Prisoner of the Vatican (28 page)

The cardinals of the Congregation were deeply divided. First to speak at the meeting was Cardinal Luigi Bilio. Although he might have been expected to take a hard line, he came from Piedmont, the home of the Savoyard monarchy, and cringed at the prospect of bishops snubbing the king.

"Bishops should try to refrain from paying visits to the King," he said. "But, if this proves impossible without provoking even greater evils for the Church, they should go ahead, albeit in the least solemn way possible." It was one thing to have such a strict rule in place immediately after the usurpation of the papal lands, he argued, but it had now been so long that continued insistence on such a policy would be counterproductive. The pope ran a greater risk, "the danger of not being obeyed [by the bishops], which would truly produce a terrible scandal."

A number of the cardinals insisted that a distinction be made between the bishops in the lands the king ruled legitimately and those in the lands that had been stolen from the Church. In the latter group, Cardinal Ledochowski argued, no bishop should ever greet the king, while in the former, if bishops were clearly forced by circumstances to do so, people would understand. Others disagreed. "You're too worried about public opinion," complained Cardinal Ferrari. Much more important, he insisted, was respecting the sensibilities of good Catholics, who would understandably be offended at the sight of a bishop paying homage to the king anywhere in Italy.
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Informed of the cardinals' conflicting views, the new pope released a set of instructions for the bishops in lands that had been usurped from the Papal States. "It would certainly be best if the bishops abstained from taking part in any act of homage to the sovereign invader," the text began. It might be made easier if the bishop absented himself when the king visited his city. However, should the bishop judge his failure to appear to be likely to provoke popular demonstrations against him, it would be acceptable for him to pay the king that degree of courtesy deemed indispensable while taking care that nothing be done that could offend good Catholics. In no case, the pope added, were bishops to permit the Te Deum to be sung or other Church rites performed in the king's honor.
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A few days later Archbishop Agostini, the patriarch of Venice, wrote a long, defensive letter to the secretary of state. The king had recently visited Venice, and the patriarch had agreed to pay him a personal visit, much to the horror of the Catholic press.

When he had been invited to be received by the king, the patriarch recounted, he reflected that the archbishops of Turin and Milan had both recently paid public homage to the king in their cities. And he had an even greater reason not to want to snub the king, for he was still awaiting the government's authorization to give him legal claim to his post. The fact that an invitation addressed to "the archbishop of Venice"—albeit without his own name on it—had been delivered to him on behalf of the king, he argued, was an important step toward the government's official recognition. And it was only right that he pay homage to the king, for Venice—unlike Rome or Bologna—was legally under the king's control. "As for me," he continued, "I am of the opinion that a bishop who does not pay public homage to a legitimate king would infringe upon a principle propounded in the Holy Scriptures, where it speaks of respect for authority, and it would offer a bad example to the faithful." As a result, on the king's arrival in Venice, the archbishop had ordered all of the bells of the city's churches to toll, and, seated in his own gondola, he joined the flotilla of dignitaries that glided out to meet the monarch.
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In an effort to stop the damage done by such episodes, Leo and his secretary of state began to warn bishops before the announced royal visits. On August 30, in one such case, Cardinal Nina wrote to the bishop of Brescia, in Lombardy, telling him that the pope, having learned from the newspapers of the king's planned visit, wanted to be sure that the bishop had the latest instructions. The secretary of state added a warning about one of the bishop's colleagues nearby. "From the press Your Reverence will have learned some details regarding the conduct of the Eminent Archbishop of Verona during King Umberto's visit to that city," Nina wrote, adding: "I cannot conceal the fact that this produced a rather painful impression on the Holy Father." He then asked the bishop of Brescia to investigate the archbishop of Verona's recent behavior and report back on what he learned.
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That same day the secretary of state sent a blistering note directly to Verona. People in Rome were distressed at the news of his recent encounter with King Umberto, Cardinal Nina told the archbishop. "Your Eminence will well understand that such accounts in the press have been greeted here with great reserve, all the more so as they involve a cardinal, bound by strong ties to the Holy See and to the Person of His Holiness." As he did not have sufficient information to rebut these charges, the secretary of state wrote, "I pray Your Eminence to furnish me with all the details regarding the supposed encounter so that I will be in a position to dissipate any of the less favorable impression that the above-mentioned news has produced in the Holy Father's soul and among the Diplomatic Corps."
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Cardinal Nina did not have to wait long for the archbishop's angry reply. "After the bombs, after the satires, after the articles in the yellow press, after the demonstrations, after the threats—even of death—that I have suffered for my strong public attachment and deep devotion to the Holy See and its venerated Head," he wrote, "I would never have believed that I would have received the words contained in your message of yesterday, which arrived this morning."

He explained that the local prefect had sent a letter inviting him to be at the train station on the king's arrival. Umberto simply planned to stop for a few minutes before continuing on his journey. "I went there, dressed in black, with only a large red cloak, as I didn't know what else I could wear." He had decided to go, he said, for three reasons. First of all, in Verona Umberto was a legitimate king. Second, the archbishop argued, a dozen years earlier Umberto, then a prince, had been a guest at his residence, and so "it seemed discourteous to me not to pay him a brief visit." But third, it had occurred to him that given his familiarity with Umberto, he might take advantage of the opportunity to urge the king to find a way to reach a modus vivendi with the Holy See. And he had begun to do that very thing when he was interrupted by a general who tore the king away from him.

But now, for having acted in a way that he believed was in the best interest of the Holy See and the Church, he was being vilified. It was too much. He begged the secretary of state to inform the pope that he wanted to be relieved both of his cardinal's hat and his appointment as bishop. He wished simply to retire to his home "to prepare myself for that death which I sense is not far away. There, as a simple priest, I will help the bishop assigned to be my successor as much as I can." He pleaded: "If only I could return to being a simple priest! I am entirely nauseated by the world."
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The Verona cardinal may have also been aware that, at the Vatican's request, his colleagues were spying on him. On August 28, the secretary of state received a confidential report from Verona. A priest whom he had asked to investigate the cardinal had been instructed to send his reply on the same sheets of paper the request had come on, to ensure its secrecy. The king had stopped at the Verona train station at 2:10
P.M.
on August 7, the investigator recounted, spending about fifteen minutes there before the train pulled out. "His Eminence, wearing the cardinal's vestments, was at the station with the other Dignitaries." On the king's arrival, the very first person to speak to him was the cardinal, "whom King Umberto greeted with great affability and kindness." After paying his respects to the queen, the cardinal kissed the little prince and gave him a red case containing a little silver statue of Saint Joseph." The informant added that the newspapers had complained that it was not right that the cardinal was the first to greet the king; this honor was due the mayor.
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Meanwhile, the bishop of Brescia found himself in an exceedingly embarrassing position when he received the secretary of state's letter telling of the pope's anger at the archbishop of Verona and requesting his own confidential investigation. The Brescian bishop had a transgression of his own to confess, as he did in a letter to Cardinal Nina on September 2. He, too, had received an official invitation to be at the train station to receive the king. "I have nothing to reprove myself for," the bishop argued, "neither from the few words that I addressed to His Majesty nor from the circumstances of that very brief encounter." Yet, in light of the secretary of state's letter, he wrote, "I confess my mistake and beg forgiveness from His Holiness and Your Excellency and from my fellow clerics who were led by my example to commit the same mistake." In the future, he promised, he would never let this happen again. "As a consequence of what I have told you here regarding my own behavior," he concluded, "I must believe myself dispensed from the delicate task that Your Excellency commissioned me to undertake." He could hardly launch a secret investigation of the behavior of the archbishop of Verona when he himself was guilty of the same misdeed.
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Yet not all of Italy's bishops were so eager to pay homage to the king, and some—much to Leo's relief—proudly informed him of their loyalty. Such was the case of the bishop of Piacenza. On August 31, the king had paid a visit to that northern city, where he stopped at the train station for official ceremonies. Displeased to learn that the city's bishop was not there to greet him, Umberto lamented his absence to the mayor and the prefect. Rather melodramatically, at this point in telling the story of his principled stance, the bishop added, "Up to now I have not been molested, but whatever comes, I am at peace and ready even for death in order to keep my sacred ministry untarnished, and to scrupulously follow the orders, advice, and instructions of our beloved Holy Father."

But the bishop did not stop there. He went on to complain about his colleagues' behavior. Inexplicably, the clear, sage instructions that the pope had sent them all "had not prevented other bishops, archbishops, and cardinals, not only from paying homage to the sovereign, but from doing all they could to show their attachment to the man who continues to inflict so much pain on the Holy Church. This is creating confusion among the people, making the position of the bishops who want to faithfully serve the Holy See much more difficult." He concluded his letter to Nina: "Oh! Eminent Prince, if we could only achieve uniformity in our behavior, how much we would gain in decorum, how much bitterness would be avoided, and how much more powerful would the Sovereign Pontiff's words of protest be, supported in this way throughout the land by the conduct of the episcopate."
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At the same time, the pope was under great pressure to soften his stance. On September 9, the archbishop of Catania, in eastern Sicily, wrote to the secretary of state a long letter pleading to be allowed to take part in the ceremonies surrounding the king's impending arrival. Here in the South and especially in Sicily, the archbishop explained, "the visits of Sovereigns assume a very special meaning. Here the mass of people, who are religious and know absolutely nothing of politics, believe that a king, whoever he is, should show respect toward the Church, and enter it with the necessary pomp." The archbishop went on to recall that in January, after Victor Emmanuel's death, he had received the Vatican's instructions not to participate in any funeral observances. But he and his colleagues had concluded that following such orders would be disastrous, and they had been proven right. Where bishops took part in the ceremonies that honored the dead king, respect for the Church had been maintained, but bishops who boycotted the rites had provoked popular anger and hostility.

None of the secretary of state's suggestions for how to avoid unpleasantness in refusing to greet the king would help, the archbishop argued. He could hardly claim to have pressing business elsewhere and so be absent from Catania when the king arrived, for everyone knew that September was the time when the peasants were busy in their vineyards and that bishops never made rural parish visits then. And writing a letter explaining his refusal to greet the king, attributing it to the poor relations existing between the state and the Holy See, as the secretary of state's instructions had suggested, was impossible, because everyone knew that the archbishops of Turin, Milan, and Verona, as well as the patriarch of Venice, had all paid their respects to the king on his northern tour.

To snub the king and the civil authorities risked ruining much of the work of his archdiocese. He had good relationships with the municipal authorities, who allowed him to continue to run Church seminaries, schools, and charities. All would be placed in jeopardy. And who, he asked, would benefit the most from such a refusal? It would not be the good Catholics of Catania but the radical anticlerics, republicans who opposed the monarchy. "They would applaud my absolute abstention while on the other hand, many well-intentioned people believe that the king, whoever he is, represents the last vestige of civil authority, and they would like it respected, as the only safeguard against a social cataclysm."
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The archbishop's arguments failed to impress Leo, who had Cardinal Nina prepare a lengthy rebuttal. The archbishop's letter, wrote Cardinal Nina, was filled with references to special local conditions, but the pope had a responsibility to look after the larger interest of the Church. The Church had to present a united front if it was to show the world how much suffering it was being forced to endure at the hands of the Italian state; only from such a demonstration could they hope to get help from foreign governments. "And here I must add," wrote the secretary of state, "that it was precisely by having diverged from such conduct on the occasion of the funeral ceremonies for King Victor Emmanuel—which did not afford the least relief from the deplorable conditions in which our Religion finds itself in Italy—that our adversaries were given ammunition to support their claims. The same thing happened again when some bishops of northern Italy recently paid private visits to King Umberto." The Holy Father, Cardinal Nina wrote, could not tolerate any deviation from this policy on his part, for his would be a powerful example to the other bishops in Sicily.
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