Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (43 page)

The Tuscan reform movement was inspired by theology. Many of its objectives, however pugnaciously and divisively asserted, were pastorally desirable, and would be realised two centuries later at the Second Vatican Council. Elsewhere in Italy anti-papalism took cruder forms. From the mid-1770s the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had discontinued its traditional feudal payments to the papacy, and the government in Naples began to close down contacts with Rome, and with the international heads of the religious orders. The Inquisition was suppressed, the bishops were forbidden to use the sanction of excommunication, and from 1784 all direct contact with the Pope was forbidden on pain of banishment. Papal communications were made subject to state approval, and the crown asserted its right to appoint to all bishoprics.

Nobody could plausibly present these measures, which the bishops disliked but dared not resist, as being for the good of the Church. The Pope responded by refusing to institute any of the bishops nominated by the crown. By 1787 forty bishoprics were vacant, but the papacy was powerless in the face of government determination. In 1792, with almost half the sees in southern Italy vacant, the papacy caved in and instituted all the nominated bishops, leaving the Neapolitan crown triumphant.

Any pope would have found these challenges hard to handle. It was the Church’s bad luck that the last Pope of the eighteenth century, Pius VI (1775–99), was a particularly poor specimen. Giovanni Angelo Braschi was an aristocrat who had worked his way with charm and efficiency through the papal civil service. He had been private secretary to Benedict XIV, and treasurer to Clement XIII, the latter a prestigious and profitable job which led to a cardinal’s hat. He was not a man of deep spirituality, and was a latecomer to the priesthood, having been engaged to be married before hesitantly opting
for a career in the Curia (his fiancée entered a convent). He was wholly without pastoral experience. After a conclave which dragged on for four months he emerged as the candidate acceptable to the Catholic monarchs. To secure his election he let it be known that he would rule in harmony with the monarchies and would not restore the Jesuits.

Braschi was tall, handsome and vain, proud of his elegant legs and noble mane of white hair. Despite the desperate state of papal finances he adopted a style reminiscent of Renaissance predecessors like Paul III, though he took the name Pius in honour of the austere St Pius V. He lavished money he did not have on raising Egyptian obelisks at key points in the city, on building an enormous new sacristy for St Peter’s, on the creation of the modern Vatican Museum, and on a sustained but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to drain the Pontine marshes. He was a nepotist in the great Renaissance tradition, enriching his own nephews at the expense of the Church. In the mid-1780s Pius scandalised Rome by his involvement in a bitterly contested lawsuit over a legacy which he wanted to pass on to a nephew. A compromise solution was hammered out, and the nephew got his money, but the Pope appeared grasping, and the dignity and integrity of the papacy had been damaged.

For most of his pontificate, however, Pius rather specialised in dignity. Rome was now firmly established as the heart of the Grand Tour, and the age-old flood of pilgrims was augmented by a stream of tourists intent on seeing the sights. Pius’ extension of the Vatican collections made the Vatican Museum an essential part of any tour, his patronage of artists like the sculptor Canova made Rome the model of taste. Almost as important, however, was the elaborate papal liturgy, over which he presided with a grave and reverent elegance which impressed Protestant onlookers, and did a good deal to soften their hostility to Catholicism.

None of this, however, could compensate for his growing powerlessness in the face of the determined anti-papalism of the Catholic states. Here Pius’ vanity may have concealed from him the full seriousness of the situation. As relations worsened with Joseph II over imperial government of the Church in Austria and Milan, Pius determined to go himself to Vienna, hoping that Joseph would succumb to his personal fascination. The visit did indeed reveal a huge and perhaps unexpected popular reverence for the person of the
Pope. The Emperor received him with punctilious correctness and treated him with honour. Everywhere he went Pius was mobbed by yearning crowds, who queued for hours in the rain to catch a glimpse of him, to have their rosaries or scapulars blessed by him. But in hard terms he achieved nothing. Chancellor Kaunitz stunned him by shaking his hand instead of kissing it, and even while he was still in Vienna the relentless stream of government decrees for the reordering of the Austrian Church went on. When he left, Kaunitz gloated, ‘He has a black eye.’

Joseph went on pressing his authority in Italy too, and by 1783 he and the Pope were at odds over the Austrian claim to appoint to all bishops in Milanese territory, a clear invasion of traditional papal prerogatives. This time Joseph reversed Pius’ strategy, and arrived unannounced in the papal apartments in the Vatican by a back stair to talk the matter over. Pius conceded all his demands, saving face (and the theoretical rights of the papacy) by granting the nomination as a personal concession to Joseph as duke of Milan, and not a recognition of his rights as emperor. The papacy was dying the death of a thousand cuts.

In 1789 France was in financial and political crisis. Confidence in the monarchy had long been eroded by royal fiscal demands. It now dissolved altogether in the face of national bankruptcy, and bourgeois resentment of the stranglehold of the aristocracy over every aspect of national life exposed a deep rift in the heart of the French political system. On 4 May 1789 the Estates General met to confront and resolve the national crisis.

It was not, at first, a crisis of religion. Catholicism was an integral part of the French constitution. State persecution of Protestants had only recently been halted. The last pastor to be martyred had died in gaol in 1771, the last Protestant galley-slaves released in 1775. France’s Prime Minister was the Cardinal Archbishop of Toulouse. But the nation was bankrupt and the Church was rich, and within the Church the gulf between aristocracy and commoners was writ large. Almost to a man the bishops were wealthy aristocrats, while a third of the parish clergy lived at or below subsistence level. In such circumstances resentments simmered, and it would not be long before the national crisis was replicated within the Church itself.

And, below the surface, Catholic Christianity in France had been eroded. The Cardinal of Toulouse was not in fact a Christian. Like
many other fashionable clergy, he shared Voltaire’s sardonic rejection of revealed religion, and when it had been proposed to promote him to Paris, Louis XVI had refused, on the ground that the Archbishop of Paris ‘must at least believe in God’. Jansenist and Gallican views within the legal profession had created a widespread hostility to the papacy, while there was even wider dislike of the religious orders.

The key moment of the Revolution came in the last week of June, when after a period of agonising debate and uncertainty, the clergy, under mounting threats from the Paris mob, reluctantly threw in their lot with the commons of the Third Estate. The legal independence of the church of France was at an end. From August 1789 France was ruled by a single-chamber Constituent Assembly, which soon turned its attention to the reform of the Church. On 11 August 1789 the Assembly ended the payment of tithes. On 2 November, at the suggestion of Monseigneur Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun and another unbelieving aristocrat, the entire property of the French church was put ‘at the disposal of the nation’, and a massive sell-off began. The bankruptcy of the nation would be solved by confiscating the entire wealth of the church. The resulting alienation of Church property marked a new phase in the secularisation of the French national psyche. Nothing would ever be quite the same again: the sacred receded, anti-clericalism grew.

The attack on the Church’s possessions inevitably spilled over into an attack on the most resented concentration of Church wealth, the religious orders. On 28 October 1789 the Assembly ended the taking of religious vows in France. Four months later, in February 1790, the suppression of the existing religious orders began. Before the Revolution, a monk or nun who abandoned the cloister thereby became an outlaw. Now, with the opportunity of liberty, there came a massive exodus, especially among men. Thirty-eight of the forty monks of Cluny walked away, and the greatest religious house of the Middle Ages came to an ignominious end. Within a few years the great abbey church would be no more, demolished and sold off as builders’ rubble.

With the dismantling of the old financial machinery, the need for a reformed structure for the church of France became imperative. In July 1790 the Assembly enacted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.
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It imposed on the Gallican church a mixture of early-Church anti-quarianism and eighteenth-century rationalisation. From now on all parish clergy and all bishops would be elected – the priests by the electors
of the local districts, bishops by those of the civil Départements. All clergy became salaried officials, parishes of fewer than 6,000 souls were abolished or merged, and dioceses were reduced in number and brought into line with the civil Départements. Bishops were to rule in collaboration with a council of twelve vicars episcopal chosen from among the clergy. There was plenty to object to in all this, yet it was hard to maintain that the new arrangements were much worse than those which had produced unbelieving bishops like Talleyrand or the Cardinal of Toulouse, and the tide of revolutionary enthusiasm made clergy reluctant to resist the Civil Constitution.

Under the Constitution, the relations of the reordered church of France with Rome were to be more tenuous than ever. The Pope would no longer be asked for canonical institution of bishops. All that would be required would be that the new bishops should send the Pope a letter expressing unity of faith. In the previous year the Assembly had unilaterally abolished annates and other payments to Rome. The Pope had said nothing, and it was widely assumed that he would go along with the new arrangements, having little choice in the matter. All Europe knew of Joseph II’s unilateral reforms, and the Synod of Pistoia. The Civil Constitution seemed just another step along the same road. In mid June 1790 the inhabitants of the papal enclave of Avignon threw off papal rule and asked for incorporation into France. The leaders of the Assembly were confident this gave them a bargaining counter with Rome which would ensure Pius VI’s compliance.

On 22 July 1790 the King, reluctantly, sanctioned the Civil Constitution, having heard nothing from Rome. The very next day a brief arrived from Pius VI, condemning the Constitution as schismatical, and urging the King to reject it. The King suppressed the brief, but opened frantic negotiations with the Pope to try to reach some compromise. Most of the clergy were opposed to the Constitution, but many thought that some interim arrangements might make it tolerable – the Pope, it was thought, might institute the elected bishops without being asked, till the Constitution itself could be revised in a more Catholic direction. The bishops appealed to Rome to help them find a compromise.

At this fateful moment, Pius VI was silent. He detested the Civil Constitution, would not come to terms with schism. Yet he feared to speak out, in case he drove the church of France to re-enact the Anglican schism, two centuries on. While Rome dithered, however, anti-clerical
feeling escalated. On 27 November the Assembly imposed an oath of obedience to the Civil Constitution on all office-holding clergy, setting 4 January 1791 as the final deadline for conformity.

The clergy of France were in an agonising dilemma. So far as anyone knew, the Pope had not spoken. Most clergy detested the new arrangements, but many were committed to the Revolution in broad terms, unwilling to destabilise it by rejecting its religious provisions. Many took the oath rather than starve, many took it out of a sense of duty to their people, many took it because the Pope had not condemned it, many took it with saving clauses ‘as far as the Catholic faith allows’. When Pius VI finally did publish his condemnation in May 1792 there was a rush of conscience-stricken retractions. Only a third of the clergy in the Assembly took the oath. Of the clergy of France as a whole, about half of the parish priests and only seven of the bishops accepted the Constitution. Nevertheless, a schismatic Constitutional Church had come into existence, its newly elected bishops consecrated by the cynical Talleyrand, who then immediately resigned his own episcopal orders and returned to the lay state, eventually marrying an English Protestant divorcée.

In theory the ‘refractory’ clergy who had refused the oath should have been left unmolested, free to follow their own papalist form of Catholicism without hindrance, once the posts they had vacated had been filled up (often by ex-monks). In practice, as the Revolution became more radical, and fears mounted of an Austrian invasion to suppress it, refusal of the Constitutional Oath was equated with counter-revolutionary treason. By May 1792, with France at war with Austria, refractory clergy denounced by twenty citizens were liable to be deported. The King’s refusal to sanction this decree hastened his own downfall. In July Prussia declared war on France; on 10 August the monarchy was abolished.

And now the persecutions began. Refractory clergy, however blameless, were forced into hiding, and massacres of the clergy imprisoned in Paris, Orleans and elsewhere took place. Over the course of the next year, 30,000 clergy, including most of the bishops, left France, to take refuge in the Papal States, in Switzerland, in Spain, in Germany, even in Protestant England, where Catholics had only recently been granted a modest amount of religious liberty, yet where 700 French priests and monks were maintained on the royal estate at Winchester alone. The Revolution, having called the Constitutional Church into
existence, now turned against it. The Assembly had introduced clerical marriage. In September 1792 it took responsibility for registering marriages away from the Constitutional Church and handed it over to the local mayors. This apparently minor administrative change was in fact of enormous significance, for the same decree recognised civil divorce. The secular state had been born, the legal authority of the new Church fatally undermined.