Prisoner of the Vatican (12 page)

As the telegraph and postal systems began to work again, Antonelli received a flurry of dispatches from his nuncios. They reported frenetic activity by Italy's ambassadors abroad, aimed at assuring Europe's governments that the pope and the Holy See were unharmed. On October 1, for example, Italy's ambassador in Vienna had met with Count Beust to relay, in the nuncio's words, the "sacrilegious guarantees that the Italian Government is pretending to want to give the Holy Father." The Italians were claiming, he wrote, that "the extraterritoriality that the Holy Father now enjoys guarantees him his fall spiritual Sovereignty and independence." But he also reported something that was now missing from the government's promises: there was no longer any mention of papal rule over the Leonine city.
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Later in the month, the pope informed the Catholic world that he had no choice but to suspend the Vatican Council because the Italian occupation of the Holy City made its continued work impossible. Visconti quickly fired off a circular to Italy's ambassadors abroad. "With all due respect for the Holy Father's decision," he told them, "it is my duty to declare that nothing justifies the fears expressed in the pontifical bull. It is well known and clear to all that the Holy Father is perfectly free to resume the Council in St. Peter's or in any other basilica or church in Rome or elsewhere in Italy that it might please His Holiness to choose."
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Throughout Europe, Catholics were in a state of shock. Catholics in Malines, Belgium, held one of the countless protest meetings that swept Europe in these weeks. Taking up the imagery of the pope as "prisoner of the Vatican," the protesters blasted the seizure of Rome as not only a sacrilege but an act of parricide, "the crime of the most ungrateful child against the common Father of the great Christian family."
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Such meetings were not entirely spontaneous. Under Antonelli's direction, the nuncios coordinated an effort to persuade the Church hierarchy in each country to stir up mass protests. In trying to maximize the political and popular impact of these protests, the nuncios struggled mightily to get the bishops to work together. This feat, as the nuncios constantly complained to Antonelli, was no easy matter.

On October 20, the nuncio in Munich reported the latest developments in that heavily Catholic region of southern Germany. The archbishop of Cologne had written a long letter of protest to the Prussian king, sending copies to all of Germany's bishops. He charged that Pius "had become a prisoner in his own home, lacking the liberty and independence that are absolutely necessary for the exercise of his apostolic ministry" and implored the king to come to the pope's defense, "so that the present intolerable conditions in Rome are remedied and the necessary steps are taken to restore the absolute liberty and independence of the Papal See."

Along with a copy of this letter, the archbishop sent the bishops a confidential note calling on them to follow his example. It was not what the nuncio had wanted, for he had urged the archbishop to coordinate the efforts of all of his colleagues into a single powerful protest. But the archbishop had refused, insisting on going his own way and leaving the other bishops to act singly as well. The reason for this failure, according to the nuncio, were the rivalries that plagued the German episcopate.
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At the same time, the Brussels nuncio—the recipient of ten different dispatches from Antonelli over the previous two weeks—reported on developments there. His efforts to get the Belgian bishops to organize a massive popular petition campaign had failed. Instead, the bishops and the heads of the various Catholic associations had sent their own letters of commiseration to the pope. The reactions in Belgium to the pope's plight, the nuncio wrote, had frankly not met his expectations. There had been much talk but little action. True, special masses and processions had been held to express solidarity with the pope, and virtually all the bishops had directed pastoral letters to their flocks protesting the outrage. But the Belgian government, which called itself Catholic, had not lifted a finger in the pope's defense.
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The nuncio kept pushing the Belgian government, arguing that the rights of Catholics everywhere were being violated by the pontiff's imprisonment. But the foreign minister had rebuffed him, asking how the Belgian government could act when "no other government was doing anything for the Holy See." The nuncio concluded his report to Antonelli on a pessimistic note: "It seems that everyone thinks that reconciliation between the Holy See and Victor Emmanuel can be arranged."
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Antonelli had entrusted the Belgian nuncio with the task of forwarding copies of his recent instructions to the nuncio in France, but it proved impossible, for Paris was by then under Prussian siege and no mail was getting through. It was only after the French nuncio escaped from the capital and made his way in late October to Tours, southwest of Paris, that he was finally able to reestablish contact with Rome.

Clearly, he told Antonelli, no help for the pope was to be expected anytime soon from the French, who were barely able to defend their own country. Nor did the prospect of aid from the Prussians appear likely. On his way to Tours, he had stopped in Versailles, where the Prussians had set up headquarters for their assault on Paris. There he had met King Wilhelm, as well as the king's brother, Prince Friedrich, and Count Bismarck. All voiced concern for the pope's welfare but said that their hands were full and they could not get involved in Roman affairs.
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Antonelli was keeping a close watch on the chaos in France. He was well aware that current circumstances made any immediate French help unlikely, but he did see some hopeful signs. In late October,
L'Osservatore Romano
quoted Adolphe Thiers, soon to become the head of the French provisional government, as saying: "If Italy loves its unity, it must renounce Rome. If it would rather stay in Rome, it must renounce its unity." The next day the paper returned to the theme, reporting that as soon as the Franco-Prussian War was over, a new French government under Thiers would help decide the future of Rome. And, the paper prophesized, "the acts of a State headed by a person who has always decisively proclaimed his opposition to the political unity and current organization of the Peninsula cannot be too favorable for Italy."
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In a meeting on November 9, the papal nuncio told France's provisional foreign affairs head that, as soon as the war ended, the Great Powers would have to arrange a conference aimed at reordering the states of Europe. The nuncio clearly expected France to support the restitution of the Papal States, not least because of the growing enmity in France toward the Italians. Just a few days earlier, the Italian government had again declined a French request to send 100,000 soldiers to help repel the Prussians. "Dislike for the Governors of Florence is lodged in every Minister's heart," the French foreign minister had said, and this, the nuncio concluded, "ought to be a good omen for the future."
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Once Antonelli was back in touch with his nuncio in France, he began sending him ammunition for the struggle ahead. The Italian government, Antonelli wrote, had the nerve to claim that they were showing the pope and the cardinals the utmost respect. Is this, he asked, what they call "the complete stripping of the august Head of the Church of all of his dominions, of all of his income, the bombardment of the capital of Catholicism, the impieties that are being spread through the population through newspapers, the violent attacks against religion and against the monastic orders, the profanation of the Catholic cult, which is being labeled superstition, the stripping of all public schools of every sacred image, which has been ordered by government authorities and already carried out, the removal of the name of Jesus from above the grand portal of the Roman College?" Nor was this all. Shouts of "Death to the Pope!" were now heard regularly outside the Vatican walls. The pope had become "morally and materially a prisoner in the strictest sense." Of this, Antonelli concluded, there could no longer be any doubt.
³¹

Yet from Europe's capitals the secretary of state received, at best, only the most generic offers of support. In mid-November, for example, the Vienna nuncio told him of a recent meeting with Count Beust. Reciting the litany of the pope's woes, the nuncio told the count that the Holy See found Austria's continued indifference "a great disgrace that can be interpreted as Austrian complicity in this sacrilege." Austrian inaction was inexcusable, said the nuncio, for "I have seen you write an angry note to the government of the Danubian principalities at the first sign of an insult aimed at a couple of Jews.... Only the Holy Father can be robbed, injured and driven from his house while Austria remains silent and indifferent."

Count Beust tried to calm him down. In fact, he told the nuncio, the emperor was very upset, "and I promise we will do something."

"What exactly he means by this 'something,'" the nuncio observed to Antonelli, "I still do not know ... until I see some action I have no faith." Yet, the nuncio still believed that the emperor might be moved to act, feeling pressured by all of the Catholic protests. "Let us hope to God," the nuncio concluded, "that there is some result."
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With the pope's decision to refuse the offer of the Leonine city now irrevocable, the battle lines were drawn. The pope was not asking foreign governments to help him strike a compromise with the Italian government. From his perspective, the only goal possible was the dismantling of Italy and, as Antonelli put it in his instructions to the papal nuncios, "the full and absolute restoration of the pope's dominions."
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B
ARREL-CHESTED, SPORTING
a handlebar mustache and a furry patch of beard on his chin and intimidating those around him with his bluster, Victor Emmanuel II came from a lineage that was related by marriage and descent to all of the kings and dukes in Italy he had overthrown. Uninhibited and often crude, eccentric, and disorganized, the monarch was not one for diplomatic niceties. He was used to saying what he meant—and in fact likely to voice whatever came into his head—much to the discomfort of his aides. He mixed a certain joviality with the haughtiness befitting a Savoyard king. Lazy and pigheaded, he had little sense of his own limits, which were considerable. Yet behind his much vaunted military bearing lurked a basic timidness and awkwardness, an inchoate recognition of his social inadequacy. Following his family's tradition, he had been given a Spartan education heavy on discipline, so he had no problem camping out with his soldiers on their march. Above all, he enjoyed riding horseback through the countryside. Proud of his ancestry and ever eager to defend the Savoyard honor, he disdained the court and all its ceremony and pomp. Although not stupid, his intellectual background and horizons were limited. Following the tradition of the Savoyard kingdom, Italy's first king never felt comfortable speaking Italian and avoided it whenever possible, sticking with his native Piedmontese dialect or its close cousin, French. But even in French he was incapable of writing literate prose. And although he disliked public appearances, he had a certain vanity about his looks, blackening his graying hair, beard, and bushy mustache with dye. Indeed, on one occasion, while waving to the cheering crowd in Venice's San Marco Square, sweat produced rivulets of black dye that formed dark stripes on his face, much to the crowd's amazement.
¹

Victor Emmanuel had three passions in life: hunting, war, and the desire to play a critical role in national life. One of his closest aides estimated that the king had spent a third of his life hunting, killing as many as a thousand animals in a day. At each of his many estates he kept a large number of horses and dogs, attended by a small army of keepers. In the hope that it would encourage the king to spend more time in the capital, Lanza agreed to have the government purchase a thirty-thousand-acre estate for him near Rome, making sure that it was always well stocked with game.

Victor Emmanuel viewed himself as a talented military leader, which he was not. While he was not lacking in physical courage, military tactics and strategy were well beyond him, and his romantic view of war would on more than one occasion seriously threaten the kingdom over which he reigned. His disposition was less than ideal for a constitutional monarch. Although at times intimidated by his ministers' superior intelligence and political knowledge, he believed that the most important decisions were best made neither by parliament nor by his ministers but by himself. This illusion, along with a degree of jealousy, had led him into a tense relationship with the man credited with being the diplomatic brains behind Italian unification, his prime minister, Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour. Nor was it merely chance that in the eight years following Cavour's death, in 1861, there were ten different governments, the king dissolving one after another when he grew irritated with the prime minister of the moment, even when the minister remained popular in parliament. The king was also not above secretly conniving in matters of military and foreign affairs—the other elements of government, economic policy, social welfare, and the like, bored him terribly—working with a small group of advisers at court and leaving the government in the dark. Up until the time of his death he kept personal agents in other European capitals to help him work around his own foreign ministers. In the words of Filippo Mazzonis, one of the foremost historians of Italy's first king, Victor Emmanuel's "level of institutional sensitivity was close to zero."
²

The Italian government operated under a constitution that Victor Emmanuel's father had granted in response to the revolts of 1848 in Piedmont. It called for a House of Deputies, whose members were elected by the small portion of the population who were eligible to vote, and a Senate, whose members were chosen by the king himself. The ministers were all appointed and could be dismissed by the king at his pleasure. The king was also commander in chief of the military, the position he valued above all others.