Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (52 page)

These tensions were inevitable, for Ultramontanism was a form of absolutism, revelling in what Cardinal Manning called ‘the beauty of inflexibility’.
³⁰
It could give no coherent or positive value to diversity and independence. Papal invasion of the prerogatives, authority-structures and rites of the Eastern churches merely highlighted a process which was far more highly advanced within the churches of the Latin West itself. In addition to defining papal infallibility, the Vatican Council had asserted that the Pope had ‘immediate and ordinary jurisdiction’ over every church and every Christian. ‘Immediate and ordinary jurisdiction’, however, is what bishops have over their flocks, and the Council never addressed the problem of how
two
bishops, the Pope in Rome and the local bishop, could have identical jurisdiction over the
same
flocks. Indeed, it is an issue which has still not been satisfactorily settled. Under Pio Nono, the problem was resolved by the steady papal erosion of the authority and independence of the local hierarchies. Bishops were increasingly thought of as junior officers in the Pope’s army, links in the line of command which bound every Catholic in obedience to the one
real
bishop, the Bishop of Rome. The death of Pio Nono did little to halt or reverse these trends.

IV U
LTRAMONTANISM WITH A
L
IBERAL
F
ACE
: T
HE
R
EIGN OF
L
EO
XIII

The Conclave which began on 19 February 1878 took only three ballots to choose a new pope, Gioacchino Pecci, Cardinal Bishop of Perugia, who took the name Leo XIII (1878–1903). Pecci was virtually
unknown outside Italy. He was not a member of the Curia, and had been bishop of the relatively obscure see of Perugia since 1846. A protégé of both Leo XII and Gregory XVI, he had been a highly successful administrator in the Papal States, before being sent as nuncio to Belgium in 1843. He made a hash of this post, however, by wading into a complicated and delicate political situation and encouraging intransigent Catholic opposition to government educational measures and he was withdrawn at the specific request of the royal family. This was the end of his career in the papal service: Perugia was his not very splendid consolation prize. Pio Nono made him a cardinal in 1853, but, for reasons which are still unclear, the coarse and worldly Secretary of State Cardinal Antonelli, distrusted him and saw to it that he stayed in obscurity. A year before his own death, however, Pio Nono made him Camerlengo, the Cardinal who administers the Roman Church between the death of a Pope and the election of his successor. It was a back-handed compliment, for there was a well-established tradition that the Camerlengo is not elected pope.

His election was probably based on three things: his impeccably conservative opinions (he had helped inspire the
Syllabus
and was an ardent defender of the temporal power), his success and popularity as a diocesan bishop, and the fact that between 1874 and 1877 he had published a series of pastoral letters which spoke positively about the advance of science and society in the nineteenth century, and which argued for reconciliation between the Church and the positive aspects of modern culture. Many of the cardinals felt that the apocalyptic denunciations of the world and political intransigence of Pio Nono had painted the Church into a corner. It was time for a little sweet-talk.

It was as if Cardinal Pecci had been waiting to be pope. Within hours of his election he declared, ‘I want to carry out a great policy.’ From his first day the new Pope displayed an astonishing sure-footedness in walking a tightrope, restoring the international prestige of the papacy without abandoning any of its religious claims. He would stand by the doctrines of the Vatican Council and the
Syllabus
, but he would abandon their shrillness of tone and confrontational manner. His first encyclical,
Inscrutabili Dei
, was typical. In it he laments the evils of the time – rejection of the Church’s teaching, obstinacy of mind rejecting all lawful authority, endless strife, contempt for law. Out of this has sprung anti-clericalism and the theft of the Church’s property. All this is misconceived, however, for the Church is the friend of society, not
its enemy. It has led humanity from barbarism, abolished slavery, fostered science and learning, it is the mother of Italy. Italy must restore to the Pope what is his own, once more receive his authority, and society will flourish again. And Catholics everywhere, kindled by their clergy, must show ‘ever closer and firmer’ love for the Holy See, ‘this chair of truth and justice’. They must ‘welcome all its teachings with thorough assent of mind and will’. He recalled with approval Pio Nono’s ‘apostolic smiting’ of error.
³¹

The world noted both the content and the manner. The Italian journal
Riforma
declared that ‘The new Pope does not … curse, he does not threaten … The form is sweet, but the substance is absolute, hard, intransigent.’
³²
Italian perceptions of Leo’s ‘intransigence’ were influenced by the continuing stand-off between the Pope and Italy. He had not given the blessing ‘Urbi et Orbi’ after his election (he had wanted to, but was prevented by the Vatican staff), he refused to recognise the King’s title and did not notify him of his election as pope, he maintained Pio Nono’s ban on political involvement in national elections, and he refused the income provided under the Law of Guarantees. Rome and the papacy, therefore, remained at odds. In 1881, when Pio Nono’s body was moved by night to its final resting-place at San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, an anti-clerical mob almost succeeded in throwing the coffin into the river. The 1890s saw the erection of an aggressive monument to Garibaldi within sight of the Vatican, and a statue to the heretic Giordano Bruno in the Campo di Fiori, deliberate gestures of defiance and rejection. Leo was never in fact to abandon hope that he would recover Rome, and a good deal of his political activity outside Italy was undertaken in the hope of exerting external pressure to recover his temporal power. He was to establish himself as a great ‘political’ pope. To that extent, however, he never faced political reality.

Outside Italy, he was anything but intransigent. He inherited confrontations with Prussia, where the
Kulturkampf
still raged, with Switzerland, with Russia over the oppression of Polish Catholics, with some of the Latin American states where anti-clerical regimes were attacking the Church, and with France, where the republican government was fiercely anti-clerical. He set himself to defuse all these situations. The letters in which he announced his election to European heads of state were uniformly conciliatory, conceding nothing of substance, but expressing a strong desire for an accommodation.

His most spectacular success was in Bismarckian Germany. Bismarck was weary of the
Kulturkampf
, for it had backfired. The Centre Party, far from shrivelling away, had increased its representation with every election, and its tactical alliances with other opposition groups, like the National Liberals and the Social Democrats, were causing government defeats. The strong leadership of the German bishops was holding Catholic resistance to the Falk Laws steady, and Catholic public opinion was increasingly vocal. The conflict was also complicating Prussian rule in Poland. For his part, Leo hoped that Bismarck, now the most powerful statesman in Europe, might help him recover Rome, and he feared long-term damage to the Church if the confrontation persisted. Secret negotiations were initiated by the nuncios in Munich and Vienna, and, although these eventually broke down, Bismarck began to suspend the worst of the anti-Catholic legislation. Between 1880 and 1886 the Falk Laws were dismantled, though the Jesuits were not readmitted to Germany till 1917, and bishops remained bound to clear all appointments of priests with government.

It became clear, however, that Bismarck would do nothing to help Leo recover Rome. The Pope turned, therefore, to France. Most French Catholics were monarchists, sworn enemies of the principles of 1789. Most of the clergy were Ultramontanes, convinced that France should intervene to get the Pope his temporal power back. But from 1879 Republican anti-clericals were in the majority in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, and the government launched a campaign, like the
Kulturkampf
, to reduce the Church’s influence in national life – restrictions on the religious orders, introduction of divorce, Sunday working permitted, prayers and processions abolished on state occasions, religionless funerals encouraged. Throughout the 1880s Church and government were at each other’s throats, Church newspapers denounced the Republic, Catholics involved themselves in royalist plotting. It was the
Syllabus
given nightmare reality, and a total breach between the Church and French political culture seemed inevitable.

All through the 1880s, Leo did what he could to prevent this polarisation, and to conciliate the French state. He wrote a mild letter to the President in 1883, he published an encyclical to the bishops of France,
Nobilissima Gallorum Gens
, in 1884, expressing his love for France, recalling its ancient faithfulness to the Church, urging an end to hostilities, praising the Concordat of 1801, encouraging the bishops to
stand firm on fundamentals but urging them to abandon extreme opinions for the sake of the common good. In 1885 he issued an encyclical on the nature of the state,
Immortali Dei
, arguing that Church and state are distinct but complementary societies, each with their own authority and freedoms. The state is truly free only when it supports the Church, and the Church is the best bulwark of a peaceful state. Liberty of religions, the press and oppression of the Church by the civil power are all damaging to society. But he insisted that no one form of government is privileged by the Church, and he urged Catholics to take a full part in the public life of their societies. With his eye on the ferocious divisions between liberal Catholics and Ultramontane royalists in France, he urged Catholics to put aside their differences in a common loyalty to papal teaching.
³³

Everyone thought the Church was the propaganda wing of the royalists, and papal utterances by themselves would not change that. The Pope made the Archbishop of Lyons and the Archbishop of Paris cardinals, and asked them to write a letter encouraging Catholics to support the Republic. Grinding their teeth, they wrote a diatribe against the government so bitter that he had to suppress it. So he summoned the great missionary Bishop Cardinal Lavigerie of Algiers, who had long believed that it was suicidal for the Church to make war on the state, and who needed French imperial support for his missionary efforts in Africa. On 12 November 1890, at a banquet for the mostly rabidly royalist officers of the French Mediterranean fleet, Lavigerie made an electrifying speech. To rescue the country from disaster, he said, there must be unqualified support for the established form of government (the Republic), which was ‘in no way contrary to the principles … of civilised and Christian nations’. He was certain, he went on, that he would not be contradicted ‘by any authorised voice’.

The ‘toast of Algiers’ was a failure, and not merely in the eyes of the scandalised sailors who heard it. Everybody knew Lavigerie had been put up to it by Leo, and a few French Ultramontanes swallowed their horror and rage and said they would be loyal. Most, however, were too deeply alienated from the Republic to respond, and in any case the notorious Dreyfus affair was soon to unchain the worst of Catholic right-wing opinion and anti-Semitism, and further polarise French public life. Leo went on trying to force French Catholics into constitutional politics, but to little effect, for he was asking them to abandon attitudes and instincts
rooted in a century of bitterness and conflict, and endorsed by several of his predecessors. His attempt to persuade the Catholics of France to ‘rally’ to the Republic, in fact, served only to demonstrate the limitations of papal influence, even over Ultramontanes.

Nevertheless, the Pope’s campaign in favour of
ralliement
did help exorcise suspicions that Catholicism and democracy were incompatible. It evoked from him a series of encyclicals which registered the Church’s acceptance of the legitimate autonomy of the state, and the compatibility of Catholicism with democratic forms of government. There was nothing strictly new about this teaching, and it did little more than codify the compromises with democracy which the popes had been making in practice since the Concordat of 1801. In many cases, his teaching repeats that of more uncompromising papal utterances like
Mirari Vos
or
Quanta Cura
and the
Syllabus
. But the tone of voice was utterly different and, having stated the ideal, he added the pragmatic qualifications.
Libertas Praestantissimum
, for example, the encyclical on liberalism published in 1888, reworks all that
Mirari Vos
and the
Syllabus
had to say in denunciation of freedom of religion, of conscience, of the press – and then goes on to say that the Church can nevertheless live with religious toleration, a free press, and the rest of the modern ‘false liberties’, ‘for the sake of avoiding some greater evil’. It was as if Bishop Dupanloup had become pope.
³⁴

The papacy had a bad record on social reform. The posture of reactionary condemnation into which it had been frozen since the publication of
Mirari Vos
in 1832 made it suspicious of any schemes for the transformation of society. From the early years of Pio Nono socialism was a particular bogey. The call of Lamennais, Henri Lacordaire the Dominican priest and political activist, and of Count Montalambert to the popes to ‘turn to the democracy’ had been rejected. Papal rhetoric was concerned with the obligation of obedience, the rights of princes and popes, it had nothing to say to people whose lives were captive to the market forces of
laissez faire
capitalism, and who had no stake in the political process of the societies that fed off their labour.