Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (49 page)

The Pope was in fact uneasy about all this, worrying about democratic concessions in the government of the Papal States which might give laymen unacceptable influence in spiritual matters and usurp the authority of priests. He was carried along with the tide of change, however, half approving, half fearful that to hold back might provoke a wave of hatred against the Church. And, whatever his private reservations, the Pope became the darling of Europe, congratulated by Protestant statesmen, celebrated in London, Berlin, New York as a model ruler. In Italy hopes for a federation of Italian states, with the Pope as president, grew. Mazzini wrote an open letter from England to tell him he was the most important man in Italy and the hopes of the people were in his hands, nationalist crowds chanted ‘Viva Italia! Viva Pio Nono!’

Disillusion came in 1848, the year of revolutions all over Europe. In Rome, the Pope responded to the dangerous revolutionary fervour by establishing an elected municipal government, and in March agreed a new constitution for the Papal States with an elected chamber capable of vetoing papal policy. As the demand for the expulsion of Austria from Italy turned into a war, more and more Italians treated it as a Crusade, and called on the Pope to lead it. On 29 April 1848, Pius made a speech designed to clarify the nature of papal policy towards Italy. It was a douche of icy water on the overheated
enthusiasm which had surrounded his first two years as pope. As father of all the faithful, he declared, he could take no part in making war on a Catholic nation: he would send no troops against Austria. He condemned the idea of a federal Italy led by the papacy, urging Italians to remain faithful to their princes.

This statement, in effect a clear return to the policy of Gregory XVI, provoked a universal sense of betrayal. Overnight, from being the most popular man in Italy, he became the most hated. Rome became increasingly ungovernable, and in November 1848 his lay Prime Minister, Pellegrino Rossi, was murdered on the steps of the Cancelleria. The Pope fled. Disguised as an ordinary priest, he left Rome by night on 24 November, and took refuge at Gaeta in Neapolitan territory. Rome erupted into revolution, and Garibaldi and Mazzini established themselves at the head of a fiercely anti-clerical republican regime. From Gaeta, Pio Nono called on the Catholic powers to restore him, and in July 1849 French troops duly took possession of Rome on his behalf. He himself re-entered Rome in April 1850. He never recovered from his exile of 1848, and for the rest of his life remained convinced that political concessions to democracy merely fuelled the fires of revolution. The liberal honeymoon was over.

For the next twenty years, Pio Nono’s position as ruler of the Papal States depended entirely on the presence of French and Austrian troops to suppress rebellion. The Christian world was treated to the spectacle of the Father of all the Faithful seated on bayonets, and ruling, rather ineptly, 3,000,000 subjects, most of whom wanted to be rid of him. Leadership of the cause of Italian unity passed to the Piedmontese, under King Victor Emmanuel II. Pio Nono admired Victor Emmanuel, and found it hard to restrain his pride and delight at news of his victories over the Austrians. But the Piedmontese government at Turin, and its premier Cavour, pursued a systematically secularist policy, and through the 1850s introduced a series of hostile measures designed to reduce the influence of the Church. In 1854, all monasteries and convents in Piedmontese territory, except for a handful of nursing and teaching orders, were suppressed. This radical anti-clericalism, harking back to Josephinism and to the Civil Constitution, persuaded Pio Nono that the Risorgimento was hopelessly atheistic, a reincarnation of the spirit of 1789. Italy was witnessing an apocalyptic struggle between the forces of good, led by himself, and of evil, led by Turin.

The temporal power of the Pope over the Papal States was central to Pio Nono’s religious vision. The Patrimony of Peter was ‘the seamless robe of Jesus Christ’, committed to each pope as a sacred trust, as the guarantee and defence of the Pope’s universal spiritual ministry. The heroic resistance of Pius VII dominated Pio Nono’s imagination, and those of his advisers. The absorption of papal territory into a united Italy therefore seemed to him a device of the devil to undermine the papacy itself. The issue came to a head in 1860, when the Legations and the Marches of Ancona were annexed to the kingdom of Piedmont, and the Papal States, reduced by two-thirds, shrank to a narrow strip of land on the western coast of Italy. The Pope refused to accept the loss of these provinces, and they were bravely but hopelessly defended by a volunteer international brigade, recruited from devout Catholics all over Europe. (Pio Nono had been doubtful about the Irish volunteers at first, because he feared the effects on Irishmen of the ready availability of cheap Italian wine.) Throughout the 1860s, as international pressure mounted on him to come to terms with the reduction and eventual eclipse of the temporal power, he remained serenely stubborn. As ‘Vicar of a Crucified God’ he was prepared to suffer, but never to surrender. If necessary he would take to the catacombs: God would vindicate him.

The conflict between the pope’s perceptions and those of the secular world were starkly revealed in the late 1850s by the Mortara affair. Edgardo Mortara was a Jewish boy whose family lived in the papal territory of Bologna. When he was still only one, the child fell dangerously ill, and a Christian maidservant secretly baptised him by sprinkling water from a bucket while his parents were out of the room. When news of her action leaked out the Inquisition investigated, since it was contrary to Catholic law for a Christian – which the boy now technically was – to be brought up as a Jew. Eventually the six-year-old Edgardo was forcibly taken away from his parents, and placed under the direct protection of the pope in Rome. Despite the serious misgivings of many Catholics, including the pope’s own Secretary of State, the appeals of the family, of the Roman Jews, the intervention of the Emperor of Austria and Napoleon III of France, and the protests of the anti-clerical press, Pio Nono resolutely rejected all pleas. He made a pet of Edgardo, escorting him into public audiences, playing hide and seek with him under his cloak. The pope’s French protectors were so acutely embarrassed by the whole
affair that the French ambassador seriously discussed with Cavour the possibility of kidnapping Mortara and returning him to his parents. For his part, the pope interpreted all criticism of his action as godless persecution, a veiled attack on religious conviction, and told the child ‘My boy, you have cost me dearly, and I have suffered a great deal because of you’. The whole world, both the powerful and the powerless, he declared ‘tried to steal this boy away from me’ but ‘by the grace of God I have seen my duty and I would rather cut off all my fingers than shrink from it’. Mortara never returned to his family, but eventually became a happy enough Catholic priest, and lived on into the 1930s. His case was both a human tragedy and a demonstration of the gulf which had opened up between the thought-world of the papacy, and the secular liberal values which were now the common moral currency of Europe, even for many Catholics.

Paradoxically, the increasingly beleaguered position of the papacy in Italy added to its religious prestige. There were of course many Catholics, including some cardinals and curial clergy, who saw that the temporal power of the Pope was not in fact vital to his role as a spiritual leader, provided that conclaves and episcopal appointments were free from external pressures, that the Pope had uncensored communication with the local hierarchies, and that the Italian church was freed from harassment by the anti-clerical regime at Turin. Liberal Catholics in France, Belgium, Germany and England groaned at the confrontation between Pio Nono and the Risorgimento, and longed for an accommodation between the Church and political reality. Given the history of the papacy over the previous half-century, however, and the blatant animosity of Turin towards the Church, it was by no means obvious that such an accommodation was in the Church’s best interests.

And there were many for whom the struggle in Italy was a microcosm of a greater confrontation between the anti-Christian spirit of the Enlightenment and of the Revolution on the one hand and God’s revealed truth on the other. For them, Pio Nono’s policy was not political obscurantism, but the last heroic stand of Christian civilisation against the forces of atheism and rebellion against God. The convert Anglican Henry Edward Manning, future Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, declared that the temporal power of the Pope was the sign of ‘the freedom, the independence, the sovereignty of the kingdom of God upon earth’. It was because the Papal States
were ‘the only spot of ground on which the Vicar of Christ can set the sole of his foot in freedom’ that ‘they who would drive the Incarnation off the face of the earth hover about it to wrest it from his hands’.
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In a sermon at the requiem Mass for the Irish volunteers who had fallen in defence of the Papal States in 1860, Manning declared that the dead soldiers were martyrs for the faith; identifying the cause of the temporal power with ‘the independence of the Universal Church’, he denounced the attack on it as a ‘falling away from the supernatural order, and a return to (merely) natural society’, the end of Christendom.
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Manning was the spokesman for a new and ardent Ultramontanism which held the Pope in almost mystical reverence. This devout papalism was just one aspect of a devotional revolution within Catholicism, away from the sober decorum of eighteenth-century religion towards a more emotional and colourful religion of the heart, a new emphasis on ceremonial, on the saints, on the Virgin Mary. The reform Catholicism of the previous century had frowned on and played down such manifestations of popular religious feeling. Nineteenth-century Catholicism welcomed them. The romantic idealisation of the Middle Ages which was a feature of many of the artistic movements of the century led to a revived interest in the ancient Roman liturgy, in plainchant, in sacramental symbolism. In the 1830s Dom Prosper Guéranger revived the Benedictine life in France at the abbey of Solesmes, and led a reaction against the eighteenth-century rationalisation of liturgy advocated by French Jansenists. Guéranger pioneered the rediscovery of Gregorian chant, and adopted the Roman liturgy as the essential focus of a renewed liturgical life in the Church. Before he died, every diocese in France had adopted the Roman missal in place of the older Gallican books. Ultramontane piety was achieving a Roman uniformity which Trent had failed to impose.

Ultramontane piety, however, was not confined to the transformation of the liturgy. The cult of Mary blossomed, for this was the beginning of a great age of Marian apparitions. In 1830 Catherine Labouré experienced a vision of the Virgin crowned with stars which was popularised in the form of the so-called ‘Miraculous Medal’. The cult was associated with the doctrine of Mary’s perfect sinlessness, or Immaculate Conception, and the medal carried the prayer ‘O Mary Conceived without Original Sin, Pray for us who
have recourse to thee’. In 1846 two shepherd children in Savoy, at La Salette, had a vision of a beautiful weeping lady, who lamented the desecration of Sunday, the prevalence of swearing and blasphemy, and the spread of drunkenness. Revelations, miracles and healings followed, and a pilgrimage to the ‘holy mountain of La Salette’ became popular. In 1858 La Salette was eclipsed by the Marian visions of Bernadette Soubirous at the grotto of Massabielle, at Lourdes in the French Pyrenees, round which the greatest Christian pilgrimage site in the modern world rapidly developed.

This blossoming of the cult of Mary was intimately linked to growing loyalty to the papacy. Gregory XVI actively encouraged devotion to the Immaculate Conception, and in 1854 Pio Nono, who attributed his own recovery from epilepsy to the intercession of Mary, solemnly defined the once contentious doctrine of Mary’s Immaculate Conception as part of the faith of Catholics. This definition was a momentous step in the development of the papal office, for although the Pope had consulted bishops beforehand, and the definition was widely desired, the doctrine was eventually proclaimed on the Pope’s sole authority. The Pope’s chamberlain, Monsignor Talbot, remarked that ‘the most important thing is not the new dogma itself, but the way in which it is proclaimed’.
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Heaven evidently approved, for four years later, at Lourdes, the visionary lady identified herself to Bernadette Soubirous by declaring, ‘I am the Immaculate Conception.’

The same direct link between popular piety and papal authority was evident in the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This devotion had been particularly loathed by eighteenth-century Jansenists, who denounced it as ‘cardiolatry’. In the nineteenth century it became the focus of an ardent devotion to the human nature of Christ, but it was never without a political dimension too. During the Vendée Rising in the 1790s it had been identified with popular Catholic repudiation of the Revolution, and its popularity among Ultramontane Catholics always carried this association. Pio Nono extended the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus to the universal calendar of the Church in 1856, and in 1864 he beatified the seventeenth-century visionary who had first popularised it. In 1861, after the fall of Romagna and the Marches, Jesuits launched an ‘apostolate of prayer’ to secure the ‘mystical subjugation’ of the whole world to the Sacred Heart. The political dimension of the cult was well in evidence when
in 1869 the Archbishop of Malines dedicated Belgium, with its liberal constitution, to the Sacred Heart, and when in 1873 Catholic deputies to the French National Assembly launched the first of a series of penitential pilgrimages of reparation to the Sacred Heart. The Sacré Coeur basilica in Montmartre was to become the focus of regular symbolic gestures of this sort. In 1876, Cardinal Manning made the links between the papacy and the cult of the Sacred Heart explicit in his best-selling sermon collection,
The Glories of the Sacred Heart
, where he presented Pio Nono’s political difficulties as a sacramental embodiment of the pierced and suffering humanity of Jesus. The Pope, stripped of his ‘temporal glory’, was the living icon of the Sacred Heart.
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