Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (48 page)

In France, the priest Felicité de Lamennais had moved from an Ultramontanism derived from the teaching of De Maistre and a hatred of Enlightenment rationalism to a radical critique of the France of Charles X. To Lamennais the royalist church of France in the 1820s, staffed by state-appointed poodle bishops (‘tonsured lackeys’) was no better than the impotent state churches of eighteenth-century Europe, or even revolutionary France. For all its lip-service to Catholicism, the state, with its control of the episcopate, its restrictions on contact with the papacy and its monopoly of religious education, was manipulating religion for its own purposes, failing to allow it the freedom of expression and action which was fundamental to the Gospel. In the persisting Gallicanism of France, Lamennais saw not an ally of the Church but its opposite. The kings had had their day. To be itself, the Church must embrace the liberty which the Revolution had proclaimed, demand control of its own officers and its own affairs: ‘The Church is being suffocated beneath the weight of the fetters which the temporal power has put upon it; and liberty which has been called for in the name of atheism must now be demanded in the name of God.’
⁹
The Church, led by an infallible pope, must baptise the Revolution, and side with the people against the forces of reaction and revolution. Lamennais and his supporters launched a newspaper,
L’Avenir
(‘The Future’), which had the slogan
‘God and freedom’ as its masthead, and which campaigned for the separation of throne and altar, a ‘Free Church in a Free State’.

Lamennais was to a large extent inspired by events in Belgium, Poland and Ireland. In all these countries, Catholic populations lived under non-Catholic regimes: Poland partitioned between Orthodox Russia and Protestant Prussia; Belgium ruled by the Protestant King William I in the interests of Holland; Ireland ruled from Westminster. In such circumstances, ‘throne and altar’ politics were a recipe for oppression, and Catholics allied themselves with liberals in a common struggle. In Rome, such alliances appeared ‘monstrous’, as Cardinal Albani described the co-operation between Belgian Catholics and liberals. Freedom of religion meant freedom for irreligion: nothing good could come from slogans coined in the hell-hole of revolution. That perception led to the disastrous alienation of the papacy from Catholic aspiration in much of Europe, and the papacy had difficulty coming to terms with the successful Belgian Revolution of 1831, where Catholics accepted the separation of Church and state.

The great papal failure was in Poland. Since 1825, Tsar Nicholas I had been systematically undermining Catholicism in Poland, attempting to force Eastern-rite Catholics (‘Uniates’) into union with the Russian Orthodox Church, hindering contacts between Rome and the Latin-rite bishops, and deposing the Primate of Poland in favour of an elderly government stooge. Rome had protested, but bad communications and the Pope’s overriding commitment to the support of monarchy meant that its protests were half-hearted and ineffective. In November 1830 Poland rose against Russia and briefly established a provisional government. By the autumn of 1831, however, the rebellion had been crushed, and Russia began a brutal campaign of reprisal without parallel anywhere else in Europe. In June 1832, while Poland was groaning under this savagery, Gregory issued the brief
Superiori Anno
, condemning the revolt, denouncing those who ‘under cover of religion have set themselves against the legitimate power of princes’, and warning the bishops to do their utmost ‘against impostors and propagators of new ideas’.
¹⁰

Gregory’s heartless response to the agony of Poland was conditioned by the rebellion of the Carbonari on his own doorstep. To appear to condone rebellion against Russian misrule would be to legitimate rebellion in Italy. His rejection of liberal values received more considered expression in August 1832, in the encyclical letter
Mirari Vos
, directed against Lamennais and the
L’Avenir
group. Lamennais’ pugnacious attacks on the conservative alliance of throne and altar in France had been heightened by the July Revolution of 1830. He called on the Church to abandon nostalgia for the Bourbons and to join with the people in creating a new and freer world. These sentiments outraged the French bishops, and episcopal opposition to
L’Avenir
grew. Unwisely, Lamennais decided to suspend publication and to appeal to Rome for support and vindication. They would go ‘to consult the Lord at Shiloh’, to prostrate themselves at the feet of the Vicar of Christ: ‘O Father, condescend to look down upon some of the least of your children, who are accused of being rebels against your infallible and mild authority … if even a single one of their thoughts deviates from yours, they disavow it, they abjure it. You are the rule of what they teach; never, no never, have they known any other.’
¹¹

Lamennais’ extravagantly pro-papal writings had made him a popular figure at Rome under Leo XII: there had even been rumours of a cardinal’s hat. But Lamennais had long since moved away from the papalist version of throne-and-altar legitimism which had first caught Roman attention. The decision to appeal to the papacy at this point was suicidal, given Gregory XVI’s track-record and known opinions, and it would ultimately lead to Lamennais’ condemnation and his eventual abandonment of Catholicism. He arrived in Rome at the beginning of 1832 against a background of frantic lobbying by the bishops and the French government, urging the Pope to give no comfort to such rebellious spirits. Gregory received Lamennais and his colleagues cordially, but studiously avoided any discussion of religious matters with them. He established a theological commission to report on their teaching, a report which formed the basis for the encyclical
Mirari Vos
.

The encyclical, when it finally came, was an out-and-out condemnation of everything the
L’Avenir
group stood for. Gregory repudiated ‘the poisonous spring of indifferentism that has flowed from that absurd and erroneous doctrine or rather delirium, that freedom of conscience is to be claimed and defended for all men’. He denounced the ‘detestable and insolent malice’ of those who ‘agitate against and upset the rights of rulers’ and who seek ‘to enslave the nations under the mask of liberty’. The Pope was particularly exercised by Lamennais’ suggestion that the Church was in need of
restoration and regeneration to meet the challenges of a new age. The Church, he insisted, ‘has been instructed by Jesus Christ and his Apostles and taught by the Holy Spirit … It would therefore be completely absurd and supremely insulting to suggest that the Church stands in need of restoration and regeneration … as though she could be exposed to exhaustion, degradation or other defects of this kind.’
¹²

Mirari Vos
is a landmark document. Though its violent tone and resolute opposition to any hint of liberalism were not entirely new – Pius VIII had condemned Freemasonry in much the same tone – Gregory’s encyclical set the register and to some extent the agenda for the key utterances of his successor, Pius IX. The papacy from now on was locked into an attitude of suspicious repudiation of modern political developments, and the current of ideas which underlay them. Gregory’s hostility to the campaign for a ‘Free Church in Free State’ which underlay most liberal Catholic work on behalf of the Church coloured the rest of his pontificate. He was therefore less than supportive to liberal Catholics like Lamennais’ former colleague Count Charles Montalambert and the French bishops who agitated for greater freedom of education in France in the 1840s, and he put up with the government’s expulsion of the Jesuits from France in 1845, despite its disastrous impact on Catholic schools.

Elsewhere, the advent of liberal regimes more or less hostile to the Church moved the Pope willy-nilly towards the sort of independent action advocated by liberal Catholics. Throughout the 1830s and early 1840s Gregory was confronted by governmental action in Europe and beyond which threatened the liberties of the Church. His response was characterised at least as much by confrontation as co-operation. The most significant of these confrontations was the Cologne church struggle of 1837.

Prussian custom dictated that in marriages between Catholics and Protestants the sons took the religion of the father, the daughters the religion of the mother. The Catholic Church wanted all children brought up as Catholics. It would not permit Catholic priests to preside at marriages unless they got a guarantee to this effect. This made life impossible for Catholic women. As prefect of propaganda Gregory had been instrumental in the evolution of a compromise, promulgated by Pius VIII in 1830, which forbade priests to bless such weddings, but allowed them to attend as observers.

In practice, the German bishops co-operated with the Protestant government in stretching this papal directive, and they allowed priests to take an active part in the ceremonies. Rome was not informed. In 1837, however, the new Archbishop of Cologne, Clemens August Droste zu Vischering, announced that henceforth the papal directive would be followed to the letter. This was a red rag to an already anti-Catholic government, and in November 1837 the Archbishop was arrested and imprisoned without trial. Gregory issued a vehement protest, the conflict spread, and other bishops were suspended and arrested. The breakdown of relations between Church and government was healed only by the accession of a new king in Prussia, the romantically inclined Frederick William IV, whose fondness for the Middle Ages made him kindlier disposed to the Catholic Church. Gregory agreed to a compromise which involved the effective retirement of Clemens August. The conflict, however, served to raise Catholic consciousness all over Germany, hardened Catholics’ sense of confessional identity, and led to a vast expansion of the Catholic press and the mobilisation of Catholic opinion. It also struck a death-blow at the remaining vestiges of Josephinism. A handful of anti-papal Catholics broke away to form a patriotic ‘German Catholic Church’ as a result of the Cologne struggle, but this served only to highlight the fact that a new and less docile Catholic identity had formed around loyalty to papal directives. Ultramontanism was no longer a theory, but was taking flesh in the life of the Church.

Outside Europe, too, the needs of the Church and the wishes of the monarchies came into conflict. Gregory cared passionately about Catholic missionary activity, and was not prepared to allow deference to governments to hamper the work of evangelisation. In 1831 he offended Spain by publishing the bull
Sollicitudo Ecclesiarum
, in which he formalised the policy of working with
de facto
rebel governments in Latin America and elsewhere. Between 1831 and 1840, in co-operation with revolutionary republican governments, whose principles he deplored, he filled all the vacant sees in Spanish America.

Gregory had a low opinion of the effects of state patronage in the Americas and the Far East. He condemned slavery and the slave trade in 1839, and backed Propaganda’s campaign for the ordination of native clergy, in the face of Portuguese racism. His disapproval of the Portuguese misuse of the
padroado
(crown control of the Church) went
further. In 1834 he subverted the
padroado
in India by establishing a series of apostolic vicariates, whose bishops were directly answerable to Rome, not to Portugal. In 1838 he suspended four
padroado
bishoprics in India and absorbed them into the new vicariates, and he correspondingly reduced the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Goa. All this added to the growing focus of Church life on Rome. In the course of his pontificate Gregory created more than seventy new dioceses and vicariates (including ten for the USA and four for Canada) and appointed 195 missionary bishops. More and more extra-European churches owed their organisation and leadership to the papacy rather than to a colonial power. The world stature of the papacy grew.

III P
io
N
ONO
: T
HE
T
RIUMPH OF
U
LTRAMONTANISM

The cardinals meeting in Conclave to elect Gregory XVI’s successor in June 1846 had a stark choice before them. They could continue Gregory’s repudiation of liberal Catholicism and his policies of repression and confrontation with Italian political aspiration, by electing his Secretary of State, Cardinal Lambruschini, or they could seek a more conciliatory and open-minded pope. They chose the latter course, and elected the relatively unknown and, at fifty-five, unusually young Cardinal Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, who took the name Pius IX (1846–78). Mastai-Ferretti was a glamorous candidate. He was an ardent and emotional man (prone to epileptic fits when younger) with a gift for friendship and a track-record of generosity even towards anti-clericals and Carbonari. He was a patriot, who was known to have been critical of the reactionary rule of Gregory XVI in the Papal States, who disliked the Austrian presence in Italy, who used phrases like ‘this Italian nation’ and so was widely assumed to support the unification of Italy. Gregory XVI recognised his abilities, but distrusted him: even Mastai-Ferretti’s cats, he declared, were liberals.

Pio Nono (as he was universally called) quickly justified the expectations raised by his election. He set up a commission to introduce railways into the Papal States, installed gas street-lighting in Rome, set up an agricultural institute to improve productivity and provide advice to farmers, introduced tariff reform to help trade, abolished the requirement for Jews to attend Christian sermons every week and admitted them to a share in the papal charities. He won golden opinions because of his edifying poverty (he had to borrow his travel
money to the Conclave) and because as pope he immediately and very unusually established himself as a pastor, preaching, confirming children, visiting schools and hospitals, distributing communion in obscure city churches and chapels.

Above all, he introduced a measure of political reform. One of the earliest acts of his papacy was to declare an amnesty for former revolutionaries in the Papal States. Conservative Europe was horrified, and Metternich, who had been appalled by Pio Nono’s election, predicted disaster. A liberal pope, he declared, was an impossibility, and Pio Nono was a fool to behave like one, for liberal reforms could in the end only mean the destruction of the Papal States. He was soon to be proved right. Meanwhile, Pio Nono went ahead with reform. In 1847 he introduced a consultative assembly with lay representatives to help govern the Papal States. When Austria occupied Ferrara, the Pope threatened Metternich with excommunication, told him Austria’s presence in Italy could do no good, and secured the withdrawal of Austrian troops.