The Pope Who Would Be King, page 3
The parish priests cut a distinctive figure on the streets of Rome, with their fuzzy black three-corner hats, the brim folded up on the sides to form a kind of heavy umbrella atop the cleric’s head. They wore black shoes with prominent buckles, short black pants that left their calves bare, and a black gown that extended to their knees and buttoned down to their stomach. For additional effect, many carried a walking stick, capped by a shiny metal knob. But these priests were the elite of the lower clergy. The others—simple priests and monks—viewed the upper clergy with envy. They were the clergy’s proletariat, as resentful of the wealth and power of the church elite as were the laypeople of the Papal States.6
As cardinals rode in carriages of unmatched luxury through the streets, they passed beggars who seemed to be everywhere: at every corner, every piazza, every monument, at the entrance of the churches, and pleading for handouts in the cafés. “Nothing,” observed a French visitor, “equals the cynicism and the audacity of the Roman beggar. It is not a favor that he asks, it is a right that he exercises and, as he always asks in the name of the Madonna, or for the most sacred sacrament, or for the souls in purgatory, while he kisses the image of the Virgin that adorns the collection box that he holds in his hand, he offers you the chance to do a pious deed, and so considers you to be indebted to him.”7
Yet while the people of Rome resented the power of their parish priest and the cardinals’ ostentatious wealth, they were certainly religious in their own way. Every home and every shop had an image of the Madonna, beneath which at least one lamp always burned. Each family had a particular saint to whom it was devoted, and each household head belonged to a religious confraternity. “The Romans,” wrote a French observer of the time, “follow the practices of devotion from habit, from fear of hell, and from fear of their parish priest.” They will cheat a foreigner without scruple, he added, or knife a neighbor in a moment of anger, “but to miss Sunday mass, to fail to do the least thing due on the saint’s day, or to eat meat on Friday, never.”8
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WHILE POPES HAD RULED the Papal States for over a thousand years, the extent of their territories had ebbed and flowed, as they engaged in both military campaigns and diplomatic maneuvering to enlarge their realm. In Gregory’s day it extended from Ferrara and Bologna in the north, running southeast around the Grand Duchy of Tuscany to encompass a long stretch of the Adriatic coast including the port of Ancona. From the Tyrrhenian Sea on Italy’s western coast, south of Tuscany, the pope’s lands reached down past Rome to encompass a series of smaller towns. To the north, the Papal States bordered the Austrian kingdom of Lombardy-Veneto, to the south the Kingdom of Naples.*2 In all, the Papal States encompassed only 14 percent of the land of what is Italy today, but it lay right in the center of the peninsula. Most of its three million largely illiterate inhabitants were peasants, eking out a living from the land.
The technical innovations that were transforming life farther north in Europe had made little headway in the Papal States. There were few factories and no trains. But this backwardness was deceptive. The old verities on which the pope’s rule rested had been under attack for several decades. In the wake of the French Revolution and the subsequent spread of its doctrines by Napoleon and the French army, people began to question the notion that God had ordained the social hierarchy to be as it was. Increasingly they resented the prerogatives of both clergy and aristocracy. According to the ideology of divine right, kings were chosen not by men but by God, and so any attempt to overthrow the monarch was a sacrilege, an offense against the Almighty. But a new, subversive theory of government was spreading. Sovereignty, in this way of thinking, lay not with the ruler but with the people. A pope-king, wielding an army and a police force, increasingly came to be viewed as a vestige of the Middle Ages. While the pontiff was properly the Holy Father of the Catholic faithful worldwide, he seemed to many to have no business also serving as a king. Nor, they thought, did priests have any business running the police and the courts.
Sweeping through Europe together with these Enlightenment-fueled ideas was another powerful new doctrine, nationalism. The Italian Peninsula at the time was divided into a multitude of different states, a patchwork of kingdoms, imperial outposts, and duchies. Many were ruled directly or indirectly by the Austrian Empire. As the growing number of nationalists saw it, all of Italy should be united. Foreign armies and foreign rulers had no place there.
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ALTHOUGH POPE GREGORY WAS far from a young man, his death came as something of a surprise, for he had not been ill. In late May 1846, what first appeared to be simply an irritating inflammation and swelling of his left leg quickly turned into something worse. He died on the morning of June 1.9
For centuries the death of a pope had triggered not only frenetic jockeying for influence among the elite but often violent popular unrest as well. Gregory XVI himself had been elected fifteen years earlier amid signs of imminent revolt in his realm. News of an uprising in Bologna, the second city of the Papal States, reached Rome in the middle of Gregory’s coronation ceremonies. Soon the whole northern region of the Papal States was in flames as one city after another declared the end of papal rule. It was only thanks to the swift arrival of Austrian troops that the old order was restored. Now, a decade and a half later, the theocracy seemed no more stable. Cardinals still headed the government’s major departments, and under them a network of bishops, priests, and monks still held all the most influential governmental positions, monopolized education, and sat as judges in courts that made little distinction between religious and civil matters. Gregory’s successor, the London Times predicted, would not survive six months on his throne without requiring help from the Austrian army.10
Given Gregory’s reputation as a bitter opponent of all that was modern, not long after his death jokes at his expense began making the rounds in Rome. As he approached Saint Peter at heaven’s gate, according to one of them, Gregory was so tired that he could barely move.
“How much further is there to go?” asked the exhausted pope.
“Well,” replied Saint Peter, “if you had only allowed the railroad, you would already be there!”11
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MONARCHS RULED EUROPE’S MAJOR STATES—kings in France and Prussia, a queen in Spain, the emperor in Austria, and the czar in Russia. The smaller states, too, were ruled by royal families or families tied to royalty: Portugal, Naples, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.
While Gregory’s funeral rites were under way in Rome, the courts of these rulers debated the qualities needed in a new pope. For the sovereigns of the three Catholic powers—Austria, France, and Spain—these were not simply idle conversations, for each had the centuries-old right to veto papal candidates they deemed unacceptable. Among their leaders, one stood out: Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian chancellor, had, over the past quarter century, dispatched his army to prop up papal rule every time the people of the Papal States had risen up against it. He was not lacking in self-confidence. “I cannot help telling myself twenty times a day,” recalled Metternich in his memoirs, “ ‘O Lord! How right I am and how wrong they are!’ ” The tall, blue-eyed prince, with curly, light-colored, receding hair, was also something of a dandy. But if these traits were the subject of snide remarks elsewhere, they were forgiven by the members of the papal court, who held him in high regard. “He is not only the greatest statesman of the century,” enthused the papal nuncio in Vienna, “but the best Catholic.”12
Prince Klemens von Metternich
It was Metternich who, as a young Austrian diplomat, had chaired the Congress of Vienna in 1815. There, in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, the victorious powers had carved out a new map of Europe. Austria’s rule over Lombardy was restored, and the thousand-year reign of the Republic of Venice came to an end, as Veneto, too, was gobbled up by the Austrian Empire. Further solidifying Austrian influence over Italy, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, as well as the smaller central Italian duchies of Modena and Parma, would be ruled by members of the Austrian imperial family, and Austrian troops would ensure the pope’s continued hold over his realm. Only the Kingdom of Sardinia, consisting of the northwestern part of the peninsula and the island that gave it its name, could claim full independence from Austrian influence.
For the Austrian chancellor, as for the other pillars of the old order in Europe, the papacy was a touchstone of stability, a powerful justification for the inequalities that left the masses under the thumb of the wealthy few. Writing in 1836 to the king of Belgium, Metternich reminded him that the Catholic Church provided Europe’s monarchs their most valuable support. “What the Church preaches,” he wrote, “is the performance of the reciprocal duties between the people and their rulers….It considers authority as emanating from God….Attach yourself firmly to the Head of the Church, Sire, and it will lend you a helping hand.”
But Metternich was no fool. The times were changing and, he realized, rulers who failed to adapt—albeit prudently—risked disaster. The fact that the Papal States bordered both the restive Austrian-held regions of Lombardy and Veneto and the Austrian-controlled Grand Duchy of Tuscany meant that any instability in the papal kingdom posed a direct danger to the Austrian Empire. The chancellor sought a pope who would defend the papal theocracy but who also recognized the need for some reforms. The clergy’s stranglehold on government had to be eased and talented laymen brought into government.13
France was Europe’s other great continental power, Spain having long been in decline. For three centuries, with the brief exception of the Napoleonic years, France had battled unsuccessfully with Austria for influence in Italy. Like his Austrian counterpart, the French king, Louis Philippe, wanted a pope who could preserve public order in the Papal States. But he, too, thought a reformer was needed to keep the ill-governed Papal States from collapsing. The new pope, as the French foreign minister put it, should be “enlightened, prudent, moderate…and not especially tied to any of [Europe’s] Powers.” The three French cardinals were instructed to use their king’s veto against any candidate who lacked those qualities.14
Bordering the Papal States to the south lay the Kingdom of Naples, which encompassed all of southern Italy and the island of Sicily. Its monarch, the Bourbon king Ferdinand II, ruled over a notoriously backward and rebellious land. He felt anything but secure, as the decapitation of his French Bourbon cousin Louis XVI, half a century earlier, offered a lesson too graphic to forget. Made uneasy by the vacuum produced to his north by Pope Gregory’s death, Ferdinand was eager to see a successor elected quickly. What was needed most in the new pope, the king’s foreign minister advised, was someone with “much experience in political affairs and great firmness of character.” As it would turn out, Gregory’s successor would have neither.15
Throughout Europe, those in power deemed the notion that the people should choose their own governments to be pernicious and utopian. But the growing numbers of republicans, socialists, and liberals were of a very different view. There were those who thought, or at least hoped, that the next pope—the embodiment of a medieval vision of society—would also be the last.
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SECOND IN AUTHORITY ONLY to the pontiff, the cardinals of the church constituted the Sacred College, responsible both for the church’s governance and for electing a successor on the pope’s death. Some cardinals had been appointed as young men as a tribute to their noble origins; some presided over small, remote Italian dioceses. As a group they were known neither for their intelligence nor for their understanding of the changing world. “It pains me to have to observe that in the discussions that have taken place thus far,” observed the Neapolitan ambassador in Rome, reporting on the cardinals gathered for the conclave to choose the new pope, “discord prevails among them together with an atmosphere of personal interests such that there is reason to fear many intrigues.” Metternich was getting similar reports from Rome. The cardinals, he was told, were a mediocre lot, concerned above all with protecting their own privileges. Making matters worse, Pope Gregory had left the treasury bare, the government peopled with incompetents, and the army in tatters. The conclave threatened to be long and difficult.16
It began when the customary ten days of mourning for the pope ended. Fifty-four of the cardinals were Italian, only eight from anywhere else. Of the eight, all were Europeans; only France, with three, and Austria, with two, had more than a single member of the Sacred College. Given the time it had taken to get word of the pope’s death to them, and then the time it would take for them to travel to Rome, none of the non-Italian cardinals arrived on time, not even the archbishop of Milan, an Austrian cardinal who carried Metternich’s veto.
It was Pope Gregory’s secretary of state, seventy-year-old Luigi Lambruschini, from a noble Genoan family, who cast the largest shadow at the conclave. Like Gregory, a monk known for his austere habits, he was a man of aristocratic bearing, cold and haughty. After serving as archbishop of Genoa, he had been sent to Paris in 1827 as papal nuncio, the pope’s ambassador to France. There he opposed any move by King Charles X to institute reforms or freedoms, arguing that listening to popular demands would undermine the social order that God intended. He especially warned the king against loosening censorship of the press, certain that it would spread seditious doctrines of individual rights. When, following a popular uprising in 1830, the more liberal-minded Louis Philippe replaced Charles X, the new king demanded that Lambruschini be replaced.
It was then that Lambruschini gained his cardinal’s hat, and during the popular uprisings a year later, he became one of the more strident voices calling on the Austrian army to restore order in the Papal States. Most of the cardinals shared his worldview. God had destined the great mass of humanity to do their humble work and not to bother themselves with matters of government. God had entrusted the public’s welfare to indulgent but firm fathers: the king in France, the emperor in Austria, and the pope in the Papal States. The notion that governments should represent the people they ruled could not have been more foreign to Lambruschini. He urged the pope to minimize the number of universities, deeming them seedbeds of dangerous modern ideas. Inflexible, despotic, and dedicated to a return of the glory days of medieval Christianity, he led the reactionary faction of the cardinals—the zelanti, the zealots.17
At six p.m. on Sunday, June 14, 1846, a long line of magnificent carriages pulled up to San Silvestro Church in the center of Rome. A cardinal stepped out of each, there to attend a special mass. Following the service, the fifty red-robed cardinals emerged into a day darkened by cloudy skies and walked the few blocks to the Quirinal Palace, flanked by two rows of papal soldiers. Each cardinal was given two rooms, the larger one for himself, the smaller for his attendants: a secretary, a waiter, and a servant. The windows were shuttered to prevent any outside communication.
Each of the cardinals then received visits from the foreign ambassadors and members of Rome’s nobility, eager to curry favor and perhaps to have influence. At eleven p.m., the ritual cry of Extra omnes!—“Everyone out!”—was repeated three times. The doors were closed, locking the cardinals and their attendants in. Fearing violence, a staple of Rome’s streets in times when there was no pope, Swiss Guardsmen dispersed the crowd of onlookers who had gathered in the piazza facing the Quirinal and built barricades to block off the nearby streets.18
Voting began the next morning in the Paolina Chapel. Resembling the Vatican’s better-known Sistine Chapel, its walls were entirely frescoed, its vaulted ceiling towering twenty meters above. A row of small canopy-topped thrones ran along each wall, one for each cardinal, each with a little table furnished with goose quill pen, inkwell, and paper. At one end of the chapel, atop the raised candlelit altar, was a table covered with a richly decorated tapestry. There sat the three cardinals who, chosen by lot at each ballot, opened and read the votes aloud.19
Election required a two-thirds majority, and no one had any idea how long it would take to reach that daunting threshold. Although there was no requirement that the new pope come from among the cardinals, no one other than a cardinal had been elected since the fourteenth century. All eyes, then, were fixed on the men who gathered in conclave. Two factions prepared to do battle. For the zelanti, the conservatives, the choice was clear: they could count on Lambruschini to continue the policies that he had shaped in his past ten years as secretary of state. Less clear was who would be the choice of the moderates, those who believed that the church had to adjust, in some ways, to modern times.
Surprisingly, the conclave reached its conclusion in remarkably short order. As it became clear by the second ballot that Lambruschini would never reach the two-thirds vote needed, one of the lesser-known members of the Sacred College, Giovanni Mastai Ferretti, saw his fortunes unexpectedly rise.
Mastai Ferretti was born in 1792 to a family of minor nobility in Senigallia, a central Italian town in the Papal States. His mother’s ambition that he become a priest was threatened when as a child he began to suffer epileptic seizures, and he would need special dispensation to be ordained. As Napoleon’s forces swept through the Papal States and laid waste to papal government, two popes were, one after the other, removed by force from Rome and driven into exile by French troops. Pius VI, exiled from Rome in 1798, died the next year in Valence, France. The conclave to elect his successor, Pius VII, was held not in Rome, where the end of papal rule had been proclaimed, but in Venice. Although Pius VII was briefly allowed back to Rome, in 1809 he, too, was seized by French troops and taken to France.
