The Pope Who Would Be King, page 5
Alarm was spreading among the cardinals as well. “My friend,” wrote Cardinal De Angelis, archbishop of Fermo, to the archbishop of Bologna, “let’s not fool ourselves. This general enthusiasm for reforms…cannot have a natural end.” Cardinal Gizzi, the secretary of state, watched uneasily as the inexperienced, impressionable pontiff was, as he saw it, manipulated by radicals through their skillful use of the crowds. In an effort to regain control, in early October Gizzi ordered an end to all popular demonstrations in the Papal States.9
If Gizzi suspected a plot behind the unending popular tributes to the kindly pope, he was not entirely wrong. Giuseppe Mazzini—the great champion of Italian unification and popular sovereignty, and a sworn enemy of priestly rule—was sending instructions from London to his supporters in Italy. Mazzini had been a headache for the popes—and Italy’s other rulers—for many years. Exiled from his native Genoa after the failure of the revolts of 1831, he had helped found Young Italy, a clandestine organization dedicated to unifying Italy under a republican government. After being expelled from Switzerland, he began what would be a long exile in London, scraping by while plotting insurrection and maintaining a huge international correspondence. Excited by the ferment in Rome, Mazzini urged his followers to take advantage of even the most minor concession by the pontiff to organize “festivals, songs, demonstrations, all of which give people a sense of the power that they have.” The watchwords, wrote Mazzini, should be “freedom, the rights of man, progress, equality, fraternity.” People would understand more easily, he added, if they contrasted these with their opposite: “despotism, privilege, slavery, monopoly.”10
Giuseppe Mazzini
Pius IX sought his subjects’ love, but he was a reluctant reformer, torn between those seeking change and those arguing that the pope’s first duty was to defend the powers of the church. In October the pope met again with the French ambassador, who urged him to end the priestly monopoly on high government positions and to remove the prelates who were most despised by the people. Pius met with distinguished laymen from all parts of the Papal States who had come to plead the same cause. But still he hesitated.11
The pope soon learned a lesson in the people’s displeasure. On November 4, the day honoring Saint Carlo Borromeo, sixteenth-century hero of the Counter-Reformation, he made his way in elaborate procession through the center of Rome to the saint’s church. Festive tapestries hung from the windows. Forty thousand people crowded the streets to watch him pass, but—disappointed that months had gone by since the amnesty, yet priests still held the most important government positions—they stood mute. When the pope returned to the Quirinal Palace, the crowd dispersed without waiting for his blessing.12
The following day the pope wrote to his brother, Gabriele, “I am always hoping that my own good will for the good of the people whom God has entrusted to me is about to be reciprocated. My hope is all the more secure inasmuch as I place my great faith in the Lord, without neglecting to do all that I can.” He asked Gabriele to distribute a ten-pound bag of salt to every family in their hometown. Two days later he approved the construction of five train lines in the Papal States.13
Perhaps it was the announcement of the first rail lines, or the excitement of the ancient ceremony, but on November 8, when the pope took possession of his seat as bishop of Rome in the magnificent Basilica of St. John Lateran, there was no doubting the people’s enthusiasm. At the sound of a cannon blast from Castel Sant’Angelo just after noon, the papal procession set out from the Quirinal Palace. A long line of cavalry led the way, followed by numerous papal attendants, some in red uniforms and others with black velvet capes and white collars, swords dangling from their belts. The commander of the Swiss Guard rode a magnificent mount, his steel armor and helmet sparkling in the sun. Behind him walked a prelate bearing the papal crucifix, followed by the head of the ecclesiastical court riding incongruously atop a white mule. Only then did the pope appear, in his ornate, horse-drawn carriage, waving his arm in benediction.
As Pius rode slowly by, women ran up to hand him their bouquets. By the end of his trip, he could hardly move amid all the flowers in his carriage. A hundred and forty thousand people, according to one chronicler, crowded the streets, waving their hats and their handkerchiefs. Many of them had traveled from the provinces to witness the spectacle. Behind the pontiff’s coach, six carriages, each pulled by six horses, carried dignitaries of the papal court, with numerous Noble Guardsmen, resplendent in their medieval uniforms, drawing up the rear. People lined the streets and leaned out of their decorated windows, applauding and shouting Viva il Papa!14
The latest outpouring of popular support for the pope only added to the nervousness of the ambassador of Naples in Rome. “The situation in which His Holiness finds himself is certainly thorny and full of difficulties,” he observed, “but it will make it even thornier and more difficult if, due to his sweet disposition, his mercy, his strong desire to make his subjects happy and content, His Holiness does not show his indifference to popular approval.” The reactionaries shared with the more perceptive moderates the belief that the pope was headed for disaster. It was not clear that papal rule—based on divine right—was in any way compatible with the democratic principles embraced on Rome’s streets. “If the Roman court concedes all that is necessary,” observed one of the democrats, “it must abdicate. If it concedes only a part, it only provokes greater conflict. If it concedes nothing, things will be even worse.”15
The reactionaries did have some reason to think that Pius might yet be brought around to their view. His first encyclical, released on November 9, 1846, made clear, to those who would listen, that he would not stray far from orthodoxy. Pius began Qui pluribus, addressed to all the world’s patriarchs and bishops, by praising his predecessor, Pope Gregory XVI, and confessing his own sense of unworthiness for the task that had been entrusted in him. He warned of the great perils the church faced:
Each of you has noticed, venerable brothers, that a very bitter and fearsome war against the whole Catholic commonwealth is being stirred up by men bound together in a lawless alliance….These men use these means to spread their hatred for truth and light. They are experienced and skillful in deceit, which they use to set in motion their plans to quench people’s zeal for piety, justice and virtue, to corrupt morals, to cast all divine and human laws into confusion, and to weaken and even possibly overthrow the Catholic religion and civil society. For you know, venerable brothers, that these bitter enemies of the Christian name, are carried wretchedly along by some blind momentum of their mad impiety….It is with no less deceit…that other enemies of divine revelation, with reckless and sacrilegious effrontery, want to import the doctrine of human progress into the Catholic religion.16
The encyclical could hardly have expressed a more conservative message, pitting the word of God against the forces of evil, the timeless truths of the church against the new blasphemies spread by the heretical champions of “progress.”
Undaunted, the liberals kept trying to convince the pope of the need for change. A week after Pius pronounced Qui pluribus, a young man from Bologna, second city of the Papal States, came to see him. Full of enthusiasm for the liberal, patriotic cause, twenty-eight-year-old Marco Minghetti, who had already acquired a reputation among Bologna’s elite for his erudition, would one day become Italy’s prime minister. Rather than raise the uncomfortable subject of the encyclical, Minghetti began the audience by thanking the pope for the changes he had already made. The pontiff expressed his appreciation for the young man’s kind words but complained that people had unrealistic expectations of him.
Reasonable men, replied Minghetti, realized that reforms would not be easy but were confident that they could be reconciled with church principles.
“Yes,” said the pope, “but first there must be enough time and enough calm.” When his visitor urged him to dismiss those clerics in government who opposed any change, Pio Nono grew silent. He stood up, lifted his arms to bless his visitor, and sent him off.17
* * *
—
IN EARLY DECEMBER, AMID torrential rains, the swollen Tiber River flooded its banks. By the morning of the tenth, a third of the city lay underwater. The Corso had become a canal, and boats outfitted by philanthropic princes glided through the city streets, bringing food to the stranded. Worst hit were Rome’s four thousand Jews, confined since the sixteenth century to a walled ghetto on the banks of the Tiber. With mud-saturated water rising several meters, the Jews could escape only through their second-floor windows. As the waters receded the next day, people learned that the pope had ordered food and clothes to be sent to those who had suffered, triggering a new surge in the pope’s popularity. The Jews, too, were thankful, for in the wake of the flood’s devastation, Pius IX granted their request that some of their number be allowed to settle outside the overcrowded, and now waterlogged, ghetto.18
Despite the order forbidding further public demonstrations, more than a thousand people marched to the pope’s palace on December 26, the eve of the festival of the pope’s namesake, Saint John. Shouting Viva il Papa! they played music and raised banners and torches. Unable to resist their pleas, the pope strode out onto his balcony to bless them.
Cardinal Gizzi, the pope’s secretary of state, was not pleased. “I gave orders that the popular demonstrations for the Pope not be repeated,” he told the Austrian ambassador, “but then my orders were not followed.” He had been in office less than half a year but was already at wit’s end. “If I am not going to be listened to,” he vowed, “nothing remains but for me to resign.”19
* * *
—
IN CONTRAST TO THE CARDINALS, the pope lived simply. He woke up at six or six-thirty in the morning, shaved himself, then went to his private chapel for an hour of prayer, meditating as he recited the rosary. He celebrated a mass with his attendants before eating his modest breakfast, dipping biscuits into a cup of coffee mixed with chocolate. After he gave his maggiordomo and other members of his entourage instructions for the day, he hosted an endless stream of visitors in his study, as cardinals, ministers of his government, heads of various ecclesiastical courts and congregations, diplomats, and assorted visitors and supplicants came to see him.
Before lunch Pius returned to his chapel for a half hour of prayer. He ate at three p.m. at a table covered in red velvet, in a vast, empty hall. Following long-established custom, the pope ate alone, his simple meal lasting no more than twenty minutes. His diet consisted largely of vegetables, favoring beans and fennel flavored with a little salt, as well as asparagus and artichokes in season. He liked his fruit green and drank a small glass of wine. He was especially partial to strong coffee, which he drank all day.
Following lunch, Pius went out with a small retinue of attendants for his daily excursion. Romans became accustomed to seeing him on the streets or in one of Rome’s many churches. These afternoon outings sometimes took him beyond the city walls to visit famous ruins and reliquaries of the martyrs or simply to enjoy a walk in the country. After the dour Pope Gregory, Pio Nono was the pope who smiled. Stories circulated of his acts of charity, coming to the aid of a crying boy whose father was in debtor’s prison, or taking the hand of a widow and offering help. Then by six p.m. he was back in his palace for more meetings, ending the workday only at ten-thirty at night.20
Forty-eight-year-old Massimo d’Azeglio, from a noble Piedmontese family in northwestern Italy, described his audience with the pope in these early months. A partisan of Italian unification but far from a radical, d’Azeglio would soon become prime minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia. After an hour in the waiting room, d’Azeglio was ushered in. Pius sat on a red leather chair, under a canopy, the desk in front of him covered by papers, a crucifix, a pair of reading glasses, two candles, and an oil lamp with a transparent lampshade. D’Azeglio kissed his foot, and Pius stretched out his hand so that d’Azeglio could kiss his ring before the pope raised his arm to invite his visitor to stand. Pius, d’Azeglio thought, was an attractive man. He spoke without a trace of affectation and had a talent for putting his visitors at ease. “I have never seen,” reported d’Azeglio, “a man who was more pleasing than this.” Pio Nono projected such sincerity both in his words and in his facial expression, thought d’Azeglio, that it seemed impossible to doubt him.21
Sharing this benevolent view of the pope, Romans had come to blame the failures of his government on his advisers, the cardinals first among them. Cardinal Gizzi found himself a particular target of the people’s ire. By early 1847, the crowds’ cries of Viva Pio Nono! were increasingly mixed with shouts of “Down with Gizzi! Down with the secretary of state!”22
Recent advances in typography had made cheap mass production of printed materials possible, opening the floodgates for newspapers and journals of all kinds. In mid-March 1847, Secretary of State Gizzi reaffirmed an 1825 decree that required all printed materials dealing with matters of morality, religion, or science to be subject to church censorship. In a mild bow toward popular demands for a free press, the updated edict placed laymen on a new board of censorship to review all political writings. Its job was to ensure that nothing be allowed to appear that “directly or indirectly tends to turn people against the acts and men of the government.”23
If the pope hoped that Gizzi’s measures would help him tamp down the political pressure, he was quickly disappointed. New publications proliferated, and Romans kept flouting the ban on popular demonstrations. “Cardinal Gizzi’s position is becoming more difficult by the day,” observed the Sardinian ambassador, reporting back to Turin. Like many others, the ambassador thought that Gizzi was acting against the pope’s more liberal inclinations. “One cannot deny anymore that there is a certain friction between the Pope and the Secretary of State,” the Sardinian envoy observed. “Gizzi uses a language that seems to indicate his firm intention of ending the people’s demonstrations, but the facts demonstrate the opposite, and the liberal party is continually gaining in importance.”24
On Easter Sunday the frustrated Gizzi went to see the pope to submit his resignation. Alerted to the cardinal’s intentions, Pio Nono took Gizzi into his arms in a warm embrace as he entered his study and begged him to stay. The pope admitted that his tendency to follow his heart rather than his head sometimes created problems, but this, he said, was exactly why he needed a man like Gizzi at his side. Did that mean, asked Gizzi, that the pope would finally begin to heed his advice? Pius assured him he would.25
* * *
—
IN THE WAKE OF THE 1831 revolts that briefly drove the cardinal legates from Bologna and other parts of the Papal States, the French had summoned a conference of foreign powers to discuss what was to be done about the tottering papal regime. The Austrians and others all agreed with the French that for the pope to continue to exercise temporal power, he would have to make major reforms. Most important, priests would need to be replaced by laymen as heads of the various government offices. Gregory XVI had done his best to ignore the recommendations, but Europe’s diplomats had not forgotten them. With belief in the separation of church and state continuing to spread through the continent, government by priests was becoming an ever more glaring anomaly.26
Responding to this pressure, in April 1847, Pius announced the creation of a new body, a Consultative Council. In each province of the Papal States, the prelate in charge would nominate three distinguished residents, from whom the pope would choose one for the council. The council’s job would be to advise the pope on matters of public administration and good governance. Romans greeted the announcement with joy, and thousands marched through the streets celebrating the news. The torches they held aloft formed a blazing ring around the fountain in the enormous, circular Piazza del Popolo, where they gathered before streaming down the Corso and on to the pope’s palace. Three rockets screamed into the air and exploded, bathing the pope’s piazza in their red and white light. Men and women shouted their vivas, begging the pope to come out to bless them. The door to the Quirinal balcony finally opened, and the pope appeared. As he raised his arms, silence spread and the people dropped to their knees.
Witnessing these displays of affection, the American journalist Margaret Fuller, then living in Rome, expressed sympathy for the pope’s plight. “He is a man of noble and good aspect,” she wrote, “who, it is easy to see, has set his heart upon doing something solid for the benefit of man.” His task was not an easy one, she pointed out, something Romans did not seem to appreciate. “The Italians,” Fuller observed, “deliver themselves, with all the vivacity of their temperament, to perpetual hurras, vivas, rockets, and torchlight processions. I often think how grave and sad must the Pope feel, as he sits alone and hears all this noise of expectation.”27
The momentum the pope created with these limited reforms proved hard to stop. Once it was admitted, if only tacitly, that the governing arrangements in the Papal States were not fixed by divine will, the whole rationale for ecclesiastical rule risked collapse. The Dutch ambassador observed that the new Consultative Council would only embolden those demanding a popularly elected legislative body of a kind found farther north in Europe. “Italy,” he reported, “is undergoing a true moral crisis,” as two ideas were taking hold: the right to constitutional guarantees, and the need to drive foreign troops back across the Alps. The pope might attempt halfway measures, concluded the ambassador, but in the end he might find himself fighting a losing battle.28
