Prisoner of the Vatican (23 page)

On Wednesday evening, following a solemn procession of cardinals and the clergy of St. Peter's and accompanied by the singing of the basilica's choir, the pope's body, clad in white papal vestments and covered by a red silk cloth, was placed in its temporary tomb inside St. Peter's. There it would remain for three years.
²⁴

Pius IX was dead. The object of greater adulation in the Catholic world than any pope in history, he had died a martyr in the eyes of millions of devoted Catholics, a deeply religious figure who would not trade his principles for political expediency, a man seen as God's champion on earth. In death, as in life, he was the saintly prisoner of the Vatican.
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But the pope's popularity was far from universal. Not only was he widely reviled in Italy for his continuing opposition to Italian unification, he had angered most of Europe's political elite as well. At his death, the
Kulturkampf,
the German government's attack on the Catholic Church, was still in full swing, as was a campaign against the Church in Switzerland. The Austrians were angered by the pope's refusal, a month earlier, to receive a member of the emperor's family who was in Rome for Victor Emmanuel's funeral. In France an anticlerical party had just come to power, and in Belgium the ruling party showed little love for the Vatican. Nor was the situation in Spain much better.

Following his predecessors' example, Pius IX had identified the Church with the monarchs of Europe and with the battle against civil liberties. But many of the monarchs with whom he had been most closely identified had been deposed and discredited, and he himself died as a self-styled prisoner of the Vatican. The question now facing the Catholic faithful, as well as the Italian government and others throughout the Christian world, was, what would his successor be like? Were things about to change or would the new pope, too, piously await the day when God would drive the revolutionaries from Rome and restore His vicar on earth to his rightful place?
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W
ITHIN MONTHS OF
occupying Rome in 1870, Italy's leaders had concluded that the Holy See would never make peace with the Italian state as long as Pius IX was alive. So it meant that a great deal was at stake in the choice of the new pope. Would he be more politically realistic and willing to stand up to the
zelanti,
as the intransigents were called? Or would he himself be drawn from their ranks, ushering in another decade of hostility toward the state?

In the years that followed, Italy's ambassadors met secretly with the leaders of Europe's other governments to try to devise a plan to influence the selection. In June 1871, for example, Marco Minghetti met with the Austrian foreign minister, Count Beust. Since a vacancy on St. Peter's throne could come at any time, Minghetti suggested that Europe's powers work together to ensure "that the new pope is a man of moderate and conciliatory spirit."
¹
The following month, Italy's foreign minister, Visconti, urged the Italian ambassador in Paris to raise the question of a papal successor with the French prime minister. "The question of the future pope," Visconti wrote, "is of tremendous importance for both political and religious interests. Governments should waste no time in smoothing the way for the election of a pope who is well disposed to conciliation, not only with Italy, but with all of modern society."
²
At the same time, the Austrian and French foreign ministries were in direct contact with each other. Beust warned the French that, under the current circumstances in the Vatican, "the candidates of the party of conciliation had no chance, and a pope chosen from among the infallibilist cardinals would be a danger for all governments." Preventive action was crucial.
³

The Portuguese government also wanted to be involved. In early 1872, the Portuguese were amassing historic documentation aimed at proving that they too had a right to cast a veto in papal elections. They would have a hard time getting anyone to heed them. The veto had long been the prerogative of Austria's emperor and the kings of Spain and France by dint of their claim to being the successors of Charlemagne, who as Emperor of the West had enjoyed such a right. They had exercised such a veto often over the past centuries.
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The Portuguese agreed with the Italian plan. As their foreign minister put it, according to a February 1872 report from the Italian ambassador in Lisbon, a prior agreement by the European powers would be extremely useful, "above all to eliminate the candidates for the pontificate well known for their membership in and devotion to the party of the irreconcilables." It would also be well to agree in advance on the election of a cardinal, he said, who, "if not the most liberal—who in current circumstances would have little chance of success—was at least one of the cardinals ... well disposed to reconciliation." Italy, the Portuguese minister warned, was in a dangerous position. The Vatican, he said, "is doing all it can ... to isolate Italy and to bring victory to the royalists in France and—with Henry V [then being championed by the French royalists] on the French throne together with a new pope hostile to Italy—reestablish temporal power."

The Italian leaders shared these fears. A few months later, Visconti told his ambassador to Paris that, while it was too much to hope for the election of a liberal pope, "it would be a most useful result to exclude the election of cardinals who are known for their intolerant viewpoint and their membership in the Jesuitical party." But he urged caution. The Italian government must not be seen to be the initiators of these secret European discussions.
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In a confidential memo dated May 10,1872, Visconti set out the government's concerns about a future conclave, to be used in briefing Italian ambassadors abroad. At the moment, what most preoccupied him was not so much who the new pope would be but how he would be selected. Two rumors had him worried. One was the proposal, favored by a number of influential cardinals, to elect the next pontiff
presente cadavere,
that is, as soon as Pius IX had died and even before he was buried. It would mean choosing the new pope without a conclave. The other was the plan to hold the conclave outside Italy, on the grounds that the cardinals could not deliberate freely in Rome. "Any deviation from the canonical form can only diminish the authority of St. Peter's new successor," Visconti warned.
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Germany and Chancellor Bismarck were also involved in these secret discussions. In late May 1872, the German foreign minister had called in Italy's ambassador and read him a confidential message that Bismarck had written. It was extremely important, the chancellor wrote, for the European governments to ensure the regularity of the upcoming conclave, not least so that they would be in a position to use their veto. Its importance was now far greater than it had ever been, given the recent proclamation of papal infallibility: "How much more precious has this right become," Bismarck wrote, "after the dogmas that have recently been proclaimed! Following these dogmas, the bishops have lost all of what independence had been left to them vis-à-vis the Holy See. They have become the Pope's employees."
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The spring of 1873 found Visconti engaged in frenetic correspondence with his ambassadors, orchestrating confidential discussions of the next papal vacancy, now widely assumed to be near. The Austrian foreign minister charged that Cardinal Antonelli was pushing for a conclave to be held outside Italy (in this the Austrian was almost surely wrong) and urged that the European powers do everything possible to prevent it. The Italian ambassadors in France, Germany, Austria, Portugal, and Spain were all reporting that those governments wanted the next papal election to be held in Rome and wanted a moderate named as pope. But Visconti suspected that something else was going on. On May 20, he wrote a long letter to his ambassador in Vienna.

"Behind our back and unbeknownst to us," he told him, "agreements are being made dealing with the papal question that are against our interests." Above all, Visconti distrusted the French. Our goal, wrote Visconti, must be "to paralyze, at least in part, that action, unfavorable to us, that France would like to carry out."
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He then turned to the prospect of a conclave outside Italy. Such a gathering, he wrote, would represent a triumph for the reactionary faction of the Church, for in such a gathering the election of one of their own number would be a foregone conclusion. And once elected outside the country, it was hard to imagine that the new pope's first act would be to return to Rome, for to do so would be to admit that he was free to come and go as he pleased and so was not the prisoner of the Vatican as Pius IX had claimed. Having the new pope outside Italy, Visconti argued, would prove a great boon for fanatics, who would use it to arouse popular anger. It would mean a new Crusade, led by the pope himself. And the impact on Italy would be enormous: "All of Italy's policies would be dominated by the need for defense. Everything would be driven to the extreme." Visconti accepted as fact the reports that Antonelli was pushing for a conclave outside Italy, but he noted that Austria and the other Catholic powers—working against France—could fight the plan, profiting from the reluctance of most of the Roman cardinals to leave the Holy City, frightened as they were by the prospect of exile.
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Evidence that the
zelanti
in the Vatican were indeed plotting to have the next pope elected outside Rome comes from a strange visitor, received by the Austrian emperor at the beginning of September 1873. The visit also suggests that it was not Antonelli but cardinals trying to work around him who were behind the plan. For the man presenting himself as the special, secret emissary of Pius IX was not the papal nuncio to Vienna (who was directly under Antonelli's authority) but Monsignor Francesco Nardi, one of the most notorious of the
zelanti,
a fervent champion of the pope's temporal power who had grown very close to Pius IX in his last years.

Nardi informed the emperor that the pope had recently signed a secret pontifical bull ordering that his successor be elected within two hours of his death. But why, the emperor asked, would the pope send Nardi to tell him this? Because, the monsignor explained, there was still a way to avoid this unorthodox procedure. If Austria were to offer a place in its territory where the conclave could be held, it would not be necessary to abandon the traditional method of electing a new pope.

The emperor was unmoved by the monsignor's plea. He refused the request, adding that he saw no reason that a free conclave could not be held in Rome.

Nardi responded with a threat: "Well, since Austria is turning us down, we will have to turn to France."

"Do as you like," the emperor replied, but he suggested that, before leaving Vienna, the monsignor speak with Count Andrassy, who had recently succeeded Beust as Austria's foreign minister.

Like the emperor, Andrassy wondered whether Nardi had actually been sent by the pope, for he offered no direct proof, and it seemed possible that it was all part of a
zelanti
plot.

A pope elected outside Rome in dubious circumstances, said Andrassy, would face grave difficulties, for many Catholics would question his legitimacy. In any case, he told Nardi, the Imperial Government would not host such a conclave, for the election of the new pope in Austria implied "the commitment to bring him back to Rome under the conditions that he himself determined and, as a final consequence, the necessity, should it be called for, of declaring war on Italy, something that the Imperial Government absolutely refuses to do."

Nardi, his mission a failure, left straightaway for Rome.
¹⁰

In June 1875, Visconti outlined his concerns in a letter to his ambassador to Paris. He was worried about the papal candidate whom he thought France was pushing, Cardinal Sisto Riario-Sforza, the archbishop of Naples. From a noble Neapolitan family close to the Bourbon king of Naples and made a cardinal back in 1846, at the age of thirty-five, Riario-Sforza was one of the Church's leading conservatives. Visconti described him as "narrow-minded and of limited intelligence," but he was nonetheless viewed as honest and incorruptible. "In some circles of the prelature here in Rome," observed Visconti, "he is seen as likely to fall under the Jesuits' influence. For my part, I believe that his papacy would follow the same line of conduct as that of Pius IX. But it is for other reasons that I must confess that the likelihood of the election of Cardinal Riario repels me. As a Neapolitan he was always very devoted to the Bourbons, and his social origin gives him greater prestige, and it also makes one suppose that he would be very closely tied to the Bourbon aristocracy of the South, without having to add that this complex of networks has close ties to France."
¹¹

In a remarkable document that Visconti sent to his ambassador to Portugal in January 1876, the Italian government offered its secret evaluation of each of Italy's thirty-three cardinals, to be shared with the Portuguese foreign minister and used in the secret negotiations then taking place in Europe's capitals. Visconti divided the cardinals into two categories. He explained that the first, List A, consisted of the names of those who, "in our view, should be excluded and whose election to the papacy seems dangerous to us both due to their fanatical and ultra-reactionary opinions and because their actions as pontiff are, for other reasons, to be feared." List B, on the other hand, "contains the names of those cardinals who, in our view, do not have against them any particular reason for the exercise of a veto." On both lists, Visconti had placed the names in the order of their probability of election, beginning with those having the greatest chances.

Among those about whom Visconti was most concerned, Cardinal Riario-Sforza again drew special attention. The head of the Bourbon aristocracy in Naples, Visconti wrote, the cardinal was the candidate of those who would like to see the South of Italy separated from the rest of the country. He was the darling of those French Catholics who most hated Italy.