Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (51 page)

La tradizione son’ io
. Pius’ magnificently arrogant aphorism laid bare both the attraction and the historical poverty of the infallibilist case. No controversy in the first thousand years of Christianity had been settled merely by papal fiat: even Leo I’s Tome had been adopted by a general council. Agreement on the truth in early Christianity had emerged by convergence, consensus, debate, painful and costly processes which took decades and even centuries to crystallise. Manning and his associates wanted history without tears, a living oracle who could short-circuit human limitation. They wanted to confront the uncertainties of their age with instant assurance, revelation on tap.

They did not get it. Guidi had his bad half-hour with Pio Nono, but his words had their effect. The final decree, drafted by Archbishop Cullen of Dublin, took account of Guidi’s arguments and was headed ‘De Romani Pontificia infallibili magisterio’ (‘On the infallible teaching office of the Roman Pontiff’). The wording of the decree itself was carefully hedged around with restrictions. It declared that:

Routine papal teaching, therefore, was
not
infallible. The Pope had to be speaking in a specially solemn form –
ex cathedra
. His teaching had to be on a matter of faith and morals (so not, for example, political denunciation of the kingdom of Italy, or instructions to Catholics about how to vote), and it had to be about fundamentals, a matter to be held ‘by the whole Church’ (so not addressed merely to some passing debate). Such solemn statements were indeed declared to be irreformable ‘of themselves’ –
ex sese
a form of words designed specifically to refute the Gallican Articles of 1682, which said that papal definitions were only irreformable when they had been received by the Church. What the definition did
not
say, however, was that the Pope when teaching could or should
act
by himself, over against the Church rather than along with it. The wording avoided any comment on the processes by which such definitions emerge, and so did not concede the extreme Ultramontane case, in which the Pope need consult nobody, the idea implied in Pio Nono’s ‘I am the tradition.’ In fact, though it was not at once apparent, the Vatican definition called a halt to the wilder Ultramontane fantasies about the papacy: it was a defeat for men like Ward and Viuellot. It is some measure of the effectiveness of these restrictions that, since 1870, only one papal statement has qualified as ‘infallible’, the definition of the Assumption in 1950.

All of that, however, would take time to emerge. The final vote on the infallibility decree took place on 18 July 1870. Fifty-seven members of the minority, including Dupanloup, having fought the definition to the last, had left Rome the day before so as not to have to vote against a measure they now knew would go through by an overwhelming majority. In the event, 533 bishops voted for the decree, only two against. One of these two was Bishop Fitzgerald of Little Rock, Arkansas in the USA. When the Pope finally read out the decree, Fitzgerald left his place, knelt at the Pope’s feet and cried out, ‘Modo credo, sancte pater’ (‘Now I believe, Holy Father’). The voting and the solemn definition itself, proclaimed by the Pope, took place in a devastating thunderstorm. Rain bucketed down on to the dome of St Peter’s, and the dim interior was lit up by lightning
flashes. Hostile commentators took the thunder as a portent – God, they said, was angry. Manning was scathing: ‘They forgot Sinai and the Ten Commandments.’
²⁸

The Council’s business was not finished, nor would it ever be. On 19 July, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and the Council was prorogued
sine die
. In the event, it never reassembled, and the first business of the Second Vatican Council almost a century later would be to declare Vatican One closed. The outbreak of the war precipitated the crisis of the temporal power. Napoleon III now needed every soldier he could get. The French garrison was withdrawn from Rome on 4 August, leaving the Pope defenceless. Within a month, Napoleon’s empire had come to an end, and King Victor Emmanuel had invaded the Papal States. On 19 September Pio Nono locked himself into the Vatican, instructing his soldiers to put up a token resistance to the royal troops, to make clear that he had not surrendered the city. The next day Rome fell, and within a year it would be declared the capital of a united Italy. A millennium and a half of papal rule in Rome was at an end.

The pontificate of Pio Nono ended in gloom and confrontation. In November 1870 Italy passed the Law of Guarantees, to regulate the new relations between Church and state. At one level, it was a generous settlement. Though now deprived of territory, the Pope was to have all the honours and immunities of a sovereign, including a personal guard and a postal and telegraph service. He was to have the exclusive use (not ownership) of the Vatican, the Lateran and the papal country residence at Castel Gandolfo. He was to receive 3,500,000 lire annually as compensation for his lost territories. And the state surrendered any claim to the appointment of bishops, though it retained its rights over clerical benefices.

The Pope refused to recognise this law, or to accept the financial compensation. In practice, however, he tacitly adopted many of the provisions as a working arrangement, allowing clergy to accept the revenues of their benefices from the state, and taking over the appointment of all Italian bishops. This last was a move of enormous significance. Italy had a greater concentration of bishoprics than any other part of Christendom, and, as new territories were annexed to the kingdom, Victor Emmanuel had accumulated immense powers of appointment, greater than those of any other king in Christian history. By 1870 he had the right to appoint 237 bishops. All these
appointments now came into papal hands, and not only transformed the relationship of the Pope to the Italian episcopate, but shifted expectation in episcopal appointments generally. From now on, there was an increasing and quite new assumption that the Pope appointed bishops. Paradoxically, the loss of the temporal power enormously increased papal control over the Italian church.

Meanwhile, however, relations between the papacy and Italy worsened. Most Italians were Catholics, but a high proportion of Italy’s tiny electorate (1 per cent of the population) were anti-clericals, and through the 1870s a series of anti-clerical measures were devised to reduce the Church’s hold on Italian life. In 1868 Pio Nono had issued the decree
Non Expedit
forbidding Catholics to vote or stand in Italian elections, and this ban on political participation remained in force till after the First World War, further alienating Church and state. Pio Nono never again set foot outside the Vatican, and withheld the customary ‘Urbi et Orbi’ blessing of the city and the world, as a protest against his status as the Prisoner of the Vatican.

This confrontation with the Italian state was mirrored in Germany. The emergence of Prussia as the dominant European power after 1870 transformed the position of Catholicism in Europe, as the dominance of Catholic Austria was replaced by that of a strongly Protestant Prussia. The German church was extremely vigorous, with some of the best bishops of the age, like Archbishop Ketteler of Mainz, who had been a leader of the minority in the Council. In 1870 German Catholics organised themselves into a political party, the Centre Party, led by the brilliant tactician Ludwig Windthorst. The Chancellor of Prussia, Bismarck, detested and feared the Church as a potentially treasonous fifth column. Catholics in general wanted a larger pan-German state which would be less Protestant, and allied themselves with Liberal political critics of Bismarck’s regime. In 1872, with the appointment of a new minister of cults, Dr Falk, there began a systematic harassment of the Church, under the so-called Falk Laws. Catholic schools and seminaries were subjected to state control, religious orders were forbidden to teach, the Jesuits and eventually all religious orders were expelled. The Franciscan nuns celebrated in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ great poem ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ were refugees from this campaign. In 1874 imprisonment of ‘recalcitrant priests’ began, and in 1875 Pio Nono denounced the laws and excommunicated the few clergy who had submitted to them.

The
Kulturkampf
(struggle of civilisations) was devastating for the Church. More than a million Catholics were left without access to the sacraments, by 1876 all the sees in Prussia were vacant, and more than a thousand priests were exiled or imprisoned. Some German Catholics, led by Döllinger, had refused to accept the Vatican decrees. Bismarck systematically encouraged this schism, hoping to undermine Catholic unity. He also encouraged similar anti-Catholic campaigns elsewhere – in Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, though only Switzerland followed the Prussian example in launching its own
Kulturkampf
.

Bismarck’s hostility to Catholicism predated the Vatican Council, but the Vatican decrees were of course a factor. Bismarck claimed that the Vatican definition had revived the most extravagant claims of Gregory VII and Boniface VIII: this time, however, he promised, ‘We will not go to Canossa.’ Ultramontanes expected this opposition and revelled in it, their language full of violent images of strife and confrontation. Louis Viuellot had written that ‘Society is a sewer – it will perish – with the debris of the Vatican God will stone the human race.’
²⁹

Pio Nono died on 7 February 1878, after the longest pontificate in the Church’s history. During those years the Church had been transformed in every aspect of its life. Almost the entire episcopate had been reappointed during his reign. The religious orders had experienced a renewal and growth which would have been unimaginable a generation earlier, not merely by the expansion of existing orders, but by the creation of new ones. Many of these new orders were dedicated to apostolic work in schools, hospitals and overseas missions, and they represent an astonishing flowering of Christian energy. In the three years from 1862, Pio Nono approved seventy-four new congregations for women religious. By 1877 there were 30,287 male religious and 127,753 women religious in France alone, many of them in brotherhoods and sisterhoods devoted to active works. The same vigour is in evidence in the spread of Christian missions outside Europe. After 1850 missionary orders multiplied, and men and women flooded into the mission field: by the end of the century there were in the region of 44,000 nuns alone working in mission territory.

Within established Catholic churches the same vigour is in evidence, and was deliberately fostered by Pio Nono. Responding to expanding Catholic numbers, he introduced new hierarchies into England (1850) and the Netherlands (1853) in the face of angry Protestant reaction. During his pontificate as a whole he created over
200 new bishoprics or apostolic vicariates. All this represented a massive growth of papal involvement and papal control in the local churches. The rapidly expanding church in the USA, in particular, whose bishops were effectively appointed in Rome, developed a strongly papalist character. That increased control was self-conscious. Pio Nono and his entourage saw to it that all these new religious energies were firmly harnessed to the papacy. Early on in his papacy he set up a special curial congregation to deal with religious orders, and he systematically encouraged greater centralisation, often intervening directly to appoint superiors for some of the orders – in 1850 for the Subiaco Benedictines and the Dominicans, in 1853 for the Redemptorists, in 1856 and 1862 for the Franciscans.

The drive to centralisation on Rome was seen at its starkest and least attractive in Pio Nono’s treatment of the Eastern Rite Catholic churches, the so-called ‘Uniates’. These local churches – in the Ukraine, India, the Middle East – were indistinguishable from the Eastern Orthodox in every respect: they used the Byzantine liturgy, had a married clergy, followed their own legal customs, elected their own bishops and held their own Eastern-style synods. They differed from the Orthodox, however, in recognising the Pope’s authority. ‘Uniate’ Catholics had always had a difficult time, rejected by the Orthodox as traitors, suspect to the Latin authorities as half-schismatic.

Ultramontanism, however, had particular difficulty in accepting the value of these Eastern Rite Catholics. Ultramontanes identified Catholicism with
Romanitas
: they saw the unity of the Church as inextricably tied to uniformity. One faith
meant
one discipline, one liturgy, one code of canon law, one pyramid of authority presided over by a proactive and interventionist papacy. Rome paid lip-service to the value of the Eastern Rite communities and their traditions as signs of the Church’s universality, and as potential bridges to Eastern Orthodoxy. In practice, however, it systematically undermined them. Latin missionaries were encouraged to wean congregations away from oriental rites, and pressure was brought to bear to phase out a married clergy. Rome tried to use patriarchal and episcopal elections to install pro-Latin candidates, and insisted on the presence of apostolic delegates at Eastern Catholic provincial synods, under whose pressure Latin customs were intruded. An attempt in 1860 to impose the Gregorian calendar on the Melkite Church (Syrian Christians under a patriarch at Antioch, who had been in communion with
Rome since the late seventeenth century) drove some of the Melkite clergy into communion with the Orthodox, and came near to splitting the Church. When they protested against this erosion of their distinctive traditions, the Melkite leaders were treated as disloyal, and during the celebrations for the anniversary of the martyrdoms of Sts Peter and Paul in 1867 the Pope issued the bull
Reversurus
, which rebuked the Eastern Rite churches for their schismatic tendencies, insisted that close papal supervision was for their good, and reorganised the machinery for episcopal and patriarchal elections to exclude involvement of the laity and the lower clergy. Unsurprisingly, the patriarchs of the Melkite, Syriac and Chaldean churches were among the minority bishops who left the Vatican Council early.