Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (56 page)

The
Sodalitium Pianum
never had more than fifty members, but its influence and spirit was far more widespread than its mere numerical strength. A new intransigence became the required mark of the ‘good’ Catholic. ‘Real’ Catholics were ‘integralists’, accepting as a package-deal everything the pope taught, not picking and choosing in the ‘pride and curiosity’ of their intellect. In September 1910 the general atmosphere of suspicion was institutionalized when a lengthy and ferocious oath was devised to impose a straitjacket of orthodoxy on suspects, and subscription
to this oath became a routine and repeated part of the progress of every cleric’s career, from the lowliest priest to the most exalted cardinal. The ‘Anti-Modernist Oath’ shattered public confidence in the integrity and freedom of Catholic academic standards. Only in Germany did the bishops succeed in having university professors exempted from subscription to the oath.

The worst features of the anti-Modernist purge were suspended at the death of Pius X in 1914. It was rumoured that one of the first documents across the desk of his successor, Benedict XV, was a secret denunciation of himself as a Modernist, which had been intended for Pius X’s eyes. However that may be, the new pope’s first encyclical formally renewed the condemnation of Modernism, but in fact dismantled the witch-hunt against it. He insisted on freedom of discussion where the Church had not formally pronounced on an issue, and called for an end to name-calling by the Integralists. When, a generation later, the cause of Pius X’s canonization was put forward, detailed evidence of the pope’s personal involvement in this witch-hunt was published. It revealed his own passionate commitment to the campaign, shocking many Catholics who admired Sarto’s warmth and humanity. Some people, he had declared, want the Modernists ‘treated with oil, soap and caresses, but they should be beaten with fists.’
⁷

The canonization went ahead. But the impact of the Modernist crisis on Catholic intellectual life was catastrophic, and persisted almost to the present. The anti-Modernist oath remained in force into the 1960s, a feature of the intellectual formation of every single Catholic priest, creating a stifling ethos of unjust and suspicious hyper-orthodoxy, and discouraging all originality. Catholic biblical studies withered, shackled to absurd and demonstrably false claims like the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch or the unity of authorship of the whole book of Isaiah. Catholic philosophers and theologians were forced into silence or into token parroting of the party line. Obedience, not enquiry, became the badge of Catholic thought. It was to be a generation before anything approaching an open and honest intellectual life was possible for Catholic theologians.

The confrontational attitudes which underlay the Modernist purges also informed Pius X’s political actions. He had announced the motto of his pontificate as being ‘To restore all things in Christ’. For him, though he denied he was a politician, that motto had an inescapably political meaning, for what he sought was a society which reflected Catholic values.
The pope, he declared in his first papal allocution to the cardinals, ‘is absolutely unable to separate the things of faith from politics’. The pope is ‘head and first magistrate of the Christian Society’, and as such he must ‘confute and reject such principles of modern philosophy and civil law as may urge the course of human affairs in a direction not permitted by the restrictions of eternal law.’
⁸

Within a few years, in pursuit of this mission to ‘confute and reject’ secular laws that conflicted with Church teaching, Pius had demolished the diplomatic achievement of Leo XIII. In contrast to his predecessor, Pius saw papal diplomatic activity not in terms of the art of the possible, of compromise, but in confrontational – or perhaps he would have said
prophetic
– terms. Professional papal diplomats were replaced as Legates and Nuncios by bishops and heads of religious orders, who would act as mouthpieces for the pope’s fiery and apocalyptic views of the modern world. The problems of this policy of confrontation were laid bare in the collapse of relations between Church and State in France in 1905, and the subsequent confiscation by the Republican government of all Church property in 1907.

This disaster was not, to begin with at least, Pius’ fault. Relations between the Church and the French state had been rocky for twenty years, growing anti-clericalism expressing itself in a succession of government measures of a depressingly familiar kind – the suppression of religious instruction in schools, attacks on and eventual expulsion of religious orders from France. Matters came to a head with the accession as Prime Minister in 1902 of Emile Combes, a rabid anti-clerical who had once been a seminarian, and was all the more bitter against the church that had refused him ordination. Even the expert diplomacy of Leo XIII and his secretary of State Cardinal Rampolla could do nothing to restrain Combes, who flouted the informal arrangements which had made the Concordat workable for a century, and he nominated unsuitable bishops without any consultation with Rome. By the time Pius X became pope, France and the Vatican were eyeball to eyeball over these bishops. The problem deepened when the pope demanded the resignation of two bishops accused of immorality and freemasonry. M. Combes refused to accept their resignations, on the grounds that the pope’s action constituted an infringement of government rights.

This situation would have been hard for any pope to handle, but the political inexperience and clumsiness of Pius and his Secretary of State now proved fatal. When the French President paid a state visit to Rome in
May 1904 and called on the King, Merry del Val issued a routine diplomatic protest against this recognition of the Italian State in papal Rome. Foolishly and offensively, however, the Secretary of State circulated a copy to of this protest to all governments, and these copies contained a sentence claiming that the papacy was only maintaining relations with France because the fall of the Combes Ministry was imminent. Here was a blatantly public political act by the papacy, apparently designed to bring about or at any rate speed up the fall of the French government. French public opinion was at frenzy pitch, the French ambassador was withdrawn from the Vatican, and, though Combes’ government did indeed eventually fall, in December 1905 a law abrogating the Concordat of 18 01 and separating Church and State was promulgated. The state would cease to pay clerical stipends, Church buildings and property would be passed to the state, and managed for the use of the Church by religious associations of lay people, known as
Associations Culturelles.

The Law of Separation was unjust and arbitrary, and it unilaterally revoked an international treaty: the Concordat. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of French bishops believed that the Church had no choice but to accept it, if it was to continue its work in France. The pope took a different view. To accept the separation of Church and State anywhere was to acquiesce in robbing Christ of his crown rights over society, ‘a grave insult to God, the Creator of man and the Founder of human society’. Moreover, the whole principle of the
Associations Culturelles
was anti-Christian, for they challenged the hierarchical structure of the Church. Lay people, he considered, had no business ‘managing’ the Church’s property or affairs. On 11 February he issued the encyclical
Vehementer Nos
, denouncing the Law of Separation as a violation of natural and human law, contrary to the Divine constitution of the Church and her rights and liberty. A fortnight later he reiterated his rejection of the Law when he consecrated fourteen new bishops in St Peter’s, chosen by himself, for the Church of France.

This condemnation left the French bishops almost no room for manoeuvre. They tried to modify it along the lines laid down in 1864 by Dupanloup in his pamphlet on the Syllabus, accepting the condemnation of the Separation in principle, but devising practical working arrangements so that Church life could go on, the clergy be paid, the churches kept open. The
Associations Culturelles
might be renamed
Associations Canoniques et Légales
, and put under the tacit supervision of clergy. Rome would have none of this. In August 1906 the pope issued another encyclical,
Gravissimo Officii Munere
, in which he seized on the bishops’ dutiful endorsement of the papal condemnation of the Law, and under the pretence of supporting ‘the practically unanimous decision of your assembly’, ordered them to have no truck or compromise with the Law. When the plight of the French bishops was explained to the pope as part of a plea for political realism, he was unsympathetic and unyielding: ‘They will starve, and go to heaven,’ he declared.
⁹

As his canonization in 1950 demonstrated, Pius X set a pattern of papal behaviour that went on influencing his successors. Since the definition of Papal Infallibility, the mystique of the papacy had intensified, though it manifested itself in different ways – in the regal detachment of Leo XIII, in the startling authoritarianism of Pius X’s personal style. At the very beginning of his pontificate, the Swiss Guard, as was customary, went on strike for gratuities to mark the new reign: the new pope listened, and then abruptly announced the dissolution of the Guard, a decision from which he was only dissuaded with much pleading. His successors would emulate him, keeping their advisers and court standing round them while they sat, acting without consultation or consulting only an inner circle. Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pius XII in 1939 and a much gentler figure than either Pius X or Pius XI, declared that ‘I do not want collaborators, but people who will carry out orders’. Now with the growing papal monopoly of episcopal appointments, the system of papal nuncios, sent to Catholic countries all over the world, directing policy, over-riding local decisions, decisively influencing the choice of bishops, became an evermore powerful instrument of centralization within the Church. In an age in which monarchies were tumbling everywhere, the popes had become the last absolute monarchs.

III T
HE
A
GE OF THE
D
ICTATORS

The election of Giacoma della Chiesa as Benedict XV (1914–1922) to succeed Pius X was as explicit a reaction against the preceding regime as it was possible to get. Della Chiesa was a wisp of a man with one shoulder higher than the other – his nickname in the seminary had been ‘Piccoletto’ (‘Tiny’) – and none of the papal robes kept in readiness for the election was small enough to fit him. He was a Genoese aristocrat trained as a papal diplomat, who had served Cardinal Rampolla as Under Secretary of State to Leo XIII. He had initially been retained in post under Merry del Val and Pius X, but the pope distrusted him as a protégé of
Rampolla’s, and in 1907 he had been kicked upstairs as Archbishop of Bologna. The pope made clear the nature of this ‘promotion’ by withholding till 1914 the cardinal’s hat that went automatically with the job, and della Chiesa became a cardinal only three months before the Conclave that made him pope. Della Chiesa was to have his revenge, for immediately after his election as pope, Merry del Val was sent packing from his post as Secretary of State without so much as time to sort his papers. The Conclave took place one month into the First World War, and the choice of della Chiesa was a recognition that blundering if saintly intransigence would not do in wartime.

War was to dominate and to blight Benedict’s pontificate. He was a compassionate and sensitive priest, horrified by the realities of modern warfare, passionately committed to diplomatic solutions of international conflicts. He bent all his efforts to persuading the combatants to seek a negotiated peace. He refused to take sides, judging that the Holy See would only be listened to if it preserved a strict neutrality. In a war where public opinion was stoked by stories of atrocities of the ‘babies-on-bayonets’ type, he refused to condemn even documented outrages. The result was that each side accused him of favouring the other. Hurt but undeterred, he went on condemning the ‘senseless massacre’ and ‘hideous butchery’ being perpetrated by both sides. In 1917 he proposed a peace plan which involved all concerned agreeing to waive compensation for war damage. Most of this damage had been done by Germany in victim countries like France and Belgium, and they not unnaturally saw the pope’s plan as favouring Germany. They also drew their own conclusions from the fact that Germany approved the scheme, and had offered to help the pope recover Rome in the wake of the defeat of Italy. In France even the clergy spoke of him as ‘the Boche Pope’.

The continuing confrontation with Italy over the Roman question further paralyzed Benedict’s efforts for peace. By a secret agreement in 1915 Italy persuaded her allies, including England, not to negotiate with the pope, for fear he would attempt to bring international pressure on Italy to recover Rome – as indeed he had hoped to do. To his bitter disappointment, he was excluded altogether from the Peace negotiations of 1919, and he was highly critical of what he took to be the ‘vengeful’ character of the Versailles settlement. In hard terms, therefore, his contribution to the amelioration of war was confined to the money he lavished on relief work for the wounded, refugees, and displaced people – 82,000,000 lire, leaving the Vatican safes empty.

In the aftermath of war however, his diplomatic skills came into their own. He recognized that the war had thrown much of the political structure of Europe into the melting-pot, and that the position of the Church everywhere from France to the Balkans, from Spain to Soviet Russia needed to be secured. He threw himself and his hand-picked helpers into a flurry of negotiation to secure new Concordats, sending the Vatican Librarian Achille Ratti, destined to be his successor as Pius XI, to the newly resurrected Poland and Lithuania, and sending Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, to Germany.

Benedict XV was as conciliatory as his predecessor had been confrontational, and in many ways his policies can be seen as a resumption of the course drawn out for the papacy by Leo XIII. As we have seen, he dismantled the machinery of Integralist reaction, dissolving the
Sodalitium Pianum
and calling a halt to the anti-Modernist witch-hunt. He prepared the way for reconciliation with the state of Italy by lifting in 1920 the Vatican ban on visits by Catholic heads of state to the Quirinal. He tacitly lifted the
‘Non Expedit’
ban on involvement in Italian electoral politics for Catholics by giving his blessing to the new
Partito Popolare
, the Catholic political party led by the radical priest Don Luigi Sturzo. In another reversal of Pius X’s policy, he encouraged Catholics to join the trade union movement. Most spectacularly, he inaugurated a reconciliation with France. Ironically, he was helped here by the war he had hated so much. The abrogation of the Concordat had meant that French clergy and seminarians lost their immunity from military service. 25,000 French priests, seminarians and religious were called up and went to the trenches, and their participation in the national suffering – in sharp contrast to the non-combatant status of chaplains in the British army – did a great deal to dissolve inherited antagonisms between Church and nation. The pope signalled the new spirit of reconciliation by canonising Joan of Arc in 1920, a highly imaginative symbolic gesture: 80 French deputies attended, and the French government sent official representatives. By the time of his death in 1922 Benedict had greatly increased the papacy’s diplomatic standing, and twenty-seven countries had ambassadors or similar representatives accredited to the Vatican.