Prisoner of the Vatican

by David I. Kertzer

  It had been almost three decades since the Kingdom of Italy was founded, and almost two since Rome had become its capital. Yet the battle raged on. The Church continued to warn all the faithful that the Italian state was illegitimate, its founding a sacrilege, its leaders doing the work of the devil, its capital an affront to God. Throughout Europe, many wondered whether Italy could last much longer.

  Epilogue: Italy and the Pope

  SEPTEMBER 20, 1870, marked a historic turning point both for the Roman Catholic Church and for Italy—and, one could say, for the whole Western world as well: on that date the Middle Ages was finally laid to rest. Europe's last theocratic government was ended and with it a model of government based on a mixture of Church law and civil law, of discrimination against those practicing minority religions, of a Church monopoly over education and social services, and the use of police powers to enforce religious observance. In the short run, all this proved traumatic for the Holy See, but from our vantage point today it was, of course, inevitable and, ultimately, liberating for the Church itself.1

  The pope never did abandon Rome. Yet the last years of the nineteenth century saw little reduction of the tensions between church and state, with periodic flare-ups producing new rounds of denunciations, charges, and fears on both sides. Italy remained perilously weak, its legitimacy undercut by the pope and the Church.

  While Leo XIII's earlier hopes of making peace with the Italian state waned and ecclesiastical proponents of reconciliation were silenced, the pope was well aware of the need for a more positive program to adapt the Church to the times and to win greater popular support. Toward this end, in May 1891 he released the historic encyclical Rerum novarum, castigating the excesses of capitalism while warning of the evils of socialism. By speaking out forcefully in favor of workers' rights, the pope helped change the Church's image as the handmaiden of the elites.

  To mark this new initiative, the encyclical was followed by an endless stream of working-class pilgrims to the Vatican, including, in September of that year, over 20,000 French workers. The scene on September 21, when the French pilgrims crowded into St. Peter's to hear the pope say a special mass for them, was described by a Roman newspaper close to the government: "This old man lifts the chalice with his trembling arm; his court, in resplendent dress, kneels around him in front of the altar; this extraordinary crowd bends their knees or bows their head in the immense temple, where only a sweet music, steeped in mysticism, is heard. It all made for an imposing, truly unique scene."2

  The coincidence of the massive presence of the French pilgrims with the celebration of the twenty-first anniversary of the taking of Rome was not lost on the Italians. The moderate Fanfulla complained: "These so-called pilgrims have come to our capital for the sole purpose of protesting Italy's taking of Rome." Crispi's paper, La Riforma, kept tensions high: "The gunpowder is all ready. It will take but a spark for it to explode.3

  The match was lit on the morning of October 2, when pilgrims from a French Catholic youth group visited the Pantheon, which held Italy's most sacred patriotic shrine, the tomb of Victor Emmanuel. Beside the tomb was a register in which guests signed their name. One of the young Catholics, an eighteen-year-old seminarian, wrote in large letters next to his signature, "Vive le Pape!" Two of his comrades followed his example, scrawling "Long live the Pope!" next to their names.

  Word of the affront soon spread through the streets, the sacrilege growing ever more outrageous in the retelling: French pilgrims had defiled the monument to the father of the nation. Crowds of outraged Italian patriots descended on the Pantheon; then groups broke off, rushing through the city's streets, waving Italian flags, and shouting "Long live the King!," "Down with the French Pilgrims!," "Down with the Vatican!" Pilgrims peacefully walking by were chased and harassed. That evening angry patriots made their way to the imposing French embassy, at the Farnese Palace, again waving flags, holding burning torches, and shouting "Down with the Pope!" "Down with the French!" Dispersed by a large contingent of police and soldiers, they surged into the nearby Campo dei Fiori, where they cheered the statue of Giordano Bruno. Similar demonstrations began the following evening in Turin and other Italian cities. In Bari and Palermo, the authorities succeeded in stopping the demonstrators as they marched on the local French consulates. Meanwhile, the young man who triggered the outbreak with his scribbling in the Pantheon guestbook was arrested, jailed, then released on October 10. He was escorted to the French border and received by his countrymen as a Catholic hero. 4

  These old battles continued, but forces of change began to appear, forces that would eventually encourage the Church to come to terms with the Italian state. The end of the century, and the years that followed, saw the dramatic growth of the socialist movement in Italy, viewed by both Italian and Church leaders as a mortal threat. With the expansion of suffrage, those in power grew ever more frustrated with the non expedit that kept Catholics from voting. In 1894, just returned to the prime ministership after a two-year absence, Crispi tried once again to initiate secret negotiations with the Vatican aimed at forming a coalition directed against the growing ranks of the extreme left, relying this time on Monsignor Isidore Carini, the son of an old friend.

  Yet these efforts would come to nothing, partially because Crispi was constrained by those around him from making any territorial concessions to the pope—if in fact he was ever inclined to do so himself, which is doubtful—and because the pope, surrounded by intransigents, was in no mood to entirely renounce his claims to temporal power. In January 1895, any chance for these secret negotiations ended when the healthy fifty-one-year-old Monsignor Carini suddenly became ill and died. Rumors that he had been poisoned by intransigents in the Vatican quickly spread. Cardinal Hohenlohe, another proponent of reconciliation who had long feared such a fate for himself, had no doubts: "They've poisoned him, because he was inconvenient for certain people." He added: "In Rome, you risk being poisoned every half hour." Monsignor Carini's family asked for an autopsy. Their request was denied.5

  Crispi's new government, facing spreading peasant revolts in Sicily, responded by sending troops to the island and proclaiming martial law. The rapid expansion and increased militancy of socialist organizations throughout northern Italy were, likewise, dealt with by the introduction of new repressive laws. Socialists, anarchists, disgruntled peasants, and government corruption scandals all left the Italian leadership battered. With the enthusiasms of national unification a distant memory for most, Italian nationalists feared for the future of their country.

  Some sense of this mood can be gleaned from the diary of one of the most acute chroniclers of Italy's fin de siècle, Domenico Farini, president of the Italian Senate and confidant of the king.

  Eager to generate greater popular support for the state and its institutions, Farini and like-minded patriots saw the upcoming twenty-fifth anniversary of the taking of Rome as an opportunity that they could not afford to pass up. But they had to contend with other conservatives in parliament, who feared that any festivities marking September 20 would anger the pope.

  In a March 1894 diary entry, following a parliament vote against the initial plans for the anniversary celebrations, Farini expressed his dismay. The vote had confirmed his worst suspicions. "The Italians," he wrote, "are tired of Rome and of unification. The papal partisans are overjoyed. There is really no longer any room in this city for anyone other than the pope. The Romans who were with us as long as they had, or hoped to get, certain benefits are now increasingly turning away. Here either the reds or the blacks will prevail."6

  The following February, the plan to create a committee of luminaries to serve as honorary sponsors of the twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations was put off. Members of parliament had nixed it, as one explained, "in order not to offend the Vatican." Farini was incensed: "Strange confession ... They think that they can befriend the Vatican by repudiating the celebration of September 20. It would take a lot more! They would have to restore all that Septe
mber 20 took from them. And even that would not be enough! They would then also want what was taken in 1860. Because the government of the priests does not die, it does not give an inch, it does not give up."

  A week later, Farini was accosted by a group of senators who were angry because a government minister had signed on as an official sponsor of the anniversary ceremonies.

  "Why make that poor old man in the Vatican unhappy?" one of the senators asked.

  "In order not to offend him," replied Farini, "the Senate and the king would have to leave Rome."

  Farini was convinced that the Italian state was in serious trouble. Moderates and conservatives were so afraid of the socialist threat, he thought, that they could no longer resist the temptation to seek the pope's support, at whatever cost. "We are," he wrote, "on an extremely dangerous slope. To protect itself, society feels the need for religion, for the clergy, for the pope. The State is forced to invoke it, while the pope cannot recognize—and will never resign himself to—the Italian state in the form in which it now exists. And so the conservatives will abandon the Italian state." 7

  Despite the conservatives' misgivings, plans for the twenty-fifth anniversary commemoration went ahead, strongly supported by Prime Minister Crispi. The highlight of the ceremonies in Rome took place on September 20, when a huge equestrian statue of Garibaldi was unveiled at the top of the Gianiculum hill. The symbolism was not lost on the Vatican. It was Garibaldi who had branded the papacy a cancerous growth on Italian society and argued that Rome's priests could be put to more productive use by being sent to drain the nearby marshes. This same Garibaldi, much larger than life, now had his head turned left, looking out toward the Vatican, while his horse advanced toward the center of the city.

  Nor did the speech that Crispi gave in front of the statue that day help calm Italian souls. Noting that the statue was erected in the midst of the battlefield where, in 1849, Garibaldi had led the defense of the Roman republic against the French army, Crispi denounced the French "invader" for having "taken on the barbarous mission of restoring the priestly tyranny." He then went on to lecture the Church on its proper mission: "If Christianity, following the teachings of Paul and John, was able, without the aid of worldly arms, to conquer the world, it is difficult to understand why the Vatican must still aspire to civil rule in order to carry out its spiritual activities." Crispi then set out to explain the Vatican's true motivations, as he saw them: "It is not for the protection nor for the prestige of religion that our adversaries invoke the Holy See's restoration of temporal power, but for human reasons: their lust for a kingdom, their earthly greed."8

  The king, Umberto I, found his prime minister's remarks vulgar and offensive and unnecessarily provocative, but he was not especially surprised. As he confided to one of his retinue: "Crispi is a pig, but a necessary pig."9 Yet Crispi's fabled indispensability was about to desert him. A few months later, after the disastrous defeat of Italian troops at Adua, in Ethiopia, violent popular protests forced his resignation. Nor would the king last much longer himself, the end of his reign brought by an anarchist's bullet in July 1900. He was fifty-six years old.

  Leo XIII, aged ninety, had by then occupied St. Peter's chair for twenty-two years, during which time he had never set foot outside the precincts of the Vatican. In his last years, weakened by age and embittered by a life lived under siege, he had given up on his earlier dream of reconciliation with the Italian state. In the winter of 1901–2, sensing that death was near, he dictated what came to be known as his "political last testament," ordering that it be read at the conclave following his death. In it he denounced the conditions in which the pope found himself, "robbed of his civil sovereignty, and therefore of his independence and freedom, and reduced to living under hostile domination." The pope reaffirmed the impossibility of two sovereigns living in Rome and expressed his belief that God would ultimately bring an end to the unholy revolt against His kingdom. In his final remarks, Leo fondly recalled the "pontiffs best known for their wisdom and holiness, who in defense of their independence and their civil principality did not hesitate to use, with great vigor, both spiritual and material arms." 10

  Leo died in 1903. Rampolla, believed by many to be his logical successor, saw his ambitions crushed by the Austrians—who had long resented his French sympathies—an Austrian cardinal casting his country's veto before he could get the votes needed for election.11 And so Leo was succeeded by Pius X, a man who, in his gregarious personality, peasant family background, and disdain for international diplomacy, could hardly have been more unlike his predecessor. Yet Pius X continued the Church's battle against modern times and refused to recognize the Italian state. It was only on his death and with the papacy of Benedict XV in 1914 that a new attitude began to take hold in the Vatican. It had been over half a century since the Kingdom of Italy was founded, and it was by then impossible to believe that the Papal States could ever be brought back.

  By the time the First World War was over, it was clear to virtually everyone in the Vatican that the growing socialist movement presented a much greater threat than any posed by the moderate forces that controlled the Italian government. And so, in 1919, Benedict XV agreed to the creation of a Catholic political party, a move that his predecessors had so long resisted. The Italian Popular Party was formed, led by a priest, Luigi Sturzo, but not directly dependent on the Vatican or the Church hierarchy. With the approach of the first elections in which the new party would appear, in November of that year, the pope finally lifted the non expedit, which for so many decades had prohibited Catholics from voting or serving in parliament.

  In fact, the Catholic party did very well, receiving 21 percent of the vote, coming in second only to the Socialist Party, which received 32 percent. For the "liberals" who had controlled the Italian government for decades, the only way to form a cabinet that excluded the socialists was by relying on the deputies of the Popular Party. This they did. Yet the new government faced ever more militant trade unions and peasant leagues on its left and, on its right, the spread of fascist violence. Led by Benito Mussolini, the fascists won the favor of the police and military, who turned a blind eye to the attacks mounted by their squads of thugs. Amid all the violence, the state itself began to totter. In October 1922, in a grand theatrical gesture, Mussolini led his fascist acolytes on a March on Rome, where a craven Victor Emmanuel III, Umberto's diminutive son, hastily named him the new prime minister.

  Mussolini acted quickly to consolidate his power and by the mid-19205 had abolished all political organizations other than his own. In this he was helped by the Vatican, which decided that its best bet was to pull the plug on its own Catholic party and support Mussolini's more effective efforts to rid Italian society of the scourge of socialism. For his part, the Duce saw the tremendous benefit to be had—both domestically and internationally—by becoming the first Italian leader to make peace with the Church. And so, on February 11,1929, Mussolini himself, alongside the Vatican's secretary of state, Pietro Gasparri, signed the Lateran Pacts, ending the hostility that had existed between church and state since the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861. The Vatican agreed to recognize the legitimacy of the Italian state and of its capital in Rome. In exchange, the pope was given a large payment for the loss of the Papal States and a concordat regulating relations between the Catholic Church and Italy. The Vatican was deemed to have the rights of a sovereign state, to be called Vatican City. The Catholic religion became Italy's sole official religion. Catholic religious instruction was made obligatory in the public schools, and Catholic religious imagery was returned to schoolrooms and public offices throughout the country.

  On July 25,1929, after celebrating mass in St. Peter's, Pope Pius XI led a joyful procession through the great doors of the basilica and into the public square, where he pronounced his blessings to the multitudes. For the first time in almost fifty-nine years a pope had left the walls of the Vatican.

  The following year, in deference to the Vatican, the
fascist state abolished September 20 as a national holiday. The origins of modern Italy in the battle against the political power of the papacy had now become a part of history that Italians were encouraged to forget.

  Fascism's fall a decade and a half later left Mussolini's deal with the Vatican intact, with the Lateran Pacts enshrined in the new, postwar Italian constitution. But the Savoyard monarchy was not so lucky. Angered by the king's support for fascism and his cowardly behavior during the war, the Italian people voted to replace the monarchy with a republic. Although it had taken longer than Pius IX had imagined, his prediction had finally come true: Rome had room for but a single sovereign.

  One consequence of this burying of the hatchet was that Italy became a country rather unlike others, a country unable to celebrate its own birth, a country whose founding fathers had become an embarrassment.

  Not a year now goes by without a torrent of new books bemoaning the Italians' lack of national spirit and the weakness of their allegiance to the Italian state. The role played by the Vatican's decades-long refusal to recognize the state's legitimacy is hard to ignore here. Yet Italy today is a country where placards marking historic battles for national unification—at least those in its capital and in the rest of what were once the Papal States—must carefully avoid mentioning against whom those battles were actually fought. Teaching schoolchildren the views of the greatest hero of national unification, Giuseppe Garibaldi, has now become unthinkable. Celebrating the date when the capital was finally captured from the hands of the principal foe of national unification is considered unseemly, the name of the enemy itself unmentionable.

  September 20, 2002, passed in Rome with little public notice. The annual mass held by the Catholic faithful, mourning the anniversary of the day when Rome was taken from the pontiff, received, as usual, no more than a paragraph in the papers the next day. On the front page of Rome's daily newspaper on September 21, the only story related to church and state was a piece written by Monsignor Manlio Asta defending the placement of the crucifix in public classrooms on the grounds that the cross was a universal symbol of European civilization.12