The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (13 page)

His first priority in bolstering a priesthood worthy of its ministries was to transform the seminaries. He was convinced that the Church’s internal problems stemmed, in part, from poor initial training. He ordered a monastic-style regime to ensure life-long holiness and dedication.
⁹
Seminaries were destined to become highly disciplined hothouses shut off from the world and its corruptions and temptations. Seminarians
were obliged to wear cassocks and Roman collars at all times, and their vacations at home were severely curtailed, since they might otherwise breathe a secular, less clerical air. The pope put the greatest stress on obedience to superiors and the external signs of piety, purity, and innocence. Many of his ‘reforms’ were reapplications of the norms of the Council of Trent, which had fallen into neglect.

Pius X decreed that seminaries should exclude outside influences. Lay teachers, secular books, and newspapers were banned (from the 1930s and into the 1960s, the same went for radio and television). Seminarians were obliged to walk out of the seminary confines in groups (in Rome the group, or
camerata
, typically consisted of five men). Seminarians were no longer allowed to attend courses in secular universities; nor were lay students allowed inside the seminary. Women must not enter the enclosure, and seminarians were not to be involved with the local community. In the presence of women, seminarians were advised to practise ‘custody of the eyes’. They must avoid ‘special’ or ‘particular’ friendships within the seminary community. In order to encourage seminarians and priests to ever greater heights of asceticism, the pope advocated that they should become ‘prisoners to the confessional’ in the manner of Jean-Marie Vianney—the austere, self-flagellating French country priest we met in
Chapter 4
. Pius X regarded Vianney’s lack of education, and his struggles with his studies, a commendable circumstance. Pius believed that a learned priest stood in danger of being a proud and potentially unfaithful one.

The emphasis on a monastic-style obedience in seminary formation would give rise to a new ethos of clerical piety that ran the risk of discouraging initiative, independence, and emotional maturity. Seminarians found themselves cut off from family life and the presence of women; they had little knowledge of children and their stages of emotional and intellectual development. They were released from domestic and financial responsibilities. The French novelist Georges Bernanos, who had attended seminary in the full flush of Pius X’s reforms, wrote of the experience, ‘It made schoolboys of us, children to the very end of our lives.’
¹⁰

P
IUS
X
BELIEVED THAT
intellectual pride lay at the root of the clerical rot. This pride, he believed, was a consequence of the dangerous influence of the phenomenon he labelled ‘Modernism’, an amalgam of unspecified heresies corrupting the clergy throughout the world. The way in which he chose to deal with this heretical contagion would have far-reaching consequences for the ethos of the priesthood and for confessors of the future. Pius X’s strategy was to promote acquiescence to Rome’s every utterance, punishing, by demotion or exclusion, any priest who was believed to be tainted with the Modernist ‘poison’, as he termed it. Clerics would come to live in daily consciousness of being watched and reported. Fear of transgressing Rome’s teaching, and the belief that one was under surveillance, would dominate the Catholic clerical mind.

Modernism did not exist as an organised conspiracy. Yet so fanatical was the Vatican’s fear and loathing of its influence that it was soon credited with being a movement comprising hundreds of thousands of ‘members’. As with the McCarthyite Communist witch-hunts in post–World War II America, fear prompted widespread paranoia. The Modernist ‘conspiracy’, however, was no more than a small, loosely allied constituency of Catholic scholars and thinkers who had attempted to come to terms with intellectual forces shaping contemporary culture. How could one reconcile Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution with the biblical creation story? How should one understand the Church’s claims of immutability in view of the facts of its historical development? How could one square belief in the divine inspiration of Holy Scripture with the latest exegeses, disputed provenance, and unreliable authorship? There were political dimensions, moreover, which had arisen during the 1890s in the United States among Catholic scholars who sought to make connections between Christianity and democracy. In Rome such thinking was deemed not only suspect but heretical. Labelling the initiative ‘Americanism’, Leo XIII had quashed the tendency in an apostolic letter in January 1899. The work involved ‘great danger’, he opined. It was ‘hostile’ to Catholic doctrine and discipline inasmuch as ‘the followers of these novelties judge that a certain liberty ought be introduced into the Church’.
¹¹

At the eye of the Modernist storm was the French priest and Scripture scholar Alfred Loisy. Among his alleged heresies
was his suggestion that the Book of Genesis was not literally true, but poetic. Ironically, his main purpose was to combat Protestant scholars who would do away with the notion of divine inspiration altogether. Hence, his ‘Modernism’ was a means of fighting ‘modern’ Protestant fire with ‘modern’ Catholic fire. His books were greeted with enthusiasm by seminarians and their teachers in France and elsewhere (before Pius’s seminary reforms began to filter through), creating excitement and debate. Rome believed that ‘Modernism’ was spreading unchecked throughout the Church, and Loisy’s works were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. In England, however, his book
The Gospel and the Church
had been welcomed by two independent Catholic thinkers: Baron Friedrich von Hügel and the Jesuit George Tyrrell. Von Hügel would remain cautious in his published writings, but Tyrrell would make his own bold reflections in the spirit of Loisy, particularly on the need to reconcile theology with science.

Pius’s loathing of the Modernist ‘conspiracy’ can be measured by the violence of his language against clerics who cautioned charity and understanding of these ‘heretics’. ‘They want them to be treated with oil, soap and caresses’, he once declared, referring to those who counselled reasoned discussion with the accused. ‘But they should be beaten with fists. In a duel, you don’t count or measure the blows, you strike as you can. War is not made with charity; it is a struggle, a duel.’
¹²

As more and more works were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, Pius became increasingly assertive. On
17 April 1907, he delivered a papal denunciation of the Modernist heretics who sought to destroy the Church. Their errors, he thundered, were ‘not a heresy, but the compendium and poison of all the heresies.’ He published his declaration
Lamentabili Sane
later that year, condemning sixty-five Modernist errors. He decreed that it was heresy to question the existence of the sacrament of confession in the early Church. Moreover, it was heretical to state that the words of Christ in John’s Gospel (20.23)—‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained’—did not refer to the sacrament of penance. Yet, according to Loisy and like-minded scholars, such ‘heresies’ hardly resembled their own views on these matters; Pius was merely rehashing stock Protestant objections to the doctrine of confession.

Pius followed his declaration with the anti-Modernist encyclical
Pascendi
, also in 1907. This document established the dogmatic, centrist tone of papal teaching through the twentieth century up to the Second Vatican Council. It set out a strengthened definition of papal primacy, asserting that theological disputes within the Catholic Church were not academic matters, to be settled by scholarly peer-group debate. Instead, they were moral matters to be definitively resolved by papal authority.

Six

Pius X’s Spy-Net

[Pius X] approved, blessed and encouraged a sort of freemasonry in the Church, something unheard of in ecclesiastical history.

—Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, testimony during the beatification process for Pius X, quoted in Owen Chadwick,
A History of the Popes, 1830
–
1914

D
ETERMINED TO IDENTIFY THE EXTENT OF THE
M
ODERNIST
threat and to eradicate it early in his reign, which began in 1903, Pius X sanctioned a secret organisation, linked both to the Department of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs in the Secretariat of State, under Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, and to the Consistorial Congregation under its prefect, Cardinal Gaetano de Lai.
¹

The man who established and ran this clandestine operation was Umberto Benigni, a stout, bespectacled, highly energetic monsignor working on foreign affairs in the Secretariat of
State. A former Catholic news service and newspaper editor, he had won the confidence of the pope and an inner circle of reactionary cardinals. Benigni had a gift for languages as well as highly honed polemical and journalistic skills. His paranoid tendencies were combined with a capacity for verbal aggression and a gift for caricature. He was particularly antagonistic towards ‘dissident’ Church historians. He declared that for Modernist historians, ‘history is nothing but a continual desperate attempt to vomit. For this sort of human being there is only one remedy—the Inquisition.’
²

Benigni’s scheme was nothing less than a modern-style Inquisition—to ferret out dissent wherever it might exist, and report it back to appropriate Vatican departments to be dealt with. His operation, which officially did not exist (it never appeared in the Vatican yearbook,
Annuario Pontificio
), was code-named ‘Sodalitium Pianum’ (Sodality of Pius); the pope’s code name within the system was ‘Mama’. The ‘Sodalitium’ was set up in a private apartment outside the Vatican, although Benigni continued to work in the secretariat in the mornings. In addition to being a 24/7 espionage service, it doubled as a propaganda operation for the planting of anti-Modernist items in the Italian and foreign press, including exposés and slurs against dissident individuals. Benigni founded a newspaper called
Corrispondenza Romana
that specialised in attacking liberals. He was its secret editor-in-chief, and its funding came from the pope himself. Benigni’s undercover network, staffed with a team of nuns, was partly a spy network and partly a news and public relations organisation. It employed
the latest in copying machines and telegraphy, and its volunteer informants, or ‘stringers’, operated throughout the world. Benigni commissioned the clandestine photographing of documents on private premises and the interception of private correspondence, and he pressed double agents into service. His tactics extended to aliases, disguises, and Watergate-style breaking and entering.
³

The key purpose of this activity, much of it criminal, was ‘delation’ (from the past participle of the Latin
deferre
: ‘to bring down, report, accuse’), the process of reporting back to Rome all instances of alleged doctrinal unorthodoxy, liberalism, dissidence, and so-called Modernism. In time, the accused spanned the lowliest seminarians right up to princes of the Church, the cardinals. The cardinal archbishops of Vienna and Paris were delated, and so was the entire scholarly Dominican community at Fribourg University in Switzerland. The taint of Modernism could include being overheard speaking favourably of ‘Christian democracy’, or being seen reading a newspaper that expressed liberal views, or being overheard questioning an item even of devotional as opposed to doctrinal belief, such as miracles and apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Sneaks and tittle-tattlers now became righteous informers and saviours of the Church. A chance ill-advised word in the refectory or common room, a lapse in a sermon or lecture, could find its way back to Rome. The consequence could be dismissal from a seminary or religious order, demotion or removal from a diocesan office, the loss of a post of academic responsibility, or exile to a distant village curacy.
More important, and long-term, was the effect on the ethos of the clergy. There arose a fear of speaking one’s mind, or even asking certain questions; priests and seminarians were careful not to be known to read outside of the narrow confines of approved seminary courses. A realisation emerged that Rome was ever and everywhere observing and capable of punishing.

It would take seventy years for Catholic readers to discover that even the youthful future John XXIII had been ‘delated’ to the Vatican after being seen reading a suspect book. His grovelling letter of exculpation to the Holy Office reveals that even the best of men were degraded by the process.
⁴
In the secret tribunal testimonies that preceded Pius X’s beatification, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, Secretary of State in the Vatican during the 1920s, asserted: ‘Pope Pius X approved, blessed, and encouraged a secret espionage association outside and above the hierarchy, which spied on members of the hierarchy itself, even on their Eminences the Cardinals; in short, he approved, blessed and encouraged a sort of freemasonry in the Church, something unheard of in ecclesiastical history.’ Pius XII chose to ignore this damning testimony, which was given under oath by the most powerful prelate of his day. Endorsing his papacy, Pius XII made Pius X a saint on 29 May 1954, describing him at the ceremony as ‘a glowing flame of charity and shining splendour of sancitity’.