leo XIII," the envoy recalled in a report of the meeting, "immediately wanted to turn the discussion to Mr. Crispi's visit to Berlin and Italy's alliance with the two empires. The Holy Father told me, in a rather excited tone, that this development had produced a very unfavorable impression on him, but that he was particularly saddened by Austria-Hungary's alliance with the Italian Government, which is now in the hands of the pope's enemies and has but one goal, the struggle against the pope and the Church." Trying to placate the pontiff, the Austrian envoy responded that, far from abandoning the pope, Austria was the best friend he had. It was in the pontiff's interest, he said, to have Italy in the Triple Alliance because it would act as a conservative brake on Italy while helping to ensure peace in Europe.