Prisoner of the Vatican

by David I. Kertzer

  Events of the next month did little to reassure the pope, for he faced one of the greatest embarrassments of his papacy. Ever since 1870, when the Italians had taken Rome, no European ruler had set foot there, warned first by Pius IX and then by Leo XIII that visiting the Italian king in Rome would be tantamount to recognizing his right to rule the Holy City. Time after time Italian prime ministers, working with the Italian court, had tried to get one or another of Europe's rulers to pay such a visit and so provide his stamp of approval, but to no avail. The most that the German emperor Wilhelm I had been willing to do was to visit Milan, thirteen years earlier, following a visit earlier that same year by the Austrian emperor, Franz Josef, to Venice. In each case Victor Emmanuel II had been put in the awkward position of traveling far from his own capital to meet emperors whose capitals he had visited.

  The breakthrough for the Italians came when Germany's new twenty-nine-year-old emperor, Wilhelm II, shortly after ascending the throne in June 1888, announced that he wanted to visit his fellow monarch Umberto I in his capital. Angered by the news, the pope again threatened to leave Rome. On July 15, Crispi telegraphed his ambassador in Vienna to report the Vatican's latest efforts: "I have it from an excellent source," Crispi wrote, "that on the 13th of this month Cardinal Rampolla sent a highly confidential note to the papal nuncio [in Vienna], to try to ensure that should Emperor Wilhelm visit our king, the Austro-Hungarian government and the apostolic Imperial Court would use all its influence to see that the visit not occur in Rome. Rampolla has apparently threatened that the Pope would leave the Vatican should Leo XIII's desire not be granted." This threat was duplicitous, Crispi charged, used solely "to frighten Catholic consciences," for the pontiff in fact had no desire to leave. "I hope," Crispi told his ambassador, "that Count Kalnoky and His Majesty the Emperor will not want to lend their support to such a disgraceful maneuver."

  That same morning, Crispi sent a similar warning to his ambassador in Berlin. If the Germans paid any heed to the Vatican's pleas and altered the planned visit to Rome, wrote Crispi, not only would it damage their friendship, but it would also lead popular opinion in Italy to shift away from Germany toward France. In such circumstances, Crispi warned, "my authority would be shattered, and I might well be forced to cede my position to men who would not be in favor of the alliance with Germany." Again trying to play the Germans against the French, Crispi urged his ambassador to tell Bismarck that "a large role in Cardinal Rampolla's intrigues is being played by the French ambassador to the Vatican."20

  At 4:10 P.M. on Thursday, October 11, the twelve-car German imperial train, adorned for the occasion with German and Italian flags, pulled into Rome's central station, a cannon blast announcing the long anticipated arrival. Waiting to receive the emperor were King Umberto, Prime Minister Crispi, and other royal and governmental dignitaries, the men of the royal family wearing full dress uniforms covered with medals. Out stepped the German emperor, dressed in a brilliant red uniform, as a band struck up the Prussian anthem. Embracing, Wilhelm II and Umberto I kissed each other's cheeks four times. To the delight of the cheering crowd, the young emperor then saluted smartly with two fingers to his forehead. Emerging too from the train was a heavy man with a huge bushy mustache, his suit a sign of his diplomatic status. Greeted by Crispi, Herbert von Bismarck, the son of the German chancellor, accompanied the prime minister to his carriage, the first to follow the two carriages bearing the sovereigns and members of their royal families.

  In all, twelve horse-drawn carriages, at half-trot, carried the delegation through the streets of Rome, lined by soldiers and cheering and curious citizens, on to the Quirinal Palace. The coach drivers were themselves quite a sight in their red livery, both their wigs and their stockings made of silk. Flowers showered down on them, along with small pieces of paper bearing patriotic inscriptions in both German and Italian. Crispi had ordered triumphal arches built along the route, and a cluster of unsightly buildings facing the Quirinal Palace were torn down before the emperor's arrival.

  Once the entourage reached the palace, the emperor and king made their way onto a balcony to salute the crowd while men bearing the crests of all of Italy's major cities lifted them high, standing in a semicircle in the square below. If either monarch noticed that some of the papers raining down on them were red, not white, and bore, not patriotic messages, but Socialist calls for an end to monarchs, they gave no indication. The police meanwhile did their best to chase off the left-wing malefactors who had infiltrated the celebration.21

  The pope, having lost his battle to keep Wilhelm away from Rome altogether, had wanted at least to keep him from paying his respects to the king before calling at the Vatican, thereby making clear who had the primary claim to rule the Holy City. Yet here, too, he failed. It was all the more galling for the pope to see the emperor received by Umberto in the palace that the Italians had expropriated from his predecessor. But in a nod to Catholic sensibilities, the Germans agreed to devote much of the first full day of the emperor's visit in Rome to the Vatican.

  At 10:45 A.M. on Friday, October 12, Wilhelm, along with his brother, Prince Henry, left the Quirinal in a royal carriage bound for the palazzo that housed the Prussian ambassador to the Holy See. The Catholic press would make much of the fact that the German emperor then sent the Italian royal carriage back to the Quirinal and for the rest of the day used his own carriage and horses, brought in for the purpose all the way from Germany. He would not offend the pope by arriving in an Italian carriage.

  Greeted by the Prussian ambassador (the heavily Catholic southern German region of Bavaria had its own ambassador to the Vatican), the emperor was ushered into the residence for a lunch in his honor. Sitting on his right was Cardinal Rampolla. Immediately after the meal, the emperor—now wearing his most splendid attire—and his entourage boarded their carriages and made their way to the Vatican.

  Leo came out to greet the emperor at the entrance to his quarters. The pope looked tense; he had in fact eaten nothing that day, limiting himself to drinking two eggs and a little glass of marsala wine. The young emperor was no less nervous, dropping the golden cigarette case he had brought as a gift for the pope.

  From Vienna, Galimberti had warned the pope that in meeting with the German emperor he should not give in to the temptation to raise the Roman question. But the pope thought this too precious a chance to pass up. As his biographer and confidant, Bishop Soderini, recalled: "Above all, he believed it his duty to take advantage of any occasion to try to regain—even if only in part—his temporal dominion." Forewarned, Bismarck and Crispi hatched a plan to foil the pope. It was arranged that Prince Henry would arrive at the Vatican twenty minutes after the emperor. The pope and Rampolla had planned for both Henry and Herbert Bismarck to be received only after the pontiff had finished his private audience with Wilhelm. But the prince, on his arrival, ordered the papal guard to knock on the pope's door. When the guard hesitated, Bismarck lit into him: "A royal prince of Prussia is not left waiting!" he bellowed. When the guard began to open the door, the pope told him to close it immediately, but Bismarck brusquely pushed it open, making way for Henry. The pontiff's entourage was aghast at the insult, and the pope's wishes for a private conversation with the new emperor were dashed. It is said that later that day the pope, known for never showing his emotions, broke down and cried, less for the missed opportunity to broach the question of Rome than for the offense to his dignity as the pontiff. 22

  Further offenses soon followed, for by 7 P.M. that day the German emperor was the guest at a special court dinner at the Quirinal. That he would proceed almost directly from his audience with Leo to be received by the king in the former papal residence offended all those loyal to the pope. The emperor sat between King Umberto and Queen Margherita, with Prince Henry sitting on the queen's other side.

  The toasts that evening had been the object of intense speculation. Would Wilhelm say anything about the king's claim to Rome? Umberto rose first and offered his toast, th
e message to be sent the world stated clearly: "With profound joy and deep gratitude, here in my Kingdom, here in Italy's capital, I salute Emperor and King Wilhelm II." The German emperor then rose, glass in hand. Following an expression of appreciation for the alliance between the two countries, he said: "Our relations have found the liveliest expression in the wonderful reception that your Majesty's capital has given me."23

  The proud Leo would never forget his humiliation at the German emperor's hands that day. Any hopes he had nourished that Germany might come to his aid, following the successful negotiations over the end of the Kulturkampf, were now gone. One of the casualties of the pope's disillusionment was Galimberti, whose French and philo-French enemies openly gloated. The very month of Wilhelm's visit to Rome, Paris's prestigious journal, La Nouvelle Revue, devoted a long, anonymous article to Galimberti, in which he and his friends were charged with being agents in the service of Germany, intent on working from within the Vatican to prepare for "the reign of the AntiChrist." What had provoked the attack was a newspaper story, widely distributed in Europe just before Wilhelm's Roman visit, claiming that the pope was about to replace Rampolla with Galimberti. The effect of such a move, the French journal charged, would be "to subjugate the Holy See to Germanism, after having Germanized Italy." It would mean, in effect, having "Bismarck installed in the Vatican."24

  But in the aftermath of the debacle of the German emperor's visit to Rome, there was little reason for the French to worry. Rampolla, ever more insistently championing a French strategy for the Vatican, saw his influence grow with his belief that a European war, and Italy's defeat, was the only way the Holy See would ever get Rome back. 25

  The pope was in no mood now to tolerate any questioning of his rejectionist stance. In March 1889, Bishop Bonomelli of Cremona anonymously published an article urging the pope to make peace with the Italian government as long as the Italians provided him with "a large enough territory so that he could move at his ease, where he would be free, and act as ruler and king." The bishop suggested that the right bank of Rome together with additional land behind the Vatican and a strip reaching to the sea would be sufficient. The pope, incensed, put the work on the Index and forced the bishop to denounce publicly what he had written. Although he felt he had no choice but to obey the pope, Bonomelli was despondent. As he confided in a private letter: "My heart is broken, seeing the sad dispute continue and worsen. I fear for the Church in Italy and I fear for our country. The two extremes are competing with each other to try to push the one and the other toward the abyss."26

  19. Giordano Bruno's Revenge

  ON FEBRUARY 17, 1600, a fifty-one-year-old man, naked except for the gag around his mouth, was brought into Rome's central square of Campo dei Fiori. His captors then tied him to a stake on top of a pile of wood and set it afire. Giordano Bruno, a former friar and one of the better-known philosophers of Europe, saw his flesh erupt in flames before his eyeballs themselves burst from the heat.

  The Italians had conquered Rome in 1870, but the completion of the conquest, at least symbolically, came nineteen years later when thousands gathered in the Campo dei Fiori and, to the pope's horror, unveiled a statue honoring Bruno on the spot where Clement VIII had had him burned alive. The devil's own forces, it seemed, had wrested control of the Holy City.

  Bruno was an odd choice as a popular hero for the anti-Vatican forces, for he was unknown to all but a few scholars, his works unread and, for the most part, unreadable. He had no popular following of any kind. Yet for the Italian avatars of anticlericalism, Bruno turned out to have much to recommend him, his persecution serving in their eyes as a perfect symbol of the Church's retrograde, repressive nature. His resurrection could serve—or so they hoped—as a way of delegitimating the pope and undermining the Church's power.

  Born in the town of Nola, a dozen miles from Naples, his father a soldier, Bruno entered the Dominican order by the time he was seventeen. A bright young man, enamored of theology and philosophy, he quickly made a name for himself as a teacher and writer. But drawn to forbidden authors such as Erasmus, he soon found himself under suspicion of heresy and so in 1576 gave up his Dominican tunic and fled Naples, first for Rome and then to points farther north on the Italian peninsula. By 1579 Bruno had made his way to Geneva, Calvinism's epicenter, and briefly became a Calvinist himself. But he got into arguments with his new coreligionists as well and before long headed west. In 1583 he became attached to the French embassy in London, where his fame was so great that he was invited to frequent the salon of Queen Elizabeth, to whom he dedicated one of his works. Returning to France in 1585, he became embroiled in yet more theological disputes, escaping to Germany and then taking a series of peregrinations through central Europe before moving to Venice in 1591. There he was arrested, charged with heresy, and brought before the Inquisition. He would never again be a free man. Bowing to pressure from the central office of the Roman Inquisition, the Venetians sent Bruno on a boat bound for the Holy City in early 1593.

  The trial that followed—many of whose sessions the pope himself attended—lasted through the rest of the decade; it involved a long list of charges, from Bruno's alleged denial of the truth of the biblical story of Christ and Christ's divinity to his opposition to the doctrines of transubstantiation and hell. By late 1599, Bruno was told that he could avoid execution only by renouncing his heretical beliefs and his previous writings. This he refused to do. On February 8,1600, in the home of the cardinal deacon of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, with the other cardinals of the Holy Office and a large crowd of onlookers present, Bruno's sentence was read. Declared an unrepentant heretic, he was handed over to the civil authorities for execution, all his works consigned to the Index of prohibited books.1

  The idea of erecting a monument to Bruno on the site of his death originated in 1876 with a group of Roman university students, with strong backing from the Freemasons. Realizing that Bruno was not known to the general population, they organized a flurry of conferences, publications, and speeches to publicize his life. These initial attempts came to nothing, but in the fall of 1884 students at the University of Rome revived the effort and, in March 1885, they sent out an international appeal for funds and support. The list of signatories to the plea was a roll call of Europe's literary and scientific elite, including Victor Hugo in France, Herbert Spencer in England, Ernst Haeckel in Germany, and Henrik Ibsen in Norway. Italian signatories included Italy's foremost poet, Giosuè Carducci, the famed anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, and many of the national leaders of the left, Crispi included.

  The Church soon began its counterattack. In a typical tirade, published as a booklet in 1886, Monsignor Pietro Balan wrote: "To the man who just a few years ago was virtually unknown, to the despised and neglected thinker ... they now want to build monuments and create eternal fame. Toward this rather peculiar goal, it has been the few, not the many, who have devoted themselves; not the serious scientists, but the youths; not the philosophers, but the politicians; not the Italy of patriotic traditions, but the Italians who follow the new doctrines." What his champions see in him, above all, Monsignor Balan charged, "is hatred of Catholicism, denial of the Christian God, theological impiety ... apostasy, defection from Christ."

  Despite such denunciations, money kept pouring in to the committee. By June 1886, with more than enough funds in hand for the monument, the committee sent a formal request to the city for permission to place the statue in Campo dei Fiori. It was signed not only by the members of the student committee but by many of the Italian members of the honorary committee that had been formed as well, including Crispi and all the other major leaders of the left with the exception of Prime Minister Depretis.2

  On August 10,1887, just three days after becoming prime minister, Crispi wrote back to Adriano Lemmi, grand master of the Italian Freemasons, who had written to him on behalf of the organizing committee. Even before receiving Lemmi's request, Crispi explained, he had already spoken to Rome's mayor, saying that t
he new national government would raise no objection to the erection of a monument to Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori.

  The matter was thus left in the hands of the Roman city council, whose approval was needed. But, to the promoters' chagrin, this the council was not willing to give, for it had a solid Catholic majority, and the mayor, Duke Leopold Torlonia, the scion of one of Rome's most prominent noble families, himself had little sympathy for the anticlerical organizers.

  But the duke's days as mayor were numbered. On Saturday, December 24,1887, Torlonia visited Monsignor Lucido Parocchi, the cardinal vicar of Rome, asking him to give his best wishes to the pope on the upcoming celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of his priesthood. For Crispi, it was too much. Long suspicious of Torlonia for his ties to the Church, Crispi told him on December 29 that he was being dismissed. A few days later, Crispi's own choice for mayor, Alessandro Guiccioli, took Torlonia's place.

  Enraged, Vatican officials sent a new series of denunciatory circulars to papal nuncios throughout Europe. The major Catholic newspaper in Turin, L'Unità Cattolica, in a commentary typical of the Catholic press, called Crispi a new Robespierre.3

  Guiccioli, a member of the right and an aristocrat, was conservative but not particularly close to the Church. Involved in 1870 in the king's last-minute attempts to strike a deal with Pius IX before invading Rome, Guiccioli had been elected to parliament from a district near Bologna in 1875 and then, defeated in 1882, was subsequently elected to Rome's city council.4 The Bruno committee lost no time in pressing its case with the new mayor, meeting with him in mid-January 1888. Guiccioli at first tried to stall, arguing that tensions with the Church were then too great to consider putting the matter to a city council vote. In response, the committee announced a strike of Rome's university students, their example quickly followed at the University of Naples.