The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (12 page)

From this point he managed by sheer force of personality and eloquence to turn the village into a kind of spiritual concentration camp. With little left to distract them, the parishioners attended church daily and confessed frequently. In the end he was hearing their confessions for up to fourteen hours a day. He was credited with special discernment, and
was given to informing penitents that they were ‘damned’. Often he would be in floods of tears as he heard confessions. In time, the stories of his holiness and insights spread throughout France, and pilgrims began to travel to the village to be confessed, or just to catch a glimpse of the extraordinary wraith-like man. In the year of his death in 1859, some 90,000 pilgrims came to the village.

One of his keenest admirers would be Pope Pius X (elected in 1903). Pius X would see Jean-Marie Vianney as an extreme exemplar of the suffering endured by French pastors. Pius kept a statue of the famous confessor on his desk during his pontificate and beatified him in 1905. The popes of the twentieth century, from Pius X to Benedict XVI, celebrated Jean-Marie Vianney as the leading exemplar of a parish confessor. Pius XI canonised him in 1925. In 2011, Benedict XVI nominated Vianney Patron of the Year of the Priesthood.

PART TWO

THE CHILD PENITENTS

Five

The Pope Who ‘Restored’ Catholicism

I suppose the greatest reform of our time was that carried out by St Pius X . . .

—J. R. R. Tolkien, letter to his son Michael, 1 November 1963

A
FTER THE DEATH OF
L
EO
XIII
IN 1903, THE CARDINALS IN
the conclave to elect a new pope broke a centuries-long tradition by choosing a prelate of working-class origins who had never worked in the Curia, had no experience of Church diplomacy, and was neither a theologian nor a canon lawyer. Giuseppe Sarto, at sixty-eight years of age, was unknown outside of Italy and had never been abroad. He took the name Pius X in honour of his ‘great predecessors of that name’.
¹

He was born in 1835 in Riese, a rural district in the Treviso Valley north of the Veneto region—at that time part of the Austrian Empire. His mother was a seamstress, his father
a local government messenger. Unsubstantiated accounts claim that Sarto’s forebears were of migrant Polish extraction (his pale, harmonious features are reminiscent of John Paul II). Ordained in 1858, he spent the first quarter-century of his ministry as a curate and parish priest, with administrative duties in the diocese of Treviso, where he also acted as the seminary’s spiritual director. At the age of forty-nine, he was appointed bishop of Mantua, a backwater diocese where he busied himself re-establishing the seminary and making parish visits. The year he took over the diocese, only one seminarian was ordained; there was an acute shortage of priests.

Leo XIII made Sarto a cardinal in 1893 and awarded him the See of Venice, which carried the grandiloquent title ‘patriarch’. The diocese was smaller than some of the greater metropolitan parishes. He immediately revealed an aptitude for reactionary politics by warning the faithful against the Radical Democrat city councillors of Venice. He banned orchestral music, women singing in choirs, four-part choral motets, and clapping in church, advocating a return to the austere simplicity of Gregorian chant. He attempted to forbid clergy and laity from visiting the city’s first great art exhibition because, he claimed, it displayed a picture offensive to religion. A sign of things to come, he closed down the college for lay students attached to the seminary to prevent seminarists from coming in contact with the laity.
²

On the death of Leo XIII, Sarto was not the first choice of his fellow cardinals during the conclave. The former secretary of state under Leo, Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, had been
an early favourite. The emperor of Austria-Hungary, Franz Joseph, had attempted to exercise an ancient right to veto, in order to prevent Rampolla’s election via an intervention made by a Polish cardinal. In the event, the vote was going against Rampolla anyway, and in Sarto’s favour. The conclave had discerned in Cardinal Sarto a pastoral, ‘holy man’ pontiff. French Cardinal François-Désiré Mathieu, a member of the Curia, wrote: ‘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.’
³
One of Pius X’s first acts was to forbid under pain of excommunication any future attempt to influence the conclave. After his election, Sarto proclaimed his motto, ‘To restore all in Christ.’ He chose as his secretary of state the suave Anglo-Spanish prelate Rafael Merry del Val, although the latter was not yet forty years old. A consummate diplomat, and highly intelligent, Merry del Val spoke a number of languages and had an enormous capacity for administrative work.

Sarto impressed all who met him as an unusually charismatic and holy individual. Just forty years after his death, he would be canonised—he was the only pope to be made a saint for three centuries, until the canonisation of John XXIII and John Paul II. Many testified to his saintliness at the beatification and canonisation tribunals, emphasising his deep faith and his sweet nature (although, as we shall see, there would be a striking exception in this regard). One day
the memory of Pius X would become a rallying point for those who opposed the Second Vatican Council, believing it had undone the Church that he had ‘restored’ and defended so vigorously.
⁴

Pius X had a great love of the priestly vocation, which he deemed an estate higher than that of the angels. He retained throughout his pontificate the characteristics of a devout parish priest. He was unassuming and loathed protocol. He dispensed with much of the daily ceremonial pomp and frippery that surrounded the papal office. He was at times absent-minded—he wiped his pen on the sleeve of his white cassock, and he tended to wear the papal triple crown askew. He did away with the
sedia gestatoria
, the chair in which popes were traditionally carried, and abandoned his predecessor’s habit of eating alone. He took snuff and smoked cigars. Early newsreels show a slow-moving man of medium height, his paunch carrying all before him; there is an impression of watchful indolence. He had a lineless face and wistful eyes. His thatch of thick hair had turned silvery white in youth.

Yet this devout, avuncular exterior hid a bullying streak. Pius X could not abide contradiction.
⁵
An astute autodidact, he had studied well beyond the spoonfed seminary courses of his youth. He was smart, yet he had never been exposed to peer-group exchange and challenge within a university. He had a brooding capacity to demonise those who questioned matters of faith. Sarto did not like intellectuals, especially clerical ones. He would more than live up to his reputation for sanctity and as a model for ideal priesthood. He has been
less recognised for his schemes to strengthen the Church for the twentieth century. Seeking to bolster the clergy, he instituted new rules for seminaries, disciplinary action against ‘modernising’ priests, a universal clerical oath of mental allegiance to papal teaching, and a worldwide surveillance system that reported ‘liberal’ priests back to Rome. Culprits were punished by removal or excommunication, their books and writings banned. He would be remembered for lowering the age at which children make their first communion; he is less remembered for a more historic decision—to insist that children also make their first confession at the same time. There was to be a powerful symbiosis between the two sets of measures—obligatory confession for children, and a highly regimented priesthood that itself would one day be composed of the products of premature confession.

W
HAT WAS IT THAT DROVE
Pius X’s relentless determination to recreate, some might say ‘reinvent’, the Catholic Church at the beginning of the new century? As Pius X looked out upon the world from the purview of the Apostolic Palace in 1903, he saw enemies on every side: without, as well as within. In his first encyclical,
E Supremi Apostolatus
, issued on 4 October 1903, he wrote apocalyptically: ‘Society is at the present time, more than in any past age, suffering from a terrible and a deeprooted malady . . . apostasy from God’. He went on: ‘There is good reason to fear lest this great perversity may be
as it were a foretaste, and perhaps the beginning of those evils which are reserved for the last days; and that there may be already in the world the “Son of Perdition” [the Antichrist] of whom the Apostle speaks.’
⁶

Ever since the Reformation, the papacy had struggled to cope with a fragmented Christendom, the challenge of Enlightenment ideas, and the profound political and social changes that had followed the French Revolution: liberalism, secularism, science, industrialisation, and the evolving powers of nation-states. Through two pontificates preceding Pius X’s reign, Catholicism had suffered a series of hammer blows as the states of Europe appropriated domains, both spiritual and geographical, that were once the preserve of the Church. By 1870 the papacy had lost the last vestige of its temporal power: the Eternal City itself. Pius IX became a prisoner in the Vatican. The march of secularisation, even in Italy, was unstoppable. Outdoor devotions were banned and religious communities dispersed. The government instituted civil divorce, secularized schools, and removed Holy Days from the calendar. In Germany, in response to allegations that Catholic citizens had divided loyalties, Bismarck instituted the Kulturkampf, the so-called cultural struggle between the state and religion. Religious education was put under state control; the Jesuits were exiled; seminaries were subjected to secular interference. In Belgium, religious orders were banned and Catholics were expelled from the teaching profession; religious orders were banned in Switzerland; schools were sequestrated in Austria; and in France, there was rampant
anticlericalism and the eventual separation of Church and State. In 1901 the Waldeck-Rousseau government in Paris forbade religious orders to teach, and entire religious congregations left the country. In the government expropriation of Church property, clergy and religious were evicted from their houses and community buildings. As it happened, Pius X felt more secure with the total separation of sovereignties: the Church in France now stood aloof, the pope unquestionably its supreme head.

If Pius X had limited power to control the enemy without, there was much he could do to manage the perceived dangers from within. He would write in his 1910 encyclical
Editae Saepae
that the peril existed ‘in the very veins and heart of the Church’. He would seek to eradicate the rot inside the Church while fortifying the faithful against current and future shocks in the outside world. Speaking to the conclave cardinals immediately after his election, he declared his intention to ‘defend [the Church] with strength and gentleness’.
⁷

Pius X was not alone in thinking that the faithful, lay and clerical, had already been seduced and corrupted on every side by secular influences, including indifference, scepticism, lukewarm faith, lack of devotion, a failure to practise the faith, and a tendency to lapse. On the eve of his election, the prominent Italian statesman and devout practising Catholic Senator, Tancredi Canonico, had commented on the malaise among the laity and clergy alike. ‘The life of the Church has come to a standstill’, he wrote. ‘It is rare to hear the vibrant and vivifying note of the spirit. The secret has
been lost of the word that moves the soul to its very root and creates the Christian conscience therein.’
⁸

In his defence of the Church, Pius X pursued a dual strategy: the strengthening of the faithful, including men, women, and especially children; and the reform of the clergy. He would fortify the faithful by encouraging them to flood their lives with sanctifying grace through frequent reception of the sacraments of communion and confession. And it must start young, with a thorough catechesis and inculcation of devotions that would last a lifetime. He would strengthen the clergy by promoting discipline, mental obedience, and strict allegiance, legally as well as in spirit, to papal teaching. Both lay and clerical Catholics must hold the clerical estate in high regard—with self-esteem on the part of priests, and due deference on the part of the laity. The ultimate test of strength overall, however, would be an insistence on the recognition of authentic Catholic identity—an ‘integralist’, total acceptance of Rome’s definition of what it meant to be a good Catholic. There would be no room for the half-hearted, the unorthodox, the
non praticant
, liberalism, local discretion, or dissidence.