The Pope Who Would Be King, page 10
The pope could not have been any clearer. General Durando, commander of the papal forces now camped at the northern border of the Papal States, was not to cross into Austrian territory. But the general—formerly an officer in the Sardinian army—refused to stand idly by as the historic battle to drive the Austrians from Italy was waged. He ordered his troops to move north, issuing marching orders that cast their cause as a holy crusade:
As long as Italy is unable to defend itself, it is condemned by the Austrian government to plundering, rape, the cruelties of a savage militia, to fires, to murders, to total ruin. It has seen Radetzky make war on the Cross of Christ, knock down the gates of the Sanctuary, send horses in to profane the altars, violate the mortal remains of Our Fathers….The Holy Pontiff has blessed your swords, so that together with those of Charles Albert you move ahead to exterminate these enemies of God and of Italy and those who insult PIUS IX, profane the Churches of Mantua, murder the Lombard monks….Such a war of Civilization against the barbarians is not only national but above all Christian.
Huge letters spanned the bottom of the marching orders: “GOD WILLS IT.” As the men set out, each wore a tricolored cross on his chest.1
Fearful of antagonizing Austria, the Catholic state that had long been the Holy See’s greatest defender, the pope did what he could to limit the damage, sending word to his nuncio in Vienna to tell the Austrians he had never authorized his army to leave papal territory.2
As the pope’s message was making its way to Vienna, the nuncio there was writing his own report back to Rome. Word that the papal army was poised to attack the Austrians in Lombardy, along with news of the Austrian imperial crest’s desecration in Rome, had roiled public opinion in Vienna. With menacing crowds gathering outside his residence, the nuncio reported, he had taken the precaution of having the papal coat of arms removed from above his door. The church’s enemies, reported the nuncio, were fanning people’s anger in their efforts to undermine it in Austria.3
The pope’s lay ministers, in an attempt to calm him, agreed to draft a statement on his behalf, published in the government’s newspaper, the Official Gazette, on April 10. “The marching orders given to the soldiers in Bologna,” it read, “express ideas and sentiments as if they were given from the mouth of His Holiness. When the pope wants to make known his sentiments, he does so himself, not from the mouth of some subordinate.”4
Although the statement put some distance between the pope and the men who were going into battle in his name, it was a less-than-ringing denunciation of the war of independence. In this, it reflected the ministers’ sympathy with that war. Feeling that he had to do more, Pius decided to prepare a formal statement of his own to let the world know where he stood.
Learning of his plan, the Tuscan grand duke’s ambassador went to see him. He urged the pope to include language reflecting “his aversion to the Democratic Spirit that threatens to undermine public order,” a plea that caused Pius to reflect unhappily on all the reforms he had recently granted. Somehow his eagerness to please, coupled with the contrast between his own gregarious personality and that of his austere predecessor, had led to the widespread belief that he wanted to bring the principles that governed the Papal States into harmony with modern times. But he had never intended to change what he thought it was his sacred duty to uphold: rule of the papal lands by the pope and the church hierarchy. If King Ferdinand hadn’t granted a constitution, and if Austria hadn’t sent its troops into Ferrara, he explained to the ambassador, he would never have gone beyond his decision to create a merely advisory Consultative Council. But in short order he had granted a constitution, and now his own army was poised to attack Austria’s despite his opposition. No army of the pope had taken part in a war since early in the previous century, and that war had been aimed against the Muslim Ottoman Empire. The idea that papal troops would wage war against a Catholic people, and a government that had long been the popes’ most important defender, would have seemed, until the dizzying events of the previous months, inconceivable.5
On the morning of April 17, Pius met with the group of cardinals who advised him on matters of state. He posed a simple question: Should the papal government join the war against Austria? They were unanimous in their reply: It should not. Pius then posed a second question: If he did not agree to join in the war, how was he “to prevent the ruinous consequences that this would provoke from the party that now predominates in all of Italy?” To this, the cardinals answered simply, if not helpfully: Deus providebit, “God will provide.”6
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ROME’S HALTING MOVE FROM its medieval ways to modern times was, perhaps, most evident in the fortunes of its Jews. Popes had long insisted that they be closed up in ghettos, but following Rome’s winter flood, Pius had allowed individual Jewish families to petition to live outside the ghetto walls. And pressure was mounting to provide more relief to the Jews, for the equality of all people before the law, regardless of religion, was one of the liberals’ core beliefs.
On March 29, Charles Albert, at his war camp in Lombardy, signed a decree emancipating the Jews of his kingdom. They thus became the first Jews in Italy to enjoy equal rights with their Christian neighbors. Excited by the news, the head of Rome’s Jewish community asked that a copy of the Sardinian king’s decree be published in the city’s official newspaper. The minister of internal affairs, to whom the request came, refused, fearful that its publication would enrage the clergy.7 But only a few days later the government—dominated by liberals, yet with the apparent support of the pope—issued its own decree, removing some of the restrictions on the Jews. One of these was the practice of locking the ghetto gates each night. That evening ax-wielding Jewish men, together with some of their more sympathetic Christian neighbors, reduced the ghetto gates to rubble. It was the first night of Passover—the celebration of the Jews’ liberation from Egyptian slavery.8
The next day a manifesto appeared on the city’s walls, titled “The Gates of Rome’s Ghetto Thrown to the Ground.” Above it were the words Viva l’Italia, Viva Pius IX, Viva Charles Albert. It described the destruction of the ghetto gates as the most recent act of the enlightened and beloved pope.
In France, the foreign minister, champion of the newly proclaimed French Republic, was pleased to receive news of these reforms. The ending of the ghetto, he wrote his envoy in Rome, “is a measure much in harmony with the principles of religious tolerance and civil equality, and thus we applaud it whole-heartedly.” But not everyone was as happy. How was it, asked some in Rome, that at the same time as the Jesuits were being driven from the capital of Christendom, the Jews were now being treated so well? For well over a millennium the church had blamed the Jews for the death of Jesus and taught that, as a result, they were condemned by God to wander the earth in misery. Priests had long warned their parishioners that Jews posed a great threat, eager to defraud and impoverish their Christian neighbors, and commanded by their most sacred text, the Talmud, to drain Christian children of their blood in order to make their Passover matzo. The notion that Jews should be treated no differently from Christians was, to many, a radical idea, associated with the sacrilegious teachings of the French Revolution.9
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THE GOVERNMENT MINISTERS, LEARNING that the pope planned to make a major statement on the war, were nervous. They had not seen him for several days, as he had moved into the Vatican for Holy Week. On April 25, two days after Easter Sunday, the ministers, joined by Cardinal Antonelli, sent the pope a long plea, urging him to use his address to announce his support for the war. The insurrection in Lombardy, they argued, had triggered tremendous patriotic enthusiasm in the Papal States. The people’s drive to take up arms was unstoppable. To disown the army as it marched under his banner would be disastrous.
The ministers acknowledged that, from a religious point of view, war was evil, but in this case, they told Pius, it was the lesser evil. If he wanted to preserve the Papal States, joining the war against the Austrians was his only choice. Should he come out against the war, they warned, “You cannot imagine without feeling a chill of horror what reactions, what disorders would occur.”10
Pius felt trapped. “You certainly know as well as I do, my dear Count,” he told the Dutch ambassador that evening, “that my authority grows weaker each day.”
Do these men, whose overwrought patriotism knows no limits, not want me to declare war? Me, head of a religion that wants only peace and harmony? Well! I will protest. Europe will know the violence that they have done to me, and if they want to continue to force me to do things that my conscience rejects, I will withdraw…to a convent to weep there over all the misfortunes of Rome, given over to all the disorders of this anarchy….For the rest, wherever one turns, no way out appears on the horizon. It is all the hand of God, which reaches visibly over us and, when He wants to teach us lessons, they are great and they are terrible.11
Why Cardinal Antonelli agreed to sign the ministers’ letter pleading with the pope to join in the war remains something of a mystery. He had been present at the cardinals’ meeting on April 17, and there is no indication that he opposed the advice they gave the pope. Nor was Antonelli among the small number of high-ranking prelates who were known to be sympathetic to the liberal cause. If he had any firm political principles of his own, it is not clear what they were. He had been close to the reactionary Pope Gregory, to whom he owed a great deal, but then had had no trouble adapting to his role mediating between the pope and the liberal lay ministers of his government. In his meeting with the ministers he suggested that the pope had not yet made up his mind, but that same day he had written the nuncio in Vienna informing him that the pope would soon announce his decision to remain neutral.12
In the end, the ministers would learn of the pope’s decision only on Saturday, April 29, when they read his statement in the city’s official newspaper. Pio Nono’s remarks came in the form of an allocution, a formal address given by the pope, seated on his throne, at a private meeting—a “secret consistory,” in the language of the church—of the Sacred College of Cardinals. Even those who suspected that the pope would disappoint the partisans of Italian independence were taken aback by his combative tone. He began with a long denunciation of those “enemies of the Catholic religion” who would spread the “calumny” that he supported the violent efforts aimed at driving the Austrian army out of Italy. Lest “some unwary and more simple men” believe such wicked tales, said the pope, he wanted to set the record straight.
Events in upper Italy had inflamed the passions of people throughout the peninsula, he acknowledged, but he had issued “no other command to our troops, sent to the border of the papal territories, than that they should protect the integrity of the Papal State.” His fateful words followed: “But when now some desire that we, together with the other people and sovereigns of Italy, should undertake a war against the Germans,* we have at length thought it our duty to…clearly and openly declare that this is wholly abhorrent from our counsels, seeing that we…regard and embrace with equal paternal earnestness of love, all tribes, peoples, and nations.” To this the pope added a rather plaintive note: “But if, amongst our subjects, nevertheless, they desist not, in what manner finally shall we be able to restrain their ardor?” He went on to warn against the “crafty counsels…of those who would that the Roman pontiff should preside over some new Republic, to be formed of all the people of Italy.” To the contrary, advised the pope, all of Italy’s peoples should “firmly adhere to their sovereigns.”13
The allocution marked the turning point in Pius’s papacy, for it made clear the incompatibility between the pope’s roles as universal spiritual leader and as monarch of the Papal States. It also marked the end of the myth of the liberal, patriotic Pio Nono that had flourished since shortly after his ascension to St. Peter’s throne. The Sicilians had revolted against the Bourbon monarchy with the pope’s name on their lips. The Sardinian soldiers battling the Austrians in Lombardy had invoked the pope, as had the men of the Papal States who had rushed north to help drive the foreigners from the peninsula. Now Pio Nono stood exposed as the retrograde champion of the existing regimes, the friend of the Austrians. “Pius IX,” reflected one of the leaders of Italian unification, “was made by others and was unmade by himself. Pius IX was a fairy tale conceived to teach the people a truth. Pius IX was a poem.” Those who had cast the pope as the champion of an independent Italy, free from foreign rule, the man of God who would bring an end to rule by the priests in the Papal States, had imagined a pope who had never existed. A very different pope—and a very different myth—was about to be born.14
There to steer the unsteady pontiff through his transformation from Italian national hero to traitor was Cardinal Antonelli, “master,” as the pope’s great Jesuit biographer, Giacomo Martina, would put it, “of the double game.” “Readiness to dissimulate and to pretend, the ability to avoid openly taking a position, the preoccupation with maintaining his own control in any eventuality,” observed Martina, “constitute some of the salient traits of the cardinal’s moral physiognomy.” Eager to prove indispensable to the politically adrift pope, but not yet sure where events would lead, the cardinal had thought it prudent to keep on good terms with the liberal ministers as long as he could.
Although to the ministers Antonelli posed as a friend of Italian independence and an enemy of the Austrians, in fact it appears that it was Antonelli who took Pius’s own first draft of the allocution and removed from it the kind words for Italian national aspirations that he had originally written. He changed its tone from paternal benevolence and even sympathy for the national desire to drive the Austrians from the peninsula, to unbridled condemnation. Although the pope could not have been entirely comfortable with Antonelli’s changes, he by now was painfully aware that his sentiments as a patriotic Italian and his desire to please his subjects were interfering with his duties as Supreme Pontiff. In Antonelli he saw a much-needed check on the impulses of his heart.15
Marco Minghetti, then the pope’s minister of public works, later to become one of Italy’s first prime ministers, remembered the moment he first read the pope’s address. “There was no longer any doubt. It was the victory of Europe’s reactionary and clerical party over Italy and over the liberal party.” That evening the lay ministers handed in their resignations. True to form, Antonelli expressed his regret at not being able to join them, citing his vow of ecclesiastical obedience. “He didn’t stop complaining about Pius IX,” Minghetti recalled. “Indeed, even more impertinently than we, he blamed him, through his indecision, for leaving us in this big mess, and shaking the flap of his priest’s cassock, he bemoaned the fact that he was not, as we were, free to resign.”16
Because the original text of the allocution was in Latin, it was only the following day, Sunday, April 30, that the news of what the pope said spread through Rome. People flooded the cafés, clustering around the men who held in their hands copies of the paper with the text of the pope’s allocution. As the pope’s words were read aloud, shouts of anger and stupefaction filled the air. Adding to people’s outrage were their fears about what would happen to the young men they knew who were then fighting under the pope’s banner in Lombardy. Should they be captured, they would now be treated not as enemy combatants but as outlaws, to be taken out and shot.
As shock turned to action, Rome edged closer to the brink of open revolt. The leaders of Rome’s clubs called an unprecedented joint meeting. On the evening of May 1, fifteen hundred members packed into the main room of the Merchants’ Club, which had been founded the previous year in a palace on the Corso. The motion to be debated was whether papal rule should be ended and replaced by a new provisional government. An immense crowd gathered outside. Inside, the club members stood arrayed in a huge semicircle, as five of their leaders, sitting at a raised table, debated what was to be done. A small honor guard headed by Ciceruacchio stood to one side. The mood was one of expectancy, a feeling that the people were finally about to decide their own destiny.
In the end, the motion to install a provisional government failed. In its place, the club members decided to send one of their leaders, Count Terenzio Mamiani, an amnestied returnee from political exile, to demand that the pope form a new government composed entirely of laymen. It must, they insisted, be committed to reform and be free to decide whether the Papal States should join the war for Italian independence.17
As the people poured out of the building, they saw uniformed, armed Civic Guardsmen everywhere. The guardsmen had wrested control of Castel Sant’Angelo and the armory at Porta San Paolo from papal soldiers and taken up positions at the other gates of the city as well. Fearing for his life, the forty-six-year-old Cardinal Della Genga, former archbishop of Ferrara and a widely reviled reactionary, tried to escape, but an angry crowd spotted his carriage and forced him out. He was saved only when a group of more levelheaded Civic Guardsmen rushed to the scene and escorted him back to his palace. It was a humiliation the cardinal would not forget, and the next year he would have ample opportunity to take his revenge.18
For the pope, the signs of revolt were but new proof of his folly in heeding popular calls for reform. He had authorized the formation of the Civic Guard—drawn from the educated classes of the population—over the objections of many prelates, including his own secretary of state, Cardinal Gizzi, who had resigned in protest. Many of these guardsmen, infected by the raging patriotic fever, had marched north with General Durando, literally singing odes to their beloved pope. Now they felt betrayed.19
