Prisoner of the Vatican (2 page)

Italians—but also others who learn about Italian history today—are led to believe that the nation was securely established once Rome was taken in 1870. But it is an illusion, the product of a natural tendency to view history backward. In fact, in the first two decades of Rome's new position as capital of Italy, there was no certainty that the end of the Papal States was any less fleeting than it had been several decades earlier, when, in the course of ten years, Napoleon deposed two popes and chased them from Rome. Nor did Catholics have to look back even that far to find grounds for hope; little more than two decades earlier, in 1848, popular revolts had driven Pius IX, then in the first years of his papacy, into exile. Then, too, the usurpers had triumphantly pronounced the permanent end of papal rule. Yet, once again, the pope had shown how fleeting were the victories of the Church's enemies, returning to power behind the French and Austrian armies. Why, loyal Catholics asked, should God's cause not triumph once more? Was He not still on the pope's side?

When, on September 20, 1870, Italian troops finally broke through Rome's walls and claimed the city as part of the new Italian state, Pius proclaimed himself a "prisoner of the Vatican." Denouncing the "usurper" state, he retreated into the Vatican complex and, spurning the government's entreaties, refused to come out. Confident that God would not long abandon His Church, Pius did all he could to help the divine cause, from excommunicating Italy's founders—the king, his ministers, and his generals—to calling on Europe's Catholic rulers to come once again to his aid. Following the pope's lead, the Catholic press assured its readers that Rome's sacrilegious conquerors would,
like their predecessors, soon meet an ignominious end. The Papal States would return.

A dramatic battle unfolded, the drama punctuated by the death of its two protagonists—Pius IX and Victor Emmanuel II—within a month of each other in 1878. Yet, even with a new pope, Leo XIII, and a new king, Umberto I, both dramatically different from their predecessors, the battle continued, the stakes high, the outcome uncertain.

This is the story told in the pages that follow, a story of outrageous accusations, mutual denunciations, terrible fears, and raucous public demonstrations, a chronicle of frenetic diplomacy and secret dealings. While the struggle was partly fought through symbols, ritual, and rhetoric, rocks were hurled along with epithets. War throughout Europe was prophesied, at the end of which, many in the Vatican hoped and believed, Italy would once again be carved up by foreign powers into a series of weak, dependent states and the pope returned to power in Rome. This battle—almost entirely unknown today outside scholarly circles—still leaves a deep mark on the Italian soul. Without understanding this history, there is no way to understand the peculiarities of Italy today.

The protagonists of this fateful conflict live on in statues of granite and marble that dot town squares from Venice and Turin to Naples and Palermo, in elaborate tombs, famous paintings, and obscure popular art. Rome itself is filled with outsized monuments, statues big and small, and a panoply of plaques commemorating the battles of unification. But, oddly, the story that they tell, together with the sanitized accounts found in the textbooks of every Italian schoolchild, has rather little to do with what happened. The actual history is, today, too dangerous, too embarrassing, still too raw for public view. The most basic fact of the creation of modern Italy—that its greatest foe was the pope himself—is one that cannot easily be mentioned, and certainly not to children, whose understanding of how their country was founded contains a hole at its center. The Italian or the foreigner visiting Rome today can scarcely grasp what the battles for Italian unification were about.

It is too bad, because the true story of the birth of modern Italy, involving the demise of the Papal States and the pope's efforts to undo Italian unification, offers a gripping tale of intrigue and pathos filled with outsized characters and high drama. It features an Italian king, Victor Emmanuel II, whose greatest passion in life was hunting and who viewed his government ministers with disdain, but who somehow rose to the challenge of unifying Italy. Although he had little love for the Church or the clergy, the king never stopped dreaming of the day that the pope would deign to receive him. It was a day that he would never live to see.

For his part, Pius IX was without doubt the most important pontiff in modern history. While deeply religious, he was politically inept. Remarkably gregarious, he loved nothing more than hosting audiences and, before Rome was taken, strolling through Rome's streets and chuckling at people's startled reactions to the white-robed pope-king in their midst. Yet, if he was a man of great charm and warmth, a man with a famous smile, he also had a fearful temper and a short fuse. And, as if from the cast of a twopenny melodrama, ever at the goodly pope's side was the dark figure of Giacomo Antonelli, long his secretary of state, his right-hand man, who compensated for the pope's lack of political sophistication with his own diplomatic savvy. A cardinal without ever having been ordained a priest, Antonelli fit the popular stereotype of the goodly pope's evil adviser, an image promulgated in this case not only by Italy's anticlericals and nationalists but by many of the Curia's cardinals as well, jealous of the stranglehold Antonelli seemed to have over Pius.

Rounding out the cast of characters at the center of this dramatic history as it began to unfold, and whose true role in the rise of modern Italy is today obscured from popular view, is Giuseppe Garibaldi, a man for whom "colorful" seems too weak a term. Condemned to death as a young man for taking part in a nationalist uprising in Genoa, he spent most of his early adult and middle-age years in exile as a sailor, adventurer, and frequent participant in popular uprisings, including a series of wars in South America, where he had taken refuge. When, in the face of a popular revolt, Pius IX fled Rome in 1848 and the end of papal rule was proclaimed, Garibaldi returned to Italy to lead the makeshift army that defended the new Roman Republic. Yet when the French responded to the pope's plea and sent their troops to retake Rome, Garibaldi, despite all his heroic efforts, could not long hold them back and was forced into exile once again. Almost single-handedly responsible for the fact that the new Italian state that took shape in 1860 included Sicily and the entire Italian South—not a part of the peninsula in which Victor Emmanuel or his ministers had any interest—Garibaldi lacked all political artifice. Yet he did have one unshakable belief: he was convinced that the priests were a parasitic scourge on the Italian nation, the papacy a cancer that had to be excised.

And then there were all the foreign rulers and diplomats whose decisions would determine whether the pope would one day return to power, whether Italy would remain united or soon crumble. There was the massive, mustachioed Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor who presided over what by late 1870 had emerged as the continent's leading power. Bismarck's six-foot, four-inch frame and considerable bulk would cast a large shadow over Europe in these years, inspiring a mixture of respect, anger, and fear. With a huge head, a shrinking fringe of whitening hair, a drooping mustache, bushy eyebrows, and large protruding eyes, Bismarck carried himself with military bearing and, indeed, always wore a white military uniform in Berlin as befitted a member of the Prussian gentry who held the rank of major general. Also, befitting his origins, he despised urban life, retreating as much as possible to his rural estates. Known to sit down for a meal and eat what would normally feed three men and to drink one or two bottles of champagne at his midday meal alone, he was apt to smoke his way through eight or ten Havana cigars a day and cap off his dinner with a bottle or two of brandy.

Disdaining any crass appeal for popularity, in his nearly three decades in power Bismarck confined his speeches almost entirely to parliament. His voice came as a surprise to those who had never heard him, for the big man spoke in something of a thin falsetto. Yet, when he was spotted ordering a mug of beer from a parliamentary aide—a sure sign that he was getting ready to mount the podium—word spread quickly, and the deputies rushed in from the halls to hear him. Bismarck's speeches were typically witty, sardonic, sarcastic, and—although he rarely used a prepared text—filled with rarefied literary allusions. Of his subordinates he expected information but not advice, still less criticism. If Pius IX's angry outbursts were entirely spontaneous and fleeting, Bismarck's were more calculated. "It's useful for the entire mechanism if I get angry at times," he said. "It puts stronger steam in the engine." Although he would soon lead Germany's own campaign against the Catholic Church, Bismarck—himself, like the German emperor, a Protestant—was above all a political opportunist. As we shall see, at one point he even toyed with the idea of providing a German refuge for the pope and pronouncing Germany the world center of Catholicism.
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Then there was Napoleon III, emperor of France. Born in 1808, seven years before Bismarck, Louis Napoleon grew up in the wake of his uncle and namesake's bitter defeat. A participant in the Italian nationalist uprisings in 1831, he was arrested nine years later in France for conspiring to overthrow the monarchy there. Escaping from prison after six years, he took part in the French revolt of 1848 and by the end of that year was elected president of the new regime. Although he was a champion of nationalism who viewed the pope-king as a regrettable relic of the Middle Ages, his first priority on taking power was to solidify his rule. And so, in an effort to attract domestic Catholic support, he dispatched his army in 1849 to defeat Garibaldi and retake Rome for Pius; three years later, he orchestrated a plebiscite that pronounced him emperor of France. He was no longer Louis Napoleon but Napoleon III. Meanwhile, the French troops remained in Rome, charged with protecting the pontiff from revolt or invasion. There, but for brief periods, they remained until the historic summer of 1870, when the declaration of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council, coinciding with the outbreak of France's war with Prussia, led Napoleon to withdraw his troops. Only then—when the coast was clear—was Victor Emmanuel willing to send in his own army and claim Rome as Italy's new capital.

We are about to enter a world that no longer exists, of a pope who was a king, of a king ashamed to share his capital with the pope who had excommunicated him, of nervous nobles, anticlericals bent on seizing the Vatican, would-be assassins, and suspicions of conspiracies everywhere. Some of its characters were eloquent, some playful, some sober, and some grim; some were witty and urbane, some abusive and inebriated. Some invoked the highest principles of Enlightenment morality, some the sacred principles of revealed truth. Still others seemed more intent on bellowing epithets as loudly as their voices would allow. The result was the mixture of contradictory traits that is the hallmark of modern Italy.

Many books deal with one aspect or another of this story, although most were written a century or more ago, when none of the Vatican archives for the period were available. Books that try to tell the whole story addressed in these pages, based on the original documents but written for a broad audience, are few indeed. None, so far as I know, are based on both the historical archives of the Vatican and the records of the Italian state. Curiously, in fact, most of the great Italian historians of national unification—reflecting their secular allegiances—felt uncomfortable even setting foot in the Vatican. To a considerable extent, this odd division of labor continues even today, with the historians of Italian unification—identified with the proponents of a secular Italy—generally avoiding research that would entail working in the Vatican archives, leaving it to Church historians, some of the most illustrious being priests themselves. Even among the latter, however, the great majority who have written on our topic lacked access to the Vatican's documents from the period following Leo XIII's ascendancy to the papacy in 1878, for most wrote before 1979, when these archives were first opened to researchers. It is, in part, the use of this rich trove of material that allows us here to shed new light on the battle waged by the pope and his Curia aimed at depriving the new Italian state of its capital.

Today, we all take for granted that the pope is forever on the move, traveling thousands of miles at a time to minister to his far-flung flock. How strange it is to be reminded that, for fifty-nine years after the taking of Rome, no pope would set foot outside the Vatican, no pope would even enter Rome's own churches nor escape Rome's summer heat by retreating to the papal villa in the nearby hills at Castel Gandolfo. To travel beyond the minuscule patch of land that remained under his control would mean acknowledging that the pope was no longer a prisoner of the Vatican. This, for almost six decades, no pope was willing to do.

P
IUS IX
had not always been such a bitter enemy of progress, of things modern. When he ascended to St. Peter's throne in 1846, among his first acts was the introduction of gas streetlights and railways to the Papal States, an implicit rebuke to his predecessor, Gregory XVI, who had viewed them as dangerous departures from the way God meant things to be. The new pope also won popular favor in these first months by freeing political prisoners and calling for the reform of the Papal States' notoriously corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy.

But, caught up in the intoxicating spirit of revolt that swept Europe with shocking speed in 1848, people soon wanted—no, demanded—more, much more. In April of that year, Pius rejected pleas that he support efforts to drive the Austrians out of the Italian peninsula. In November, amid increasing disorder, calls for a constitution, and demands for an end to the papal dictatorship, his prime minister was stabbed to death in the middle of Rome in broad daylight.

Fearing for his life and by then practically a prisoner in his Quirinal Palace in central Rome, the pope decided to escape. Dressed as a simple priest, his face partially concealed by tinted glasses, he furtively boarded the carriage of the Bavarian ambassador and, with his help, made his way south to the seaside fortress of Gaeta, north of Naples in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.