Prisoner of the Vatican (27 page)

Leo found himself in a difficult spot, caught between his recognition that something new needed to be tried and the heavy pressure he felt within the Church not to do anything that might call into question the wisdom of his saintly predecessor's rejectionist stance. Among the forces exerting the most pressure were Italy's two major national organizations of Catholic laity, established under Pius IX—the Society of Catholic Youth and the Opera dei Congressi—both of which firmly supported the intransigent line.

But Leo was very different from Pius, as was clear to all who would but look. While Pius had barely let an occasion go by without denouncing the usurper state and heaping abuse on those, inside and outside the Church, who embraced the ideals of freedom of religion and freedom of speech and press, Leo was much more restrained. When he received groups of pilgrims he rarely strayed from his prepared text, he rarely got emotional, and he largely avoided political topics. As a result, at least in the first years, when memories of the warm and fiery Pius IX were still fresh, pilgrims found the new pontiff rather cold and uninspiring.
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One of the most eagerly watched signals of Leo's intentions was whether he would continue Pius's attempt to portray the pope as a prisoner of the Vatican. Might he, for example, signal a change by escaping Rome's summer heat and malarial air for the cooler, safer climes of the papal estate at Castel Gandolfo, something Pius IX had refused to do after 1870?
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The first real test of the new pope's commitment to the Vatican's stance came soon enough. The occasion was the decision by Umberto, Italy's new king, to set off on a grand tour of his kingdom. His father, Victor Emmanuel, had hated public ceremonies and loathed traveling from city to city to take part in them. The only city that Italy's first king had felt at all comfortable in was his old capital, Turin. But Italy's ministers were eager to build up popular enthusiasm around the new monarch, and he was amenable to the travels they planned for him.
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Umberto was not terribly impressive, lacking his father's brusque self-assurance and striking many as rather plain in contrast to his anything-but-ordinary-looking father. Like the Savoyards before him, Umberto had been trained for the military but not given any political responsibilities. Or, as his wife, Queen Margherita, would later put it, in the House of Savoy "one person reigns at a time."
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As colorless and quiet as his father was colorful and boisterous, he had a hard time becoming popular among the masses the way Victor Emmanuel was. Embarrassed by his own inadequacies, he waited until others left the room before he would sign documents put in front of him, or he found a way to go into another room to do so, ashamed of his difficulty in producing a suitably royal signature. He was an easy target for the canny Crispi, who, along with Depretis, wrote most of the speech that the king gave to parliament on his inauguration. It was they, too, who persuaded him not to follow his family's advice and become Umberto IV (the fourth in the Savoyard dynasty) but rather demonstrate his allegiance to the new kingdom by becoming Umberto I, the first to rule Italy.
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Up at five o'clock every morning, the king took a hearty breakfast of roast pheasant covered with meat sauce. Although uncomfortable in the world of culture—he would flee at the approach of an intellectual or artist—he knew all there was to know about horses, uniforms, and—at least so he would like to think—women. His aides tried to protect him from the latter—or at least to do what they could to avoid public scandal—but they were worn out by the king's love of horses and riding, sometimes finding themselves sore from trying to keep up with his marathon rides, which could last fourteen hours without a break.

The new king did have one powerful advantage over his father: Queen Margherita. Blue-eyed, elegant, comely, bright, and politically astute, she had little in common with her husband beyond their shared sense of Savoyard pride. Victor Emmanuel's own wife, along with his mother, had both died in 1855, leaving a ceremonial vacuum that lasted almost a quarter of a century. The appearance of the new queen was thus all the more dramatic.

If marrying Margherita was the best thing that Umberto could have done, the wedding itself was a somewhat hasty affair. It appears that his 1868 marriage to the sixteen-year-old, Umberto's first cousin—the daughter of his father's brother—was intended to bolster the sagging popularity of Victor Emmanuel in the wake of the debacle at Men tana.

While pretending a close relationship for public consumption, Umberto and Margherita could barely stand each other. Umberto had met his true love, the Duchess Litta, said to be one of the most beautiful women of the nineteenth century, when he was eighteen and she twenty-five, and she remained his lover throughout his life. He installed her in a home next to his royal quarters in Monza, outside Turin, where she bore him a baby who died in childhood. When in Monza—which was a good deal of the time—he went to her every evening. Nor was Litta his only female companion, for in Rome he had relations with a series of women, arranging for them to be brought to an apartment set up for the purpose in a wing of the Quirinal, where, according to his close aide, he insisted on making the bed himself the next morning.
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Margherita wanted the royal couple to become the center of social and intellectual life in Rome, something Victor Emmanuel had disdained. They held regular banquets and formal balls at the Quirinal, sponsored charitable organizations, and held salons for the artistic elite. Margherita appeared as a vision of royal beauty: covered with jewelry, wearing a spectacular white dress with gold trim and a long train and a fur stole draped over her slender shoulders. While many observers were enchanted, others were less impressed, thinking her extravagance unseemly. Among those in the latter camp, the Frenchman Ernest Tissot complained that she dressed with "poor taste." At her frequent balls, she wore fifteen strands of pearls around her neck, huge pear-shaped earrings, and a corset covered with brooches and tangles of diamands. The queen, he remarked, "is adorned to look like a votive statue." Others, seeking to puncture the highly touted image of royal beauty, carped that the queen had short legs (which she tried to conceal by strategic dressing) and a hooked nose and that her supposedly blond hair was in fact simply mousy. Whatever her appearance, it was clear that the queen had an iron will joined to aristocratic, autocratic instincts, and she knew how to get her way.
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In addition to cultivating an image of the devoted wife and gracious queen, Margherita reveled in her reputation as a devout Catholic. A year after Umberto became king, the French ambassador to the Holy See reported that, at the queen's urging, the pope had lifted the ban on holding mass in the Quirinal. "The Queen," wrote the ambassador, "is very pleased by the decision and she plans to hold mass every morning." At Margherita's appearances at Church functions, cries of "Long live the Catholic Queen!" greeted her. By contrast, although Umberto went to mass often enough—believing it appropriate for a king to do so—he had a visceral distaste for the Vatican, the Church, and the priests. A close aide described him as a
pretofobo,
a priestophobe, reporting that Umberto once told him that all priests should be castrated.
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From the Vatican's perspective, the new king had no right to rule anywhere other than northern Italy, along with the island of Sardinia, and even this claim was undercut by the Savoyard monarchy's treachery in robbing the pope of his domain. While Umberto sought the legitimacy that would come from rituals of the sort that the Church had been furnishing monarchs for many centuries, the Vatican was eager to deprive him of any such support. Yet, maddeningly for Leo, this proved impossible, so fiercely did so many of Italy's bishops resist his orders.

In the short time between Umberto's accession to the Savoyard throne and Leo's own coronation, the Vatican had already begun to feel pressure from the Italian bishops. In one such case, the bishop of Parma wrote to the secretary of state for instructions: "I am under great pressure to order the singing of a
Te Deum
[a prayer of thanksgiving] in my cathedral ... to mark Umberto's elevation to the throne." He added that he had also heard rumors that the new king would soon be paying a visit to Parma and noted that he would be expected to appear with other dignitaries to pay his respects.

"I have referred your queries to the Pope," responded the secretary of state, writing on the very day that Pius IX died. The bishop was not to take part in any Te Deum rites, and he was ordered to refrain "from any act of homage that might be interpreted as a sign of adherence to the current order of things." The reasoning was clear: "The king's voyage will clearly be aimed at better entrenching the work of the revolution, which today no longer aims merely at undermining the legitimacy of the deposed Princes, but at undermining the rights of the Church and of the holy Pontiff himself." It was therefore imperative, wrote the secretary of state, "for the bishops to abstain from any act that could contribute to the attainment of such a perverse goal."
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By the time the bishop received this letter, the Church and the whole Catholic world were in mourning, and for the next few months the pope's death and funeral, the conclave to elect his successor, and the period of the new pope's settling in would overwhelm all else. But by summertime the issue of what to do about the new Italian monarch came once again to preoccupy the Vatican, as news arrived of Umberto's plan to visit each of the cities in his domain.

The summer presented another difficulty for the Holy See when the surprising news came of yet another death. On July 31, Leo's first secretary of state, Cardinal Alessandro Franchi, a man known for his moderate views, died. The fifty-nine-year-old cardinal had passed so rapidly from florid health to his death throes that—in Rome's overheated atmosphere—rumors that he had been poisoned by the intransigents spread quickly. After some hesitation, the pope selected Cardinal Lorenzo Nina as his new secretary of state. A less imposing figure, he was known both for his deep theological learning and his prudence, though some would say timidity.

In August, in a letter that he made public, Leo wrote to his new secretary of state with instructions on the conduct of his office. The pope bemoaned "the extremely difficult condition in which the Head of the Church finds Himself in Italy and Rome in the wake of the seizure of his temporal dominion, which Providence had given him for so many centuries in order to safeguard the freedom of his spiritual power." He went on to complain about a series of government measures, from the suppression of the monasteries to the law subjecting Catholic seminarians to military conscription, bewailing as well the government's decision to allow other religions to erect their own temples and churches in the Holy City.

The liberal press, until that time nursing some hope that the pope would take a different approach from that of his predecessor, began to lash out at him, seizing in particular on his calls for help from foreign governments to accuse him of wanting to foment a war against Italy.
La Libertà
wrote that the pope's letter to his secretary of state showed that the Vatican's true goal was "peace with everyone else at any cost; war with Italy at all costs and at all time." It charged: "The Vatican's game is clear: it aims to isolate Italy. Having made peace with all the Powers, the pope hopes to turn all of them against us."
La Riforma
put the matter more personally: "This pope is dangerous, we've already said it, because he is a calculator, perhaps also a skeptic. Pius IX was a man of faith; Leo XIII is a man of tricks."
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Meanwhile, the problems caused by the king's travels would not go away. On August io, Leo XIII sent instructions through his new secretary of state to all of Italy's bishops, forbidding them from participating in any rites for the usurper king. This act prompted an immediate, heated reply from the archbishop of Cagliari, Sardinia's capital. Using an argument that dozens of other bishops would make in the coming months, he insisted that his situation was unique, and that applying the pope's directive would be disastrous. "On the island of Sardinia in general, and in the city of Cagliari," the archbishop wrote, "even today there is the greatest popular veneration for the King and for the entire royal House of Savoy. If the King comes here, as is likely, and I do not pay him any act of homage, not even a private visit, it would be viewed very poorly, and greatly irritate the large majority of the population." What would he tell people, he asked, when they pointed out that in the king's recent visits to Lombardy and Venetia he had been greeted publicly by bishops, patriarchs, and cardinals? To fail to greet the royal couple would be impossible for him, not only because the palace in which the new monarch would be staying was contiguous to his own residence, but because he had known the queen for a long time, having in fact presided over her confirmation in Turin years earlier. The only way he could obey the papal directive, he concluded, would be to leave the island altogether before the king's visit, something he was clearly not eager to do.
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With similar pleas arriving in great quantity from throughout Italy, Leo had Cardinal Nina convene the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs on Thursday morning, August 22. The secretary of state set the meeting's tone by preparing a report for discussion; it began by noting the "painful impression" made by the bishops in northern Italy who had participated in welcomes to the king on his recent travels. The harm was all the greater in the diplomatic world, for Europe's royalty had shown restraint in refusing to visit a king "who has not only usurped the Temporal Dominion of the popes, but who still finds himself in open war with the Holy Pontiff." How, asked the cardinal, could the pope expect foreign royalty to shun the king when his own bishops and cardinals were going out to welcome him? Nor was it any use arguing that such deference was acceptable as long as it took place only in the northern lands to which the king had legitimate claim, for the king himself was in a state of war with the Church, his residence the pope's own palace in Rome.
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