Prisoner of the Vatican (5 page)

The reactionaries in the Church exulted. But for most Catholics—or at least those who cared about such matters—the Syllabus produced disorientation and dismay. The pope, it seemed, hoped for a return to the Middle Ages. While loyal Catholics were uneasy, anticlericals were ecstatic. A Piedmontese newspaper asked how long it would be until the pope, having condemned the discoveries of modern science, would ban the trains, the telegraph, steam engines, and gaslights in those lands he still ruled. In Naples and Palermo, groups of Freemasons publicly burned copies of the encyclical and the Syllabus.
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The pope had no intention of doing away with the trains or the telegraph, but there was no mistaking his embrace of a medieval vision for the Church. The very language used in
Quanta cura
recalled an era in which the papacy was locked in bitter struggles with a series of medieval emperors. It offered an apocalyptic vision of the forces of good arrayed against those of evil: "Our Predecessors have, with Apostolic fortitude, constantly resisted the nefarious machinations of wicked men, who, like raging waves of the sea foaming with their own deceptions, and promising freedom while they are themselves the slaves of corruption, have striven by their deceitful opinions and most pernicious writings to demolish the foundations of the Catholic religion and of civil society, to remove all virtue and justice, to corrupt all souls and all minds."
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The Syllabus represented the triumph of the Curia's reactionary faction, which in these years was closely identified with the Jesuits. More than any other major religious order, the Jesuits—or Society of Jesus—recruited their members from the aristocracy, whose fierce identification with the old order they typically shared.
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By contrast, although Cardinal Antonelli had little sympathy for the liberals, he had thought the encyclical and Syllabus a bad idea. Ever the practical politician, he feared the harm that they would do to the pope's cause in Europe's capitals.
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As he predicted, throughout Catholic Europe political leaders lost no time using the Syllabus to paint the papacy as an anachronism and a danger, urging a drastic reduction in the Church's influence in public life.

Odo Russell was among those who viewed
Quanta cura
as a disaster for a papacy. "At a moment when the Holy See stands in need of all support of the faithful," the British envoy wrote, the pope "has seen fit to condemn the honest exertions of the ablest defenders of the Church." The impact, he thought, would be enormous, for either the Catholic clergy would be forced to take part in "a vast ecclesiastical conspiracy against the principles which govern modern society" or they would refuse, thereby putting "the Catholic clergy in opposition to the vicar of Christ whom they are bound to obey." If the current path continued much longer, Russell predicted, the break between the Church and the progressive nations of Europe would become irreparable.
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As the forces poised to put an end to the thousand-year papal reign gathered steam outside his shrunken kingdom, Pius IX called a special Jubilee to beseech God to keep the Church's enemies at bay. In early March 1866 magnificent processions, led by eye-poppingly dressed cardinals, made their way through the streets of the Holy City, with a sea of monks and friars parading behind them, bearing sacred images aloft and holding blazing candles. Among the highlights of the celebrations were ceremonies conducted at several of Rome's historic churches, where priests piled books banned by the Index onto large braziers and, assisted by the papal police, set them on fire.
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The pope soon followed this gathering with a much more ambitious event, summoning all of the world's bishops and cardinals for a grand Ecumenical Council. The first such council to be held in Rome in over 350 years, it had two goals: to endorse the Syllabus and with it the pope's condemnation of the modern age, and to sanctify the principle—not previously an official part of Church doctrine—that the pope was infallible.

The goal originally envisioned for what came to be known as the First Vatican Council was nicely expressed by Bishop Félix Dupanloup, one of France's most influential Churchmen, in a letter to Antonelli in the months following Garibaldi's defeat at Mentana. The gathering of all the world's bishops would offer such a show of strength, he wrote, that it would make it impossible for France to dream of ever abandoning Rome. "The Council will at the same time be a great force against Piedmont," the bishop predicted. "Our strongest argument against
Rome capital of Italy
" he explained, "is
Rome capital of Catholicism
." In the face of the massive gathering of bishops and cardinals in Rome, "the pretensions of the Piedmontese will become not merely impossible, but the object of ridicule."
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Yet influential sectors of the Church looked with horror on the prospect of an enormous Vatican spectacle aimed at denouncing freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press, and many also opposed the idea of pronouncing the pope infallible. In a letter written in June 1869, just six months before the Council was called to order, Charles Emile Freppel, bishop of Angers, captured this mood. "The Council is being held either too soon or too late. Too late, because we are at the end of the pontificate of a tired and discouraged old man ... who views everything through the misfortunes he has suffered. For him, everything that takes place in the modern world is, and must by necessity be, an 'abomination.'" On the other hand, the bishop continued, "It is too soon, because it is clear that the situation in Europe is not yet settled." He blamed the Jesuits for the pope's unfortunate decision to call the Council.
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Hostility toward the Jesuits was evident among the American prelates attending the Council as well. A few days before the Council began, Bernard McQuaid, bishop of Rochester, New York, wrote to a colleague at home: "Since coming to Europe, I have heard much of the question of the infallibility of the Pope, which with us in America was scarcely talked of. The feeling is very strong,
pro
and
con.
It seems that the Jesuits have been at the bottom of it, and have been preparing the public mind for it for the past two years. They have not made friends for themselves by the course they have followed, and if in any way the harmony of the Council is disturbed, it will be by the introduction of this most unnecessary question." He concluded, "[T]here is no telling what the Jesuits will do, and from the manner in which they are sounding out the Bishops, I am inclined to think that they will succeed in having the question forced upon us. In my humble opinion, and almost every American Bishop whose opinion I have heard agrees with me, it will be a great calamity for the Church." Or as the bishop of Pittsburgh lamented three months into the Council, speaking of the proposal of papal infallibility, "It will kill us ... we shall have to swallow what we have vomited up." What worried him most was the Protestant anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States and the frequent charge that Catholics viewed the pope as a kind of deity. In the past, he said, we have always angrily denied such accusations, but if infallibility is pronounced, he asked, how will we be able to defend ourselves?
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The intellectual leader of the movement against the Council and against papal infallibility was a man who would not be in Rome for the historic gathering. The redoubtable Ignaz von Dollinger, Germany's most renowned Church historian and one of Europe's most influential Catholic theologians, was convinced that the Council would be a calamity for the Church, and he devoted the months leading up to it, and the months of the Council itself, to a frantic and doomed effort to persuade the bishops to vote against the propositions that would be put before them. In the most public of these efforts, a series of articles in the newspaper
Allgemeine Zeitung,
Dollinger, using a pseudonym, accused the Jesuits and the pope himself of preparing an "ecclesiastical revolution." A papal seizure of power was planned that, he warned, would undermine the bishops' authority and create a papal dictatorship. It was but the last step, the Church historian argued, in a centuries-long drive toward centralization that had produced "a tumor that is disfiguring the Church and causing it to suffocate."
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Influenced in part by Dollinger, Bishop Dupanloup, who had earlier championed the calling of a Council, published a booklet that appeared a month before its opening ceremonies, setting out all the reasons why he now believed it unwise to declare the pope infallible.
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Yet it was not only the Jesuits who championed papal infallibility. Although never an official part of Church doctrine, the principle had been taught within the Church for centuries. Most Italian bishops, and many elsewhere, were convinced that this was exactly the right time to publicly embrace it. With the authority of the pope—and so of the Church—threatened, with much of the Papal States already in enemy hands and what little remained exposed to usurpation at any time, anything that could bolster the papacy, they believed, was to the good.
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Much was made of the torrential rain that drenched the crowd on the Wednesday early in December 1869, when the Council opened. Was it an omen of things to come, as many feared? St. Peter's had been packed with the curious and the devout since seven that morning; outside, carriages from the most luxurious to the merely serviceable clogged the square. Seats of honor were reserved for the recently deposed royalty who had come to pay homage. Leopold II, former grand duke of Tuscany, was there, although looking poorly—he died a few months later—along with his son Ferdinand IV. Beside them was Francis II, who was the king of Naples until Garibaldi drove him out in 1860. The former head of the Duchy of Modena was present as well. Special places were reserved for Generals Kanzler and Du Mont, whose troops guarded what remained of the Papal States. Of the thousand or so bishops, cardinals, and heads of religious orders throughout the world who were invited, 774 were there that first day. They formed a solemn—if soggy—procession to their red seats, which filled the right transept of the massive basilica. Although the great majority came from Europe—Italy with more than two hundred having by far the most—forty had made their way from the United States, nine from Canada, and another thirty from Latin America. After the bishops, cardinals, and other Church dignitaries were in place, the pope was carried to the front entrance of St. Peter's in his
sedia gestatoria,
getting out to walk the length of the nave on foot. After a mass was said, each of the fathers paid homage to the pope on his throne, the cardinals kissing his hand, the bishops his knee, and the abbots and religious superiors his foot.
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Among the uninvited observers who struggled to catch a glimpse of the proceedings was Ferdinand Gregorovius, the esteemed German historian then in the midst of writing his massive multivolume history of Rome. "The heat," he recalled the next day in his diary, "was unendurable. Clouds of steam rose from the wet clothes and umbrellas, from the dripping of which the marble floor was turned into a puddle." A Protestant, Gregorovius viewed the Council with deep suspicion. As with all past such councils, he wrote, here too the tension between the pope's authority and that of the bishops was evident to all. But the pope had now become, he thought, a tool in the hands of the Jesuits, who sought an ever greater concentration of power at the center. "Rome," Gregorovius wrote on December 26, "presents the spectacle of the deification, amounting to insanity, of despotism. If the movement is really carried: if the bishops, in fear and fanaticism, yield submission to the will of the pope: it is to be hoped that the unity of Germany will quickly bring to pass a second reformation."
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People in higher places than Gregorovius likewise warned of the disaster that would befall the Church if the plan to proclaim papal infallibility went ahead. Among those in a position to make such a prediction come true was Napoleon III, who, through the archbishop of Algiers, warned Cardinal Antonelli two months into the Council that should papal infallibility be voted in, he would have all French troops withdrawn from Rome. He would have no choice, he said, because French public opinion would, in such circumstances, demand it.

Odo Russell, in reporting this news to London, observed that the French emperor clearly had little understanding of how Pius's mind worked. "I am surprised," he wrote, "that the Emperor Napoleon and Count Daru [his foreign minister] should know so little of the character of Pio IX as to suppose that advice or threats of any kind could turn him from his path of duty. Pio IX has the faith that moves mountains and believes in his divine mission. Martyrdom at the end of his Pontificate would be the reward from heaven he has prayed for all his life." The pope, as the British envoy rightly observed, was impervious to appeals to political calculation. "His stand-point is that of a divine teacher ready to suffer and die for his faith, and he cannot yield to the advice of the temporal sovereigns of the earth to whom his life is to serve as an example." Although Pius was well aware that the French troops had restored him to his throne ten years earlier and that it was those same troops who kept him in power in Rome even today, wrote Russell, the pope in his own mind "owes them no gratitude for it, since they merely performed a sacred duty."
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In writing back to Russell, the British foreign minister expressed the view then common among Europe's political elite, that the drive for papal infallibility was a "monstrous assault on the reason of mankind." But he saw a silver lining in the cloud, for he believed that such a move would make "church despotism" so extreme that it would inevitably drive Catholics away from the Church. "I cannot therefore regard the prospects of papal triumph with the alarm of Gladstone," the foreign minister wrote to Russell, "who (strange to say) is almost exclusively occupied by it and thinks that Catholic governments will bitterly rue the day when they determined to be passive spectators of what they well knew was about to happen."
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