The Pope Who Would Be King, page 4
Giovanni Mastai’s seminary in Rome was then closed, and he had to go home. Only Napoleon’s defeat in 1814 allowed Pius VII to return to the Eternal City and Mastai to resume his clerical studies. One result of these disruptions—reinforced by his own limited interest in intellectual pursuits—was that Mastai never felt fully versed in theological and cultural matters. In 1818 the newly restored Pius VII accepted him for the priesthood on the condition that, given uncertainties about his epilepsy, he celebrate mass only when assisted by another cleric.20
In 1827, aged thirty-five and recently returned from accompanying a church delegation to Chile, Mastai was named the archbishop of Spoleto, a town midway between his hometown and Rome. “God really is having some fun on earth,” he wrote to a friend, “for he has wished to promote a miserable insect to such an honor.”
When revolts against the papal government erupted in 1831, the young archbishop did not initially realize how great a threat they were. “All of the [revolutionary] forces of Perugia, Foligno, Spoleto, and Terni together barely amount to five hundred men,” he informed the secretary of state in Rome. “Lacking uniforms, without leadership, far from courageous, they are incapable of intimidating anyone….Either the pontifical troops are ready to fight and victory is assured, or the papal troops are entirely corrupt, and then I leave our cause in the Lord’s hands and say nothing.”
But papal troops did indeed prove unequal to the task, and when the town’s Civic Guard joined in the uprising, Mastai was forced to flee. He took refuge in the Kingdom of Naples, where, nearly two decades later, he would again seek exile. This first stay was brief, for Austrian troops quickly regained control. On his return, Mastai, filled with self-doubt, asked the pope to relieve him of his post, citing his “inexperience in the sacred sciences,” his “deficiency” in the charisma that the Apostles demand of a bishop, and in a reference to his episodic epilepsy, “the shaky health which has afflicted me for many years.”21
Gregory XVI rejected Mastai’s request and the next year transferred him to Imola, a more prestigious posting, twenty miles southeast of Bologna. Over the next decade, he would acquire a reputation there as fair-minded, principled, and good-natured, although he could be stern when necessary. He found the poor quality of the local priests especially upsetting. “Far from…pastors of their flocks,” he complained, “they are more like the wolves, a scandal and the ruin of their flocks.” He forbade priests to appear in public without their clerical garb, forbade them to carry weapons, and required all parish priests to live in their church residence.
Prince Metternich first heard of Mastai, who had only recently been made a cardinal, in an 1842 letter from his ambassador in Rome discussing possible successors to Pope Gregory. “He enjoys the esteem of all, both clergy and lay,” concluded the ambassador. “The faction that wants neither a foreigner [someone from outside the Papal States] nor a monk [as were both Pope Gregory and Cardinal Lambruschini] would certainly put him forth in the next Conclave.”22
Bishop of a minor town and lacking any experience in the intrigues of the Roman Curia—the central administration of the Holy See—Mastai was in some ways an odd choice to be pope. But he was respected for his good humor, his lack of pretension, and his success in winning popular favor in a diocese in a portion of the Papal States known for its hostility to priestly rule.23
For the conservatives, it was his very weakness that made him so appealing. Given his inexperience in the world of Roman politics, they thought, he might, with proper care, be led along the right path.
The fourth ballot, on June 16, proved decisive. Mastai happened to have been selected by lot as one of the three cardinals charged with reading out the results of the voting. As he called out his own name on one ballot after another, his voice began to fail him. He asked to be excused, and another cardinal took his place. When Mastai reached the two-thirds vote, the cardinal in charge rang a bell and formally asked him if he was willing to accept his election. Overwhelmed with emotion, Mastai walked to the altar and sank to his knees. His lips moved in prayer. He stood and then turned to the expectant cardinals: “Accepto,” he replied in Latin. The cardinals’ little canopies were then taken down, all except his own. Asked what name he would take, Mastai responded that he wanted to be known as Pius IX, after Pius VII, who, like him, had served as bishop of Imola when elected to the papacy almost half a century earlier.24
Pope Pius IX
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EARLY ON JUNE 17, the day following the election, the new pontiff returned to the Paolina Chapel to receive Rome’s noblemen and allow them to kiss his foot. Eleven blasts from the cannon at Castel Sant’Angelo alerted the people that a new pope was about to be announced, and thousands rushed to the Quirinal Palace. Above the front entrance of the massive building—well over a million square feet in size—the door to the loggia overlooking the piazza had been bricked up when the cardinals went into conclave. Now workers broke through. When the passage was cleared, a procession of cardinals emerged, clothed in their red silk robes. Appearing last, the cardinal deacon strode to the front to announce the name of the new pontiff. Since word of the election had begun to spread the previous evening, there had been much uncertainty about who this could be. Few in the huge crowd could make out the cardinal’s words. Of those who could, few knew who Mastai was. Scattered shouts of Evviva! rose from the piazza, and a few hats were thrown into the air, but most, confused or disappointed, remained silent.
Then the unfamiliar white-robed figure—his relative youth and benevolent smile contrasting so sharply with his unloved predecessor—strode onto the balcony. The new pope was a good-looking man of medium height, with a broad chest and blond hair. He projected a sense of goodness and simplicity that would quickly win him sympathy. “If someone were to cut Giovanni into a million pieces,” his older brother liked to say, “from each piece—as from an octopus—a priest would be born.” Pius raised his arms and in a strong, clear voice blessed the crowd. Those close enough saw tears trickling onto his cheeks. The cannons of the massive, ancient Castel Sant’Angelo sounded again, and throughout the city church bells rang.25
That evening all of Rome’s foreign missions lit up the facades of their palaces. The French ambassador, fifty-nine-year-old Pellegrino Rossi, stayed up late to send the news to Paris, eager to report that he had played no small role in the surprisingly swift election of the new pope. In the days leading up to the conclave, he had spoken with as many cardinals as he could, stressing the importance of acting quickly to calm the people of the Papal States and to elect someone able to meet the challenges of modern times. Although he had not specifically lobbied for the bishop of Imola, he thought that Cardinal Mastai was the kind of man the church needed.
Rossi went to the Quirinal that morning to greet the new pontiff. His eyes again tearing up with emotion, Pius took Rossi’s hands in his. As the ambassador later made his way out of the crowded hall, he spoke with several cardinals. They predicted that the new pope would soon proclaim an amnesty for all those jailed for political crimes and also announce plans to bring railroads to the Papal States. “If that should come to pass,” observed Rossi, “I see the tranquility of the land as assured.”26
Rudolf von Lützow, the Austrian ambassador, offered a similarly enthusiastic report to Metternich in Vienna. In Spoleto and Imola, the Austrian recalled, Mastai had known how to win “the affection of his flock by his works of charity and by the paternal kindness with which he governed his diocese during such challenging times.” Lützow also thought they could count on the new pope to consult closely with Austria as he considered reforms.27 On receiving the news, Metternich expressed his pleasure both at the speed with which the cardinals had acted and at the result. Pius’s election, he told his ambassador, would “console all those friends of religion and order, while spreading confusion among those so quick to denigrate the Catholic Church and brand its temporal rule as anachronistic and out of step with the needs of modern civilization.” The difficulties that the new pope now faced, the Austrian chancellor acknowledged, were great, but, he added, “Every time that Pius IX will be called upon to defend the great conservative verities that the papacy has the sublime mission of preserving…he will find us at his side.”28
The pope was crowned in St. Peter’s Basilica. There the heads of the religious orders, the bishops, the cardinals, and hundreds of other church dignitaries marched in procession. At the back of the seemingly endless line came Pio Nono, carried aloft by twelve footmen as he sat in his sedia gestatoria,*3 surrounded by Noble Guardsmen, Swiss Guardsmen, and the generals of the papal army.
While the French and Austrian governments were pleased with the new pope, the people of Rome remained uncertain. To them, he was a stranger. The crowd gathered in the basilica for his coronation greeted Pius, in the words of the Tuscan envoy, “with absolute coldness, without giving, either by voice or with their hands the least sign of happiness.” The new pope was eager to find a way to win their hearts. This would turn out to be the easy part. It was keeping their love without destroying the church that would prove to be so difficult.29
*1 Pio Nono is the Italian for “Pius the Ninth” and so was the way Italians referred to him.
*2 I here use the simplified name of the kingdom, whose formal name at the time was the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
*3 The richly adorned, silk-covered throne on which popes were carried on various ceremonial occasions.
The hundreds of men who languished in the Papal States’ prisons for political crimes, and the hundreds more who had gone into exile to avoid a similar fate, weighed heavily on the minds of the more enlightened men and women of the pope’s dominion. Many had been in the pope’s dark prisons since the last major uprising against church rule fifteen years earlier. Practically every layperson with whom the pope met in the first days of his papacy told him that there would be no better way to win people’s hearts than to grant an amnesty to free the imprisoned and allow the exiles to return.
On July 1, 1846, the new pope summoned six prominent cardinals to ask their opinion before making his decision. The archconservative Lambruschini argued against such a move, but others thought it would be a good thing. On July 17, a month after the new pope’s election, the decree appeared on Rome’s walls, then in towns throughout the Papal States:
Pius the Ninth to his faithful subjects….
We commute the sentence of all of our subjects who are currently in prison as punishment for political crime.
The offenders had only to give their word of honor that they would never again rebel against the government of the Papal States. All political exiles were likewise to be allowed to return, and all those currently being tried for political crimes were to be pardoned.1
The next day, a Saturday, Romans flooded the streets in celebration. In each of the city’s neighborhoods men and women formed processions and headed toward the papal palace, singing the new pontiff’s praises. At seven p.m., as hundreds shouted Viva Pio Nono! in the piazza below his window, the smiling pope walked onto his loggia to thank and bless them. As more celebrants arrived, he emerged two hours later to repeat the scene. But people kept coming, twenty thousand in all, carrying long sticks topped with fluttering handkerchiefs and numerous hand-stitched banners bearing the papal crest or simply the words Viva Pio Nono! Their torches lit up the piazza. A band played, and shouts of praise to the new pontiff filled the air. No pope was supposed to appear in public at night, but at 10:45 p.m. Pio Nono, in his white robe and short red cape, came onto his balcony once again to bless the crowd. His subjects then streamed into the nearby streets, filling the brightly lit Corso and waving their papal banners.
Sunday morning the festivities continued. The streets were clogged, as flowers rained down from the windows amid cries of praise for the new pope. Surrounded by his joyful subjects as his carriage returned from the Roman church where he had celebrated mass, Pius slowly made his way back into the palace. When the crowd showed no sign of leaving without getting to see him, he again came out to his balcony to offer his blessing. Surveying the multitudes, many with tears of emotion in their eyes, he struggled to contain his own. Making the sign of the cross, he offered his blessing.2
“The amnesty is not everything,” observed Pellegrino Rossi, the French ambassador, “but it is a big step.” More cautiously, he added, “I hope that the new path is now open and that the Holy Father will know how to continue in it, despite all the obstacles that will certainly stand in his way.” In Paris, the French foreign minister was encouraged. The new pope, he thought, might well prove the salvation of the tottering Papal States.3
While the French were pleased, the Austrians were not. The pope, they thought, should have given not a blanket amnesty but a limited “pardon” to individuals who expressed remorse for the crimes they had committed. This was what Cardinal Lambruschini had recommended. Austria’s ambassador in Rome, Count Rudolf von Lützow, stung by the fact that the pope had neither consulted him in advance nor informed him before the announcement, let the cardinals know of his unhappiness. Several shared his alarm, fearing that the naïve pontiff was recklessly planting the seeds of revolt.4
As the days and weeks passed, Pius found himself in an increasingly uncomfortable spot. Crowds began gathering regularly in Rome’s piazzas, as men and women shouted slogans and carried signs urging him to grant other long-sought reforms. They wanted the mercenary militias disbanded and replaced with citizen militias. They asked that the most reviled priestly functionaries be removed, they wanted laymen to replace the prelates who dominated public administration, and they urged freedom of the press. They also wanted to see a united Italy, one free of foreign armies. Many hoped that Pio Nono himself might lead this movement for national independence. But while the pope was a proud Italian, he had no interest in leading a war against Austria, a disinclination reinforced by the cardinals who saw the Austrians as their best guarantee of continued rule. As for the people’s other demands for change, the thousand-year-old Papal States were not like any other states. As the cardinals kept reminding the pontiff, the laws of the papal reign were given not by man but by God.5
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IN EARLY AUGUST, Pius named fifty-eight-year-old Cardinal Pasquale Gizzi to be his secretary of state. After the reactionary Lambruschini, the pope was looking for a man with diplomatic experience who had a more moderate outlook. Gizzi seemed a good choice, having served as papal representative to Lucerne, Turin, and Brussels, in addition to a successful term as papal legate to Forlì, in the north of the Papal States. Pius himself had voted for Gizzi at the conclave and, in a sign of affection, referred to him as il mio papa, “my pope.”
Romans were pleased by the appointment, believing—wrongly, it turned out—that the cardinal was on the side of major reform. If the pope had hesitated several weeks before appointing him, it may have been because Gizzi was hobbled by poor health, which showed in his sallow complexion and the gout that frequently confined him to bed. His tenure as secretary of state was destined to be neither smooth nor long, as the charmless, strong-minded Gizzi increasingly found himself at odds with the pope.6
In trying to do something to improve the Papal States’ poor economic situation, Pius turned for advice to Pellegrino Rossi, the French ambassador. Rossi had an unusual background. Born to a modest family in Carrara, in central Italy, he became a lawyer and, still in his twenties, was appointed professor of law at the University of Bologna. A few years later he moved to Geneva, where he spent the next decade writing books on political economy and serving as a member of the Swiss legislature. He then left Switzerland, taking up a professorship in Paris, a post he held until 1845, when King Louis Philippe named him French envoy to the Holy See. A short, slight man of dignified bearing, he possessed a penetrating intellect, combined with enormous self-confidence and drive. He was said to resemble the profile portraits of Dante, and some went so far as to claim that, conscious of this resemblance, he periodically struck a pose to maximize that effect.
Pellegrino Rossi
Pius coupled his request for advice with a note of caution. “A Pope,” he told Rossi, “must not plunge into utopian schemes.” People had crazy ideas. There were even those, he marveled, who “speak of an Italian league to be headed by the Pope. As if such a thing were possible! As if the great powers would ever permit it!”
Rossi expressed his sympathy for the pope’s plight and offered his encouragement. “You have already traced the route that you should follow,” Rossi told him, one “that will bring the best results: putting an end to the abuses that, I fear, are numerous, and introducing everywhere good government. I think that is what the Holy Father has in mind.”
“You are right,” replied the pope. “That is my firm resolution. One must, before anything else, put our finances in order, but I need a little time.”7
While the French ambassador was urging Pius to act quickly, others were trying to slow him down. Along with the Austrian court, the Bourbon king of Naples—not among Europe’s more enlightened monarchs—had been dismayed at the pope’s broad amnesty and at his unseemly eagerness to please his restive subjects. Pius’s uncertain first moves, reported the king’s ambassador in Rome, were allowing the esaltati, the fanatics, people who would have been happy to see all of Europe’s monarchs fall, to claim that the pope was on their side. Some reforms were no doubt to be desired, the Neapolitan ambassador told the pontiff when they met in the fall, but firmness was also needed. Otherwise, he warned, “pernicious influences” would grow unchecked.8
