Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (54 page)

He himself could not bear contradiction. When his Secretary of State once questioned his decision on some minor administrative matter he tapped the table and snapped at him, ‘Ego sum Petrus’ – (‘I am Peter’). That authoritarianism is in evidence in everything he did. He insisted punctiliously on the style and ceremony of a sovereign, and he systematically exalted the papal office. His encyclicals are littered with paragraphs urging the faithful – and their pastors – to undeviating obedience to papal teaching. The sheer quantity of that teaching in itself testifies to his extraordinary commitment to a teaching office. Its quantity, however, was not its most significant characteristic. Until the time of Leo XIII, papal doctrinal interventions had been relatively rare, and their form generally reflected the papacy’s role as a court of final appeal. Popes judged and, therefore, sometimes condemned. One of the attractions of Leo’s encyclicals is that they rarely merely condemn, but we should not allow relief to blind us to the radical shift in the nature of papal teaching which his collected encyclicals represent. Here, for the first time, we have the Pope as an inexhaustible source of guidance and instruction. No pope before or since has come anywhere near his eighty-six encyclicals. Leo taught and taught, and expected obedience.

He expected obedience, too, in the day-to-day running of the Church. Despite his reversal of Pio Nono’s centralising measures over the Eastern Rite Catholics, he himself tightened papal control over all the Church. He greatly increased the role of papal nuncios and apostolic delegates, insisting on their precedence over local hierarchies and other ambassadors as representatives of the Holy See. From 1881 the rise of international devotional rallies, known as Eucharistic Congresses, provided a platform for public manifestations of Catholic enthusiasm, in which the papacy played a growing role. From the late 1880s these events were routinely presided over by apostolic delegates or specially appointed groups of cardinals; in 1905 Leo’s successor Pius X would personally preside over a eucharistic congress in Rome.

In negotiating with the
ralliement
and with Bismarck, Leo overrode the wishes of the local bishops and the leaders of the German Centre Party, in Germany even organising a secret settlement from
which they were excluded. He kept a tight reign on episcopal conferences – the American hierarchy’s momentous Third Council of Baltimore in 1884 was planned in Rome, and Archbishop Gibbons presided at it as the Pope’s personal representative. The first Conference of Latin American Bishops was actually held in Rome under the Pope’s personal chairmanship. Nor was his policy of support for the Republic an indication of liberal political views. He told the Bishop of Montpellier that if Catholics threw themselves into republican politics they would soon have the upper hand: ‘If you follow my advice, you will have 400 Catholic deputies in France and you’ll establish the monarchy. I’m a monarchist myself.’
³⁷
His denunciations of socialism so delighted Tsar Nicholas II that he had them read out in Orthodox churches in Russia.

Leo’s conception of the papacy, in fact, was no less authoritarian or Ultramontane than that of Pio Nono. He surrounded himself with the trappings of monarchy, insisted that Catholics received in audience kneel before him throughout the interview, never allowed his entourage to sit in his presence, never in twenty-five years exchanged a single word with his coachman. And all his actions tended to consolidate and extend papal involvement at every level of the Church’s life. In a world in which the Church was increasingly being pushed to the margins, he retained grandiose ideas of the popes as arbiters of nations, elder statesmen at the centre of the web of world politics. Most of this was self-delusion: when Bismarck asked him to arbitrate in a territorial conflict between Prussia and Spain over the Caroline Islands he was offering a sop to Leo’s vanity. Leo imagined he was being invited to give a ruling, and was dismayed when Spain insisted he was no more than a go-between.

Yet he lived long, and by the end of his pontificate the papacy had indeed recovered much of the prestige which it had forfeited in the fraught years between the Revolutions of 1848 and the Vatican Council. It had also become the unquestioned focus of policy-making and doctrinal teaching in the Church. Pio Nono had made the Vatican Council; Leo XIII was its principal heir and beneficiary.

CHAPTER SIX

THE ORACLES OF GOD
1903–2005

I T
HE
A
GE OF
I
NTRANSIGENCE

At the end of the nineteenth century, the fortunes of the papacy seemed at an all time low. The pope was beleaguered and landless, the Prisoner of the Vatican. But, as if in compensation, his spiritual role and symbolic power had grown to dizzying heights. The pope was infallible, the unquestioned head and heart of the greatest of the Christian churches, spiritual father of millions of human beings, revered from Asia to the Americas as the oracle of God.

In the nineteenth century, the popes had used their oracular powers to denounce secular thought, to present a siege mentality Catholicism which opposed the revelation of God to the godless philosophy of the modern world.

In the new century, the modern world would test this new papacy as it had never before been tested. New currents of thought in philosophy, in the physical sciences, in the study of history, in biblical criticism, would challenge ancient certainties, not from outside the Church, but from its own seminaries, universities and pulpits. How would an infallible papacy respond to these new currents in thought?

And in place of the hostile liberal governments of Italy, France and Bismarckian Germany, the Church and the world would witness the rise of dictatorships more savage than any in human history. The nineteenth-century popes had first condemned and then struggled to come to terms with the industrial revolution. Now, all the resources of the industrial revolution would be put to unimaginably terrible use, as the Nazi gaschambers and the camps of Stalin’s Gulag harnessed modern technology, communications and bureaucracy, in the service of death. Pope after pope had denounced the
anti-clerical activities of nineteenth-century governments. What would the oracle of God have to say to evil on this scale?

The twentieth-century papacy began, as was appropriate in this century of the common man, with a peasant pope, the first for three centuries. Giuseppe Sarto, who took the name Pius X (1903 —1914), was the son of a village postman and a devout seamstress from northern Italy. He was chosen in deliberate contrast to the style of his predecessor, the remote and regal diplomat Leo XIII. The French Curial Cardinal Mathieu later declared that ‘We wanted a pope who had never engaged in politics, whose name would signify peace and concord, who had grown old in the care of souls, who would concern himself with the government of the Church in detail, who would be above all a father and shepherd’.
¹

This feeling was not universal: there had in fact been strong support for a continuation of Leo’s policies, and the old pope’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Rampolla, was a strong contender throughout the conclave. He was, however, vetoed by Austria, the last occasion in which one of the Catholic monarchies exercised a veto, and in any case he would probably not have won. After Leo’s long and political reign, Mathieu’s views were widely shared, and the new pope could hardly have been less like his predecessor. Where Leo was cool, austere, detached, Sarto had a gutsy humanity, a strong emotional piety and an eager sense of the priority of pastoral issues which had made him an extraordinarily effective diocesan bishop. Not one of his nineteenth-century predecessors had been a parish priest. Sarto, even as Bishop of Mantua and Patriarch of Venice, had never really been anything else. The positive reforms measures of his pontificate sprang directly out of his own experience as parish priest and diocesan bishop, and he never lost the urge to function as a parish priest. One of his most startling innovations as pope was to conduct catechism classes himself every Sunday afternoon in the courtyard of San Damaso.

His pontificate was therefore to be distinguished both by a personal approachability and warmth which contrasted absolutely with his predecessor, and by a series of important practical reforms. These included the reconstruction and simplification of the Code of Canon law, the improvement of seminary education for the clergy and of catechetical teaching in the parishes, the reform of the Church’s prayer-life through the breviary and missal, and a sustained campaign to get the faithful to receive communion more frequently, which included the admission of children to communion from the unprecedented early age of seven. These pastoral reforms, and especially the reform of the liturgy, modest in scope as they
were, were to be picked up and extended in the mid-century by Pius XII, and would bear their full fruit at the Second Vatican Council.

All this, combined with his anti-intellectualism, his plump, handsome face and warm, open-hearted manner, won an immense popular following for Pius X, a devotion which was to culminate in his canonization in 1950. He was in many ways the first ‘pope of the people’, a type which would become more familiar in the television age in the person of John XXIII, and the short-lived John Paul I. But if Sarto’s pontificate looked forward to a new populism, it also looked backwards to a nineteenth-century agenda.

For the choice of the name Pius X was no accident. The new pope saw himself as a fighter against the modern world like Pio Nono, ready to suffer as he had suffered for the rights of the Church. He too was preoccupied with the Italian question, the confiscation of the Papal States and the temporal sovereignty of the Holy See, the issue which had made Pius IX the voluntary ‘Prisoner of the Vatican’. As Patriarch of Venice, Pius X had cooperated pragmatically and tacitly with moderate liberal politicians, but this was mainly for fear of a growing socialism in Italy. He detested the Italian State, and distrusted even the modest advances towards other liberal regimes made by his diplomat predecessor. His first pastoral letter as Patriarch of Venice had emphasized this almost apocalyptic distrust of modern society:

His remedy for these ills was an undeviating devotion to papal directives, an absolute ultramontanism:

That exalted view of papal authority was directed, in the first place, to the renewal of the life of the Church, and the first five years of his pontificate saw the inauguration of a series of far-reaching reforms. Reacting to the interference of Austria during the Conclave which had elected
him, he abolished once and for all the right of any lay power to a voice in the electoral process. Though he had never worked in the Curia, he had served for eighteen years as Chancellor of Treviso, and he was an effective administrator. He restructured the Roman Curia, streamlining its thirty-seven different agencies and dicasteries to eleven congregations, three tribunals and five offices, and redistributing its responsibilities on a more rational and efficient basis. His work at Treviso had also convinced him of the urgent need for a revision of the Code of Canon Law. He commissioned Mgr. Pietro Gasparri, former professor of Canon Law at the
Institut Catholique
, to coordinate this project, assisted by the young Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII.

The revised code was not finally approved till 1917, three years after Pius’ death, but it was a project very close to his heart, and he personally drove it forward. It drew on a wide circle of expertise outside Rome, and its sections were sent out to the world’s bishops for comment and approval. Its overall effect, however, was a massive increase of centralization. It owed more to the spirit of the Napoleonic Code than to scripture or patristic tradition (scripture is rarely quoted in it), and it canonized as permanent features of Church life aspects of the papal office which were very recent developments. Of these, the most momentous was the new Canon 329, which declared that all bishops were to be nominated by the Roman Pontiff, setting the seal of legal timelessness on a radical extension of papal responsibility which had taken place virtually in living memory.

These administrative and legal reforms were undertaken in the interests of greater pastoral effectiveness. That pastoral motive was evident in Papa Sarto’s campaign for greater frequency of communion. The Eucharistic Congresses of the late nineteenth century had been designed as international demonstrations of Catholic fervour, and rallying-points of Catholic identity. They had not been designed to encourage the laity to receive communion more frequently, but this had been a prime objective of Pius X as diocesan bishop, and he now made it a priority of his pontificate. Many lay people received communion only a few times a year. Pius X believed that weekly and even daily communion was the key to a fully Catholic life. Between May 1905 and July 1907 he issued a stream of initiatives, a dozen in all, to encourage more frequent communion, easing the fasting regulations for the sick, emphasizing that communion was a remedy for shortcomings, not the reward of perfection. In 1910 he took these measures to unprecedented lengths, in reducing the age of First Communion,
conventionally administered at twelve or fourteen, to seven, laying it down that a child need only be able to distinguish the difference ‘between the Eucharistic bread and common bread’ to be eligible to receive it. The admission of children to communion was one of those relatively minor-seeming changes which profoundly transformed the religious and social experience of millions of Catholics. Round these child-communions grew up a celebration of innocence and family – little girls dressed and veiled in white, little boys in sashes and rosettes, the gathering of kindred to celebrate, community processions and parades of first-communicants – which rapidly entered Catholic folk-culture: Pius’ own popularity as a pope of the people grew as a direct result.