Keys of This Blood (90 page)

Even then, however, Bonapartism was to produce perhaps the most important of its enduring consequences: Raw power, and the preponderance of such power, was thenceforward accepted as the international yardstick for the arrangement of human affairs.

The victorious powers of Europe assembled at Vienna in September of 1814 to rearrange the map of their continent. Europe would never again be as it was before Napoleon. At the Congress of Vienna, there was neither a religious principle nor any kind of moral suasion for the decisions made. Certainly, Europe was not even remotely ready for anything resembling the geopolitical principle expressed fully four hundred years before in Poland's Act of Union, by which powers agreed to unite and to govern themselves on the basis of that divine love through which “laws are established, kingdoms are maintained, cities are set in order, and the well-being of the State is brought to the highest level.”

Quite the contrary, the Congress of Vienna was the first international meeting of European powers where the rule of thumb was to divide the spoils of war. Aside from the aim of preventing a recurrence of the danger all had been subjected to by Bonaparte, the purpose of the victorious parties was to balance raw power among themselves. And in that, it provided the model that would be followed by the Versailles Conference of 1918, and by the Yalta and Potsdam conferences at the end of World War II.

The historical track of the geopolitical involvements of Masonry and the demise of Poland appears to have continued; for historians have pointed out the Masonic identity of the main movers at the Congress of Vienna—Metternich for Austria, Castlereagh for Britain, Czartoryski, a Pole, and the Russian Czar.

Ercole Cardinal Consalvi as papal secretary represented the interests of the Pope. But his involvement was little more than what might be called an act of presence, required only by the fact that participants saw the Papal States as part of the world order they wanted to restore after the tumult caused by Bonaparte. In fact, “Holy See” as an internationally recognized papal title originated in the agreements of the Vienna Congress. Beyond that, however, the Cardinal's presence had little more effect than the nonpresence of any papal representative at the Versailles Conference a century later, when it was explicitly agreed in advance by the victors of World War I that the Holy See would have no say in the terms that dictated the end of that war with Germany.

In the circumstances that prevailed at Vienna in 1814–15, then, whatever hope there might have been for reversing the Third Partition of Poland evaporated. In its balance-of-power arrangements, the Congress ratified the tripartite mutilation of Poland, and the continued crucifixion of the Polish people as a nation, by what was asserted and maintained to be international law.

The First Polish Republic, with its constitutional monarchy and its splendid democratic institutions, was to die. Poles as a nation of people in Europe officially ceased to exist. Poland as a geopolitical entity was effectively to disappear from all the maps of Europe. For Poland—people and country—death and entombment was the decision of the Congress.

In the flush of their victory, the participants at the Congress of Vienna suffered from a lack of prescience at least as severe and costly as Napoleon's lack of geopolitical acumen. As members of the ancien régime of crowned heads and of autocratic and privileged landed aristocracy, they failed to appreciate yet another legacy Napoleon had left them.

As a child of the Revolution, Bonaparte had sown the seeds of dissolution all over Europe. He had smashed the hard surface imposed on European peoples by the ancien régime. He had shown its flaws, demonstrated its weaknesses, proved it was not perpetual. It was now a matter of time before the people—as distinct from the traditional superstructure of society—would clamber out and demand their place in the sun. It was, in fact, a mere matter of thirty-three years before Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would publish
The Communist Manifesto
.

By then, however, Europe had fully deprived itself not only of the Polish democratic models for freedom of political and religious rights in a European context. It had deprived itself as well of the land that had stood strategically for a thousand years as Central Europe's strong and vibrant northern bulwark.

Given that the internationally agreed aim, as recorded in the sentiments
at the Congress of Vienna, was to inculcate the persuasion that “nothing good can come out of Poland,” and “nothing good and acceptable must be ascribed to Poland and its Poles,” the question of what to do about Polish Masonry became an interesting logistical problem.

In essence, the difficulty was neatly finessed. The Polish Grand Orient, which dated from the period between the First and Second Partitions of Poland, was dissolved on September 24, 1824, by order of Czar Alexander I. All other Lodges in the territories formerly known as Poland—the Congress Kingdom, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, parts of the Russian Empire and the Free City of Krakow—were likewise dissolved. German Masonic organizations took over the Lodges that remained in Poznania. And the liquidation of Polish Masonry was completed when the Polish Lodge known as “Piast Beneath the Three Sarmatian Columns,” together with the German Lodge
Zur Standhaftigkeit
, or Endurance, was merged into a new German Lodge—
Tempel der Eintracht
, or Temple of Unity—to which the Prussian government gave full support, as it did to all other German Lodges in its territory.

It was only after the Polish insurrection of 1831 that purely Polish Lodges raised their heads tentatively but identifiably once again—in Besançon and Avignon, France, in 1832; in London (the Polish National Lodge) in 1846; and in a new Lodge in the famous Polish Armed Forces School in Cuneo, Italy, in 1862. Otherwise, even Polish Masonry would have to wait until the beginning of the twentieth century for its revival.

If it is to be said that the ultimate aim of Poland's enemies was the obliteration of the Roman papacy as a georeligious and geopolitical force in Europe, then it must be said as well that the flourishing Freemasonry of the Enlightenment accomplished at least two major victories over the Roman Catholic Church on both counts.

In 1773, the year following the First Partition of Poland, and a time when Rome found itself weakened in the traditional political sense, the suppression of the Society of Jesus was achieved under the architectural direction, as one might say, of dedicated Masons—the Marquis de Pombal, royal adviser in imperial Portugal; Count de Aranda, royal adviser in imperial Spain; the Duc de Choiseul and Minister de Tillot in imperial France; Prince von Kaunitz and Gerard von Swieten at the imperial court of Maria Theresa in Habsburg Austria. With that coup, the Roman papacy was deprived of an internationally distributed, highly trained, deeply respected and maddeningly resourceful battalion of papal loyalists. Their suppression at a critical moment removed the most dedicated
offensive and defensive instrument ever placed in the hands of the Roman pontiffs. It was a loss whose consequences were to be felt by the papacy into the present day.

The second achievement—liquidation of Poland in the same general period—was a blow in the very same direction as far as its specific impact on the papacy was concerned. For the destruction of Poland as a nation-state stripped Roman Catholicism as a geopolitical force of a northern bulwark and of a powerful Catholic influence in the international affairs of Central Europe. And it stripped Roman Catholicism as a georeligious force of a powerfully radiant center for Catholic doctrine.

Some idea of the confessional enmity entertained by Masonry for the Roman papacy can be gleaned from the
Permanent Instruction
drawn up a few years after the Congress of Vienna, in 1819–20, by the French, Austrian, German and Italian Grand Masters of the Lodges:

… we must turn our attention to an ideal that has always been of concern to men aspiring to the regeneration of all mankind … the liberation of the entire world and the establishment of the republic of brotherhood and world peace…. Among the many remedies, there is one which we must never forget: … the total annihilation of Catholicism and even of Christianity…. What we must wait for is a pope suitable for our purposes … because, with such a pope, we could effectively crush the Rock on which God built his Church…. Seek a pope fitting our description … induce the clergy to march under your banner in the belief that they are marching under the papal banner … make the younger, secular clergy, and even the religious, receptive to our doctrines. Within a few years, this same younger clergy will, of necessity, occupy responsible positions…. Some will be called upon to elect a future pope. This pope, like most of his contemporaries, will be influenced by those … humanitarian principles which we are now circulating…. The medieval alchemists lost both time and money to realize the dream of the “Philosopher's Stone.” … The dream of the secret societies [to have a pope as their ally] will be made real for the very simple reason that it is founded on human passions….

The Masons, it would seem, had stolen a march on Antonio Gramsci and the brilliant plan he proposed to his Marxist brothers for the extinction of Roman Catholicism as the central force impeding the de-Christianization of the Western mind. For both Marxists and Masons, however different and opposed they may be politically, are at one in locating all of man's hopes and happiness in a this-worldly setting, without any intervention of a divine action coming from outside this cosmos
and without appointing an otherworldly life as the goal of all human life and endeavor. Marxism and Masonry transcend, both of them, individuals and nations and human years and centuries. But it is rather an all-inclusive embrace, holding all close to the stuff and matter of the cosmos, not in any way lifting the heart and soul to a transhuman love and beauty beyond the furthest limit of dumb and dead matter.

There are similar and disturbing echoes of these extreme policies in the activities of the superforce and the anti-Church faced by Pope John Paul II today, as well as in the statements of some who call themselves “progressive Catholics.” For all of these elements of influence in today's Roman Church wish to carry on with a new ecclesiology that would in effect eliminate the Catholic exercise of the Petrine Office. But in 1820, the actual possibility that such an agenda might be accomplished was still over a century away. Today, it is the ongoing policy of John Paul's intra-Church enemies.

Meanwhile, the commitment to obliterate Poland and its Three Pacts of Polishness, and to see that “nothing good and acceptable must be ascribed to Poland and its Poles,” was carried to outlandish lengths in particularly important instances.

One curious and instructive case in point touched the papacy itself, a little more than eighty years after the writing of the
Permanent Instruction
was completed, and a little less than eighty years before the 1978 election of Pope John Paul II. It concerned the village mailman in the Italian town of Riese in Upper Venetia, one Giovanni Battista Sarto by name, and his wife, Margherita, a seamstress.

Sarto had been born Jan Krawiec in Wielkopolska, Poland. When his part of the country fell into Prussia's hands, Sarto found political asylum in Italy, first in Godero, near Treviso, and finally in Riese, where he earned a ducat a day delivering the mail to the townfolk.

On June 2, 1835, a son was born to the Sartos, and they baptized him Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto. The boy, “Pepi” to his family, was schooled in Castelfranco and Asolo. As a young man in 1858 he was ordained a priest. As a middle-aged man in 1884 he became Bishop of Mantua. And as he was getting on a bit in age in 1893, he was nominated cardinal and promoted to the See of Venice.

Following the death of Pope Leo XIII on July 20, 1903, the papal Conclave narrowly avoided fulfilling the dream of the
Permanent Instruction
and electing Mariano Cardinal Rampolla del Tindaro—the Vatican Secretary of State and an inducted member of the Masonic Lodge—as Pope and Vicar of Christ. In fact, Rampolla did actually receive the required number of votes. But Jan Cardinal Puzyna of Krakow—which
was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—exercised the veto power enjoyed at that moment by His Imperial Master, Franz Josef of Austria. Franz Josef knew of Rampolla's Masonic identity, but he probably had as many politico-financial as religious reasons for excluding Rampolla from the Roman See.

It took seven more voting sessions before the Cardinal Electors chose the sixty-eight-year-old Giuseppe Melchiorre Cardinal Sarto of Venice, who chose the papal name of Pius X.

On Sarto's election as Pope, the scramble of high officials in the Austrian monarchy was almost as comic as it was tragic, as they scurried to destroy all certificates and records that might reveal the Polish origins of Pius X. In accordance with the expressed sentiments, aims and intentions of the Congress of Vienna, nothing as good as a pope could come out of Poland.

At least one trace of Sarto's Polish heritage did survive, however, in spite of all the efforts to the contrary. The elder Sarto's original surname, Krawiec, is also the Polish word for “tailor.” That, in fact, was the reason he chose Sarto as his Italian surname; for
sarto
is the Italian word for “tailor.”

Still, so vigorously was the death and entombment of Poland and Polishness pursued that grown men of presumed probity swarmed like carpenter ants to devour all the official records in Krakow and in Italy, as well, that might reveal the Polish origins of the Krawiec-Sarto family.

“Poles,” Czar Nicholas I remarked loftily to a visiting delegation of Polish nobles in 1833, “must remember that the lands they occupy traditionally are of supreme value to the interests not only of our Imperial Majesty but to those of other major European powers. Nature itself and Divine
Providence have written this destiny of the Polish people clearly for all to see in geography and history.” If the concept (as well as the actual words) of “geopolitics” and “geopolitical” structure had been in current usage during the 1830s, His Majesty would surely have told his Polish visitors that not national Polish politics but geopolitics should frame their thinking and determine their actions.