The Pope Who Would Be King, page 38
A new, more spiritual, yet stronger-minded pope was beginning to emerge. Over the next years, he would face challenges no less daunting, no less consequential for the future of Italy and the church than those he had faced in these early years of his papacy. God, as he would see it, was not finished putting him to the test. He vowed he would prove worthy of the divine judgment that surely would come.
Thanks to the bishop of Marseilles, who sent the pope two new guillotines, executions in the Papal States could once again proceed in a more dignified manner. In 1851 officials carted one of them from town to town, stopping long enough at each place to sever the heads of those condemned to death by the local ecclesiastical tribunals.1
Three years later, following a long trial, eight men were found guilty of Pellegrino Rossi’s murder. Two, Luigi Grandoni, a forty-year-old Roman, and the twenty-eight-year-old sculptor, Sante Costantini, were sentenced to death. Grandoni, who in fact had played no part in the plot, committed suicide in prison while awaiting execution. On Saturday, July 22, 1854, Costantini, proclaiming his innocence, was alone marched to the place of his decapitation. Accompanying him were a priest, a monk, and members of the religious confraternity devoted to assisting in such executions. They headed toward the Bocca della Verità, whose piazza was one of the three sites for capital punishment in papal Rome. Catching sight of some of his friends among the crowds of the curious who lined the way, Costantini shouted, “They’re sending me to the slaughterhouse!” Rebuffing all pleas that he confess and take last rites, Costantini said that he was tired of suffering in the dungeons and simply wanted to get the execution over with. The confraternity leader recorded what happened next:
6:15 p.m. The patient* is taken to the platform of the guillotine. On mounting it he shouted, in a loud voice, “Viva la Repubblica!” at which the drums sounded. As the condemned man persisted in his final refusal to repent, he received the mortal blow with that wicked defiance that regrettably one must recognize in many of the condemned men who have been sent to the guillotine for crimes committed in the heat of the rebellion.2
Over the following years, many heads rolled into the guillotine’s bucket. Among them, three years later, severed at the same spot, was that of Antonio de Felice. The thirty-five-year-old hatmaker had accosted Cardinal Antonelli on a Vatican stairway, brandishing a small pitchfork, but attendants had subdued him before he could do any harm. In a final act of bravado, on mounting the platform, De Felice kissed the executioner before placing his head beneath the blade.3
Two weeks after De Felice’s execution, Charles Bonaparte, the revolutionary prince-naturalist, died a beaten man, in Paris. After enjoying the limelight in the fiery days of the Roman Republic, he had lived his last years in painful obscurity, spurned by his Catholic wife, who had remained in Italy, and barely tolerated by his cousin, Louis Napoleon, whose army had caused his misfortune.4
Despite their hopes of help from the Rothschilds and their pleas to the pope, Rome’s Jews, after their brief liberation, found themselves again confined to lives of poverty in the ghetto, objects of scorn and abuse. Worst of all, they lived in fear that their children might be taken from them, for should any Christian think to baptize a Jewish child, under the laws of the church, that child had to be removed from his Jewish family to be raised a Catholic.5
French troops remained in Rome throughout the decade to protect the pope from his restive subjects. The French continued to plead with him to replace priests with laymen in the government and the courts of the Papal States, but Pius held firm.
The pope’s worldly kingdom would not last long. In 1859, with Louis Napoleon—having in the meantime pronounced himself Emperor Napoleon III—feeling emboldened, and Charles Albert’s son, King Victor Emmanuel II, eager to avenge his father’s ignominious defeat of a decade earlier, the French and Sardinian forces combined in a new effort to drive the Austrians from the peninsula. With the Austrian army in retreat, the people in the Austrian-occupied provinces of the Papal States tore down the papal banners and drove out the clerics who ruled in the pope’s name. The day of Italian independence was finally at hand, as patriots from the newly liberated papal lands organized referenda to join the expanding Savoyard kingdom. Victor Emmanuel II had shown no desire to have the southern portion of the peninsula join his realm, but the omnipresent Garibaldi forced his hand, sailing with a thousand armed volunteers to Sicily and then marching northward, through the Kingdom of Naples. In late 1860, fleeing his capital, the twenty-four-year-old Francis II—who had ascended to the Neapolitan throne on the death of his father, Ferdinand II, a year earlier—decided to make a last stand at the fortress of Gaeta, where as a child he had so often gone with his family to visit the pope. After a bloody siege, he surrendered early in 1861. Later that year the Kingdom of Italy, under Victor Emmanuel II, was proclaimed, encompassing the entire Italian Peninsula except for Venice, still in Austrian hands, and Rome and the region surrounding it, left to the pope in deference to French Catholic sensibilities and the continuing role of French troops in the capital of Christendom.
Rebuffing the Italian king’s efforts to negotiate, Pius, in a January 1860 encyclical, demanded the “pure and simple restitution” of the Papal States. Excommunicating those guilty of usurping the papal lands, Pius expressed his faith that God would not long allow the outrage to stand. After all, little more than a decade earlier, the pope’s defeat had proven short-lived, the Italian patriots crushed.
Committed to continued papal rule in the Eternal City, the French kept their army there and extracted an agreement from the Italian king to leave Rome alone. Pius could take some solace from the fact that none of the continental powers seemed eager to see the emergence of a strong, unified Italy. Both he and Antonelli bided their time, hoping that the pope’s rightful realm might soon be restored. “Like the Pope,” reported Britain’s envoy in Rome in early 1865, “Antonelli hopes in a European war to set matters right again in the Holy See!”6
Pius was once again plagued by the sense that he had failed in his duties as Supreme Pontiff, having presided for a second time over the loss of much of the papal kingdom. Again his temper battled with his good nature. “How is it,” Pius asked Britain’s envoy at the beginning of 1866, “that the British can hang two thousand Negroes to put down an uprising in Jamaica, and receive only universal praise for it, while I cannot hang a single man in the Papal States without provoking worldwide condemnation?”
“His Holiness,” recounted the envoy, “here burst out laughing and repeated his last sentence several times holding up one finger as he alluded to hanging one man, so as to render the idea still more impressive.”7
For the patriots, there could be no true Italian nation without Rome, and the king came under intense pressure to take it. Reluctant to provoke a war with France by launching a direct attack on the Eternal City, the king secretly sent funds there to try to prompt “spontaneous” popular uprisings, which he might then use to justify intervening. Much to the king’s dismay, the Romans, having so often seen the workings of the guillotine, showed little interest in sticking their necks out.
In March 1868 the British envoy again met with the pope. Buoyed by France’s recent reinforcement of its garrison in Rome, and by the large number of Catholic volunteers who had poured into Rome to join the papal army from France, Ireland, Germany, and as far away as Canada, Pius was feeling increasingly confident. In proportion to his state’s population, he told the envoy with a chuckle, he now had the largest army in the world.8
The pontiff made full use of his spiritual arsenal as well. In December 1864 he issued what would become one of the most important encyclicals of modern times, Quanta cura, with an accompanying Syllabus of Errors. No Catholic, he warned, could believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or freedom of religion. Catholics had to believe that the pope must rule over a state of his own. All Catholics, he declared, were bound to reject the view that “the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself to progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”9
Visiting Rome early in 1869, the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow found the city “beleaguered” and “depressing.” “I look out of the window this gray, rainy day,” he wrote to an American friend, “and see the streets all mud and the roofs all green mould, and the mist lying like a pall over the lower town, and Rome seems to me like king Lear staggering in the storm and crowned with weeds.” What most struck Longfellow was how little Rome had changed in the forty years since he had first visited it, an observation he shared in his meeting with Cardinal Antonelli. “Yes, thank God!” replied the cardinal, pausing to put a pinch of snuff to his nose.10
A few months later Rome witnessed something it had not seen for 350 years. The pope summoned all the world’s bishops, cardinals, and heads of the religious orders to St. Peter’s for a Vatican Council. The timeless truths of Christianity, as he saw it, were under assault from the godless forces that had emerged from the French Revolution. The principle of separation of church and state had been making its way into the European states’ new constitutions, along with guarantees of freedom of expression and the press that went directly against church doctrine. Pius wanted to show the world that he had the church’s full support in his battle against these modern heresies. He had a second goal as well, eager to strengthen his position by having the pope, for the first time, officially declared infallible. “Religion,” Pius explained in a public address he gave in the midst of the council, “is immutable; not an idea, but the truth. Truth knows no change.”11
On December 8, 1869, the 774 bishops and several hundred other church dignitaries who had flooded into Rome for the council gathered in St. Peter’s for the inaugural ceremony. Since seven in the morning, the basilica had been packed, many foreigners having come to witness the historic event. In a separate reserved section sat the various sovereigns of Europe, including Elizabeth, empress of Austria, Francis II, the deposed king of Naples, Leopold II, deposed grand duke of Tuscany, and the deposed duke of Parma. In a special position of honor sat General Kanzler, head of the papal army, and General Du Mont, commander of the French expeditionary force patrolling Rome.
Having decided that the battle for the church’s survival depended on the proclamation of papal infallibility, Pius pressed the bishops to support his cause, and those opposed felt his anger. He branded one “evil,” another “a madman,” and a third an “incorrigible, schismatic snake.” His campaign came as the culmination of a centuries-long battle aimed at wresting power away from the cardinals and bishops and from the national churches. Over the next months, in Latin speeches few could have understood even if the acoustics had not been so wretched, the church fathers continued their debate.12
Europe’s rulers, fearing that the doctrine of papal infallibility might lessen their hold over their Catholic subjects, looked on in horror. Napoleon III, the pope’s great protector, was so enraged that he threatened to pull all French troops from Rome. But as a man of faith and decidedly not of realpolitik, Pius pushed forward. On July 18, 1870, as a thunderstorm outside darkened the midday skies, the prelates cast their votes. Of those who had misgivings, many in the end voted in favor, fearful of incurring Pius’s wrath. The pope’s pronouncements on matters of faith would now be deemed infallible.
The vote proved to be unfortunately timed. Two days earlier France had declared war on Prussia, and Napoleon was eager to marshal all the forces he could for the fighting ahead. The declaration of papal infallibility gave him all the excuse he needed to abandon the pope to his own devices. On July 27 the emperor ordered the withdrawal of all French troops from Rome.13
The pressure on Victor Emmanuel to take Rome now became irresistible. Amid the excitement, Giuseppe Mazzini, unhappy that the Italian nation he had long dreamed of had embraced monarchy, decided to return to Italy in hopes of triggering a republican uprising. Disguised as an Englishman named John Brown, Mazzini traveled on a ship bound for Sicily but was recognized and seized by Italian police. Ironically, they imprisoned the prophet of Italian unity in the fortress of Gaeta, where Pius had taken refuge two decades earlier. The Italian prime minister meanwhile ordered police in Sardinia to arrest Garibaldi, the other patriotic hero of the Roman revolution, should he make any move to leave his remote island home off the Sardinian coast.14
Before daybreak on September 20, the Italian army began its assault on Rome’s walls. What two decades earlier had taken the French weeks to do, now, in the face of only halfhearted defense, took the Italians a few hours. The American consul to Rome observed the scene:
The old walls generally proved utterly useless against heavy artillery, in four or five hours they were in some places completely swept away, a clear breach was made near the Porta Pia fifty feet wide, and the Italian soldiers in overwhelming force flowed through it and literally filled the city….A white flag was hoisted over from the dome of St. Peter’s. After the cannonading ceased the papal troops made but a feeble resistance, and they who a moment before ruled Rome with a rod of iron were nearly all prisoners, or had taken refuge in the Castle of St. Angelo, or St. Peter’s square.
The disinclination of the papal forces to fight more fiercely, in the American consul’s view, was fed by their realization that the Romans welcomed the Italians as their liberators, for “no private citizens made the least effort or demonstration in favor of the Papal Government.” In short, he reported:
It was an easy victory for the Italians, and the loss, in killed and wounded, on both sides, was not great, they were in over-whelming force, with very heavy artillery and they knew that the mass of Romans were their friends; the Zouaves [the papal troops], on the other hand, although they never could have imagined how much they were detested, must have, at heart, feared the people and could not fight their best.15
The following year Victor Emmanuel made his triumphal entry into Italy’s new capital. Bowing to the pleadings of the Holy See, the European powers boycotted the ceremony. “Today,” the eminent historian of medieval Rome, Ferdinand Gregorovius, then living in the city, wrote in his diary, “is the close of the thousand years’ dominion of the Papacy in Rome.” The Castel Sant’Angelo cannon sounded. “How the Pope’s heart must have quailed at every shot!” wrote Gregorovius. “A tragedy without a parallel is being enacted here.”16
In an encyclical issued a month later, Pius reiterated his excommunication of the leaders of the new nation and declared the Italian occupation of the Papal States null and void. The Holy See, proclaimed the pope, would never compromise. “Despite our advanced age,” he wrote, “we prefer…, with divine aid, to drink the cup to the dregs rather than accept the iniquitous proposals which have been made to us.”17
The pontiff hoped that 1870 would prove to be a repeat of 1848, as 1848 had proven to be a repeat of 1798 and 1809. “That they will leave Rome is a certainty,” wrote Milan’s Catholic daily newspaper, “just as the Napoleonics, the Mazzinians, and before them all the other enemies of the Church. How and when they will leave, it is not yet possible to say. Probably they will leave soon and they will leave badly.”18
Pius now cast himself as a prisoner. Although he had control of the hundred acres of the Vatican, with its magnificent palaces and gardens, and no one would stop him from leaving were he so inclined, images of his imagined imprisonment spread quickly. Mass-produced cards bearing an image of the pope behind jail bars circulated from Ireland to Poland, and in France, priests, monks, and nuns sold, as holy relics, straw that the pope, they said, had slept on in his cell.
Rome was now the capital of the Italian king, capital of a modern constitutional monarchy, and seat of Italy’s bicameral legislature. The Quirinal Palace from which Pius had made his daring escape in 1848 was now the king’s home. But the king never felt comfortable in the Eternal City, with the man who claimed to be its legitimate ruler—and who had excommunicated him—living as a self-proclaimed prisoner barely a mile away. Victor Emmanuel spent as little time as he could there, preferring to spend his days at one of his country estates, riding his horse and hunting. Indeed, the king feared that he was now cursed, and perhaps he was, for in early January 1878, at age fifty-seven, he fell sick and died a few days later. The Catholic press made much of this evidence of divine punishment, although it might have made more of it had the elderly Pius IX not died four weeks later.
Pius IX’s long struggle in life continued after his death. In 1881 his successor, Leo XIII, judged that tensions had cooled enough to allow him to grant Pius’s wish to be buried in the Basilica of San Lorenzo, on the other side of Rome. To minimize the possibility of any unpleasantness, Leo had the procession with the pope’s remains set out at midnight, its route a secret. But mixed in with the thousands of the faithful who came to honor the martyred pope were large numbers of anticlerics. As the procession reached the bridge over the Tiber at Castel Sant’Angelo, hundreds of protesters, shouting “Into the river!” tried to break through the police escort and send the papal bier plunging into the Tiber’s yellow waters. Many were injured in the resulting melee, but the pope’s mortal remains made their way safely to their final resting place.19
It would take more than half a century after Pius IX’s death for a pope to recognize the legitimacy of the Italian state and its claim over Rome. Until that year, 1929, when the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini reached a deal with Pope Pius XI and Vatican City was formally created, no pope would ever set foot outside the Vatican walls.20
