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.

The Pope was in fact uneasy about all this, worrying about democratic concessions in the government of the Papal States which might give laymen unacceptable influence in spiritual matters and usurp the authority of priests. He was carried along with the tide of change, however, half approving, half fearful that to hold back might provoke a wave of hatred against the Church. And, whatever his private reservations, the Pope became the darling of Europe, congratulated by Protestant statesmen, celebrated in London, Berlin, New York as a model ruler. In Italy hopes for a federation of Italian states, with the Pope as president, grew. Mazzini wrote an open letter from England to tell him he was the most important man in Italy and the hopes of the people were in his hands, nationalist crowds chanted ‘Viva Italia! Viva Pio Nono!’

Disillusion came in 1848, the year of revolutions all over Europe. In Rome, the Pope responded to the dangerous revolutionary fervour by establishing an elected municipal government, and in March agreed a new constitution for the Papal States with an elected chamber capable of vetoing papal policy.

As the demand for the expulsion of Austria from Italy turned into a war, more and more Italians treated it as a Crusade, and called on the Pope to lead it. On 29 April 1848, Pius made a speech designed to clarify the nature of papal policy towards Italy. It was a [shower-spray] of icy water on the overheated enthusiasm which had surrounded his first two years as pope. As father of all the faithful, he declared, he could take no part in making war on a Catholic nation: he would send no troops against Austria. He condemned the idea of a federal Italy led by the papacy, urging Italians to remain faithful to their princes.

This statement, in effect a clear return to the policy of Gregory XVI, provoked a universal sense of betrayal. Overnight, from being the most popular man in Italy, he became the most hated. Rome became increasingly ungovernable, and in November 1848 his lay Prime Minister, Pellegrino Rossi, was murdered on the steps of the Cancelleria. The Pope fled. Disguised as an ordinary priest, he left Rome by night on 24 November, and took refuge at Gaeta in Neapolitan territory. Rome erupted into revolution, and Garibaldi and Mazzini established themselves at the head of a fiercely anti-clerical republican regime.

From Gaeta, Pio Nono called on the Catholic powers to restore him, and in July 1849 French troops duly took possession of Rome on his behalf. He himself re-entered Rome in April 1850. He never recovered from his exile of 1848, and for the rest of his life remained convinced that political concessions to democracy merely fuelled the fires of revolution. The liberal honeymoon was over.

For the next twenty years, Pio Nono’s position as ruler of the Papal States depended entirely on the presence of French and Austrian troops to suppress rebellion. The Christian world was treated to the spectacle of the Father of all the Faithful seated on bayonets, and ruling, rather ineptly, 3,000,000 subjects, most of whom wanted to be rid of him.

Leadership of the cause of Italian unity passed to the Piedmontese, under King Victor Emmanuel II. Pio Nono admired Victor Emmanuel, and found it hard to restrain his pride and delight at news of his victories over the Austrians. But the Piedmontese government at Turin, and its premier Cavour, pursued a systematically secularist policy, and through the 1850s introduced a series of hostile measures designed to reduce the influence of the Church. In 1854, all monasteries and convents in Piedmontese territory, except for a handful of nursing and teaching orders, were suppressed. This radical anti-clericalism, harking back to Josephinism and to the Civil Constitution, persuaded Pio Nono that the Risorgimento was hopelessly atheistic, a reincarnation of the spirit of 1789. Italy was witnessing an apocalyptic struggle between the forces of good, led by himself, and of evil, led by Turin.

The temporal power of the Pope over the Papal States was central to Pio Nono’s religious vision. The Patrimony of Peter was ‘the seamless robe of Jesus Christ’, committed to each pope as a sacred trust, as the guarantee and defence of the Pope’s universal spiritual ministry. The heroic resistance of Pius VII dominated Pio Nono’s imagination, and those of his advisers. The absorption of papal territory into a united Italy therefore seemed to him a device of the devil to undermine the papacy itself. The issue came to a head in 1860, when the Legations and the Marches of Ancona were annexed to the kingdom of Piedmont, and the Papal States, reduced by two-thirds, shrank to a narrow strip of land on the western coast of Italy. The Pope refused to accept the loss of these provinces, and they were bravely but hopelessly defended by a volunteer international brigade, recruited from devout Catholics all over Europe. (Pio Nono had been doubtful about the Irish volunteers at first, because he feared the effects on Irishmen of the ready availability of cheap Italian wine.) Throughout the 1860s, as international pressure mounted on him to come to terms with the reduction and eventual eclipse of the temporal power, he remained serenely stubborn. As ‘Vicar of a Crucified God’ he was prepared to suffer, but never to surrender. If necessary he would take to the catacombs: God would vindicate him.

Paradoxically, the increasingly beleaguered position of the papacy in Italy added to its religious prestige. There were of course many Catholics, including some cardinals and curial clergy, who saw that the temporal power of the Pope was not in fact vital to his role as a spiritual leader, provided that conclaves and episcopal appointments were free from external pressures, that the Pope had uncensored communication with the local hierarchies, and that the Italian church was freed from harassment by the anticlerical regime at Turin. Liberal Catholics in France, Belgium, Germany and England groaned at the confrontation between Pio Nono and the Risorgimento, and longed for an accommodation between the Church and political reality. Given the history of the papacy over the previous half-century, however, and the blatant animosity of Turin towards the Church, it was by no means obvious that such an accommodation was in the Church’s best interests.

And there were many for whom the struggle in Italy was a microcosm of a greater confrontation between the anti-Christian spirit of the Enlightenment and of the Revolution on the one hand and God’s revealed truth on the other. For them, Pio Nono’s policy was not political obscurantism, but the last heroic stand of Christian civilisation against the forces of atheism and rebellion against God.

The convert Anglican Henry Edward Manning, future Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, declared that the temporal power of the Pope was the sign of ‘the freedom, the independence, the sovereignty of the kingdom of God upon earth’. It was because the Papal States were ‘the only spot of ground on which the Vicar of Christ can set the sole of his foot in freedom’ that ‘they who would drive the Incarnation off the face of the earth hover about it to wrest it from his hands’.13 In a sermon at the requiem Mass for the Irish volunteers who had fallen in defence of the Papal States in 1860, Manning declared that the dead soldiers were martyrs for the faith; identifying the cause of the temporal power with ‘the independence of the Universal Church’, he denounced the attack on it as a ‘falling away from the supernatural order, and a return to (merely) natural society’, the end of Christendom.14

Manning was the spokesman for a new and ardent Ultramontanism which held the Pope in almost mystical reverence.

This devout papalism was just one aspect of a devotional revolution within Catholicism, away from the sober decorum of eighteenth-century religion

The reform Catholicism of the previous century had frowned on and played down such manifestations of popular religious feeling. Nineteenth-century Catholicism welcomed them. The romantic idealisation of the Middle Ages which was a feature of many of the artistic movements of the century led to a revived interest in the ancient Roman liturgy, in plainchant, in sacramental symbolism. In the 1830s Dom Prosper Guéranger revived the Benedictine life in France at the abbey of Solesmes, and led a reaction against the eighteenth-century rationalisation of liturgy advocated by French Jansenists. Guéranger pioneered the rediscovery of Gregorian chant, and adopted the Roman liturgy as the essential focus of a renewed liturgical life in the Church. Before he died, every diocese in France had adopted the Roman missal in place of the older Gallican books. Ultramontane piety was achieving a Roman uniformity which Trent had failed to impose.

This blossoming of the cult of Mary was intimately linked to growing loyalty to the papacy. Gregory XVI actively encouraged devotion to the Immaculate Conception, and in 1854 Pio Nono, who attributed his own recovery from epilepsy to the intercession of Mary, solemnly defined the once contentious doctrine of Mary’s Immaculate Conception as part of the faith of Catholics. This definition was a momentous step in the development of the papal office, for although the Pope had consulted bishops beforehand, and the definition was widely desired, the doctrine was eventually proclaimed on the Pope’s sole authority. The Pope’s chamberlain, Monsignor Talbot, remarked that ‘the most important thing is not the new dogma itself, but the way in which it is proclaimed’15 Heaven evidently approved, for four years later, at Lourdes, the visionary lady identified herself to Bernadette Soubirous by declaring, ‘I am the Immaculate Conception.’

The same direct link between popular piety and papal authority was evident in the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This devotion had been particularly loathed by eighteenth-century Jansenists, who denounced it as ‘cardiolatry’. In the nineteenth century it became the focus of an ardent devotion to the human nature of Christ, but it was never without a political dimension too. During the Vendée Rising in the 1790s it had been identified with popular Catholic repudiation of the Revolution, and its popularity among Ultramontane Catholics always carried this association.

Pio Nono extended the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus to the universal calendar of the Church in 1856, and in 1864 he beatified the seventeenth-century visionary who had first popularised it.

In 1861, after the fall of Romagna and the Marches, Jesuits launched an ‘apostolate of prayer’ to secure the ‘mystical subjugation’ of the whole world to the Sacred Heart. The political dimension of the cult was well in evidence when in 1869 the Archbishop of Malines dedicated Belgium, with its liberal constitution, to the Sacred Heart, and when in 1873 Catholic deputies to the French National Assembly launched the first of a series of penitential pilgrimages of reparation to the Sacred Heart. The Sacré Coeur basilica in Montmartre was to become the focus of regular symbolic gestures of this sort. In 1876, Cardinal Manning made the links between the papacy and the cult of the Sacred Heart explicit in his best-selling sermon collection, The Glories of the Sacred Heart, where he presented Pio Nono’s political difficulties as a sacramental embodiment of the pierced and suffering humanity of Jesus. The Pope, stripped of his ‘temporal glory’, was the living icon of the Sacred Heart.16

And indeed in the age of cheap popular print and the emergence of the mass media, the Pope himself became, quite literally, a popular icon. Catholic households from Africa to the Americas were as likely to display a picture of the Pope as a crucifix or a statue of the Virgin, and the face of Pio Nono was better known than that of any pope in history. Cheap books and mass-produced holy pictures spread and standardised the culture of Ultramontane Catholicism. In 1869 a book describing the first 200 miracles at Lourdes sold 800,000 copies. Lourdes itself was the product of the railway age, its pilgrims funnelled in from all over Europe and its offshore islands by steam packet and steam engine, in numbers and at speeds unimaginable in any previous century. The same mass transport brought pilgrims flocking to Rome to see and venerate the Pope, and, as his long pontificate stretched out, to celebrate his anniversaries.

This process was assisted by the charm of the Pope himself. Even his critics, exasperated by his stubbornness and unimpressed by his modest intellect, admitted that it was impossible to dislike him. He was genial, unpretentious, wreathed in clouds of snuff, always laughing. His sense of the absurd sometimes got the better of him, as when some earnest Anglican clergymen begged his blessing, and he teasingly pronounced over them the prayer for the blessing of incense, ‘May you be blessed by Him in whose honour you are to be burned,’ or when he scrawled at the bottom of a photograph of himself presented by a nun for an autograph the words of Christ in the storm, ‘Fear not, for it is I.’17 Above all, it was his human decency which impressed most, the open heart which made him exclaim on hearing of the death of his arch-enemy Cavour, ‘Ah, how he loved his country, that Cavour, that Cavour. That man was truly Italian. God will assuredly pardon him, as we pardon him.’18 The person of the Pope became part of the fabric of Catholic piety, and was enshrined even in the hymn-books:

Full in the panting Heart of Rome,
Beneath the Apostle’s crowning dome,
From pilgrim lips that kiss the ground,
Breathes in all tongues one only sound,
‘God bless our Pope, the great, the good.’19

However genial the Pope was in person, he had put himself at the head of a party within the Church which was anything but genial. In devotional terms Ultramontanism was a broadly based movement, in touch with some of the most powerful religious energies of the age. In doctrinal and institutional terms it was narrow, aggressive and intolerant. In journals like the French L’Univers, edited by Louis Vieullot, or the Jesuit Civiltà Cattolica, Ultramontanes extravagantly vamped up papal authority, and denounced not only the secular world which rejected the Church, but other Catholics whose opinions did not pass muster as sufficiently papalist. Everyone knew the Pope favoured this school of thought, and in 1853 he even published an encyclical, Inter Multiplices, defending Vieullot and L’Univers against the French bishops. The result was a suffocating churchiness, narrow, fearful and exclusive.

Newman_and_Pius_IX

The famous Anglican convert John Henry Newman, now leader of the Oratory community in Birmingham, and by Pio Nono’s standards a liberal, deplored this Ultramontane tendency to create a ‘Church within a Church’, and the failure of vision involved: ‘we are shrinking into ourselves, narrowing the lines of communication, trembling at freedom of thought, and using the language of dismay and despair at the prospect before us. ²⁰

The leading English Ultramontane Henry Edward Manning, whose main ally at Rome was Monsignor George Talbot, for many years Pio Nono’s most trusted confidant. Talbot ended his life in a lunatic asylum, and was probably unbalanced for years before his breakdown in 1869. He was certainly devious, feline, wreathed in intrigue, his view of the world and the Church a perpetual game of cowboys and Indians, heroes and villains. The villains included most of the English bishops, whom he thought disloyal anti-papalists, and Newman himself, in Talbot’s view ‘the most dangerous man in England’, still half a Protestant, and a leader of rebels — ‘his spirit must be crushed’. Talbot had the Pope’s ear, and was the key mover in the surprise appointment of Manning to succeed Cardinal Wiseman as archbishop of Westminster in 1865.

It was on the advice of men of this calibre that Pio Nono issued in 1864 the encyclical Quanta Cura, to which was attached the so-called Syllabus of Errors. As Pio Nono aged he became more responsive to Ultramontane pressure for strong, clear statements which would burn the bridges to the modern world that liberals like Count Montalambert were trying to build. The immediate trigger for the encyclical was the Catholic Congress held at Malines in Belgium in 1863, at which Montalambert had urged a reconciliation between the Church and democracy.The alliance of throne and altar was doomed, he argued, bringing the Church into discredit. It was better to tolerate error in order that the truth could speak freely, than to attempt to suffocate it by persecution and the Inquisition.

Monatalambert’s speech was published under the headline ‘A Free Church in a Free State’, and the Ultramontanes flooded Rome with demands for his condemnation. In March 1864 the Pope instructed his Secretary of State Cardinal Antonelli to send letters of rebuke to Montalambert and the Archbishop of Malines, and in December, on the tenth anniversary of the definition of the Immaculate Conception, the encyclical itself appeared.21 Much of it, though cast in the now familiar Vatican form of the Jeremiad, was a matter of rounding up the usual suspects — Indifferentism, Freemasonry, Socialism, Gallicanism, Rationalism were all condemned. It was the Syllabus, a list of eighty condemned propositions, which caused general consternation. Here again, many of the condemned propositions were uncontroversial.

All Christians agreed that it was a bad idea to claim that Jesus Christ was a mythical figure, or that revelation could add nothing to human reason (Propositions 5, 7). No one can have been surprised to find Pio Nono condemning the view that the abolition of the temporal power of the Pope would be good for the Church (76). The final group of propositions, however, seemed designed to shock and offend, for example by denying that non-Catholics should be free to practise their religion (77).Above all, the last proposition seemed to sum up the Catholic Church’s war against modern society, for in it the Pope condemned the notion that ‘the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and recent civilisation’ (80).

The Syllabus was in fact a far less devastating document than it appeared at first sight. Its eighty propositions were extracted from earlier papal documents, and Pio Nono repeatedly said the true meaning of the Syllabus could be discovered only by referring to the original context. So, the offensive proposition 80 came from the brief Iamdudum Cernirnus of 1861. Its apparently wholesale condemnation of ‘progress, liberalism and modern civilisation’ in fact referred quite specifically to the Piedmontese government’s closure of the monasteries and Church schools. But in December 1864 matters struck nobody in this light. The Syllabus was intended as a blow at liberal Catholicism, and everyone knew it. The English government representative in Rome, Odo Russell, reported that liberal Catholics, the Church’s ‘ablest and most eloquent defenders’, had been paralysed, ‘because they can no longer speak in her defence without being convicted of heresy ... Silence and blind obedience must henceforward be their only rule of life.’ Russell was a sympathetic observer of Roman affairs, fond of Pio Nono, but even he thought that the Pope had put himself ‘at the head of a vast ecclesiastical conspiracy against the principles of modern society’.22

He was not alone in thinking so. The French government, whose troops were the only bulwark between the Pope and the Risorgimento, banned the Syllabus; it was publicly burned in Naples; Austria considered a ban but decided that this would breach the Concordat. Montalambert’s ally, Bishop Dupanloup of Orleans, wrote that ‘if we do not succeed in checking this senseless Romanism, the Church will be outlawed in Europe for half a century’. He worked day and night to produce a pamphlet in mitigation of the Syllabus, claiming that it was not a prescription for the actual conduct of the Church’s relations with society in the concrete, but an abstract outline of the ideal. This changeless ‘thesis’ needed — and, in the Church’s actual agreements through concordats and the like, in fact received — modification to adapt it to actual circumstances: the ‘antithesis’.

Dupanloup’s pamphlet was a tour de force which went a long way towards defusing non‑Catholic hostility to the Syllabus, and gained breathing-space for liberal Catholicism. Six hundred and thirty-six bishops wrote to thank him for it, and Montalambert called it ‘a first-class verbal vanishing trick’. Pio Nono, daunted by the clamour the Syllabus had caused, also thanked him, but was privately unimpressed, and the Ultramontane juggernaut rolled on.

On the feast of Sts Peter and Paul 1867, kept as the eighteenth centenary of the martyrdom of the Apostles, Pio Nono announced the summoning of a general council, to begin on 8 December 1869. Manning and other leading Ultramontane bishops took a solemn vow at the tomb of St Peter to work for the definition of papal infallibility at this, the First Vatican Council.

AT FIRST, however, infallibility was not on the agenda. The Pope had called the Council to tackle nineteenth-century unbelief and rationalism, which he thought were undermining Christianity, and to strengthen the Church in her stand against hostile societies and governments. As the date for the Council approached, however, it was clear to everyone that infallibility would be the dominating issue. Governments feared that the doctrines of the Syllabus would be made absolute, and thereby worsen the confrontation between Church and state. Liberal Catholics feared they were being edged out of the Church, and that an unlimited doctrine of papal infallibility would be imposed at the Council. All Catholics accepted that in fundamental matters the Church taught infallibly, and all accepted that solemn papal utterances spoke for the Church. Agreement ended there, however. Ultramontane enthusiasts like W. G. Ward attributed infallibility to almost every papal utterance.Ward thought that not only was the Syllabus infallible, but that every one of the other thirty encyclicals and allocutions from which the Syllabus quoted was thereby shown to be infallible. He wanted a new infallible statement from the Pope on the table every morning with The Times. Ultramontanes of this cast of mind imagined the Pope as permanently inspired, and were prone to statements like ‘the infallibility of the Pope is the infallibility of Jesus Christ himself’, or ‘when the Pope thinks, it is God who is thinking in him’.23

Few nineteenth-century Catholics rejected out of hand the notion that the Pope might teach infallibly. But many thought that it was dangerous to try to define just how and when that might happen.They thought it unnecessary, for the infallibility of the Church had never been defined, yet all Catholics believed it. They also thought such a definition inopportune, likely to inflame anti-Catholic feeling, to alienate Protestants and Eastern Orthodox Christians, to antagonise governments. Some, like Bishop Dupanloup, thought that in any case such a definition would be almost impossible to get right. How, for example, could the Pope’s teaching as an ordinary priest or theologian be distinguished from his solemn teaching ex cathedra (‘from his throne’)? This digging around in the roots of the Church’s authority, he feared, might kill the whole tree.24

Seven hundred bishops attended the Council, 70 per cent of all those eligible. Italians dominated — all five of the presidents, all the secretaries and two-thirds of the consultors (expert advisers) were Italian. The key posts in the Conciliar bureaucracy were held by supporters of infallibility. The initial sessions were taken up with the formulation of the decree Dei Filius, a strong assertion of the rationality of faith and the uniqueness of the Christian revelation. Attention soon turned, however, to the draft document on the Church, a lengthy affair which dealt with everything from the nature of ministry to the relations of Church and state. Debate dragged on, and Manning and his colleagues persuaded the Pope that it would be dangerous to leave the question of infallibility unresolved. The chapter dealing with infallibility was moved to the head of the agenda.

The Council was polarised between two groups, the infallibilist majority, led by Archbishop Manning, and the inopportunist minority, which included all the Austrian and German hierarchy, and many of the French. Initially, the Pope preserved a scrupulous neutrality, greeting known opponents of infallibility with warmth and friendliness. He was offended, however, by a widely publicised letter by the dying Montalambert which said that the infallibilists were ‘setting up their idol in the Vatican’, and by the attempts of liberal Catholics to prevent infallibility being discussed. Dupanloup tried to persuade Napoleon III to intervene. The English Catholic layman Sir John Acton, who was a pupil of the German leader of theological opposition to the definition, Ignaz von Döllinger, organised a campaign to whip up public opinion and British, French and German action to prevent the definition. There was talk of the English Cabinet sending a gunboat.

Both sides lobbied and plotted frantically. Manning recorded that the inopportunist minority ‘met often, and we met weekly to watch and counteract. When they went to Pius IX we went also. It was a running fight.’25

The Pope’s hand was decisively shown on 18 June, when the Dominican theologian Cardinal Guidi, Archbishop of Bologna, criticised the heading of the draft decree on infallibility, which ran ‘On the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff’. This was erroneous, Guidi insisted: the Pope was not infallible, though his teaching might be. Infallible teaching is irreformable, the teacher is not. Guidi went on to argue that a condition of infallibility was that it should not be exercised rashly. The Pope teaches in consultation with other bishops, and this needed to be indicated in the decree. He proposed that the wording should state that the Pope is assisted by ‘the counsel of the bishops manifesting the tradition of the churches’. This intervention was all the more powerful because Guidi was an infallibilist, basically in favour of the definition. His careful theological intervention, one of the weightiest of the whole Council, was designed to rule out any notion of an inspired or personally infallible Pope, and to protect the truth that the Pope taught not as an isolated monarch, but as first among the bishops. He was embraced by members of the minority as he descended from the podium. But Pio Nono was enraged. He summoned Guidi and berated him, as a cardinal and a bishop of the Patrimony, for treachery. Guidi replied that he had said only that bishops are witnesses to the tradition. ‘Witnesses of tradition?’ the Pope replied, ‘I am the tradition.’26

La tradizione son’ io. [“I am tradition”] Pius’ magnificently arrogant aphorism laid bare both the attraction and the historical poverty of the infallibilist case. No controversy in the first thousand years of Christianity had been settled merely by papal fiat: even Leo I’s Tome had been adopted by a general council. Agreement on the truth in early Christianity had emerged by convergence, consensus, debate, painful and costly processes which took decades and even centuries to crystallise. Manning and his associates wanted history without tears, a living oracle who could short-circuit human limitation. They wanted to confront the uncertainties of their age with instant assurance, revelation on tap.

They did not get it. Guidi had his bad half-hour with Pio Nono, but his words had their effect. The final decree, drafted by Archbishop Cullen of Dublin, took account of Guidi’s arguments and was headed ‘De Romani Pontificia infallibili magisterio’ (‘On the infallible teaching office of the Roman Pontiff’).

The wording of the decree itself was carefully hedged around with restrictions. It declared that:

Routine papal teaching, therefore, was not infallible

Such solemn statements were indeed declared to be irreformable ‘of themselves’ — ex sere — a form of words designed specifically to refute the Gallican Articles of 1682, which said that papal definitions were only irreformable when they had been received by the Church. What the definition did not say, however, was that the Pope when teaching could or should act by himself, over against the Church rather than along with it. The wording avoided any comment on the processes by which such definitions emerge, and so did not concede the extreme Ultramontane case, in which the Pope need consult nobody, the idea implied in Pio Nono’s ‘I am the tradition.’ In fact, though it was not at once apparent, the Vatican definition called a halt to the wilder Ultramontane fantasies about the papacy: it was a defeat for men like Ward and Vieullot. It is some measure of the effectiveness of these restrictions that, since 1870, only one papal statement has qualified as ‘infallible’, the definition of the Assumption in 1950.

All of that, however, would take time to emerge. The final vote on the infallibility decree took place on 18 July 1870. Fifty-seven members of the minority, including Dupanloup, having fought the definition to the last, had left Rome the day before so as not to have to vote against a measure they now knew would go through by an overwhelming majority. In the event, 533 bishops voted for the decree, only two against. One of these two was Bishop Fitzgerald of Little Rock, Arkansas in the USA. When the Pope finally read out the decree, Fitzgerald left his place, knelt at the Pope’s feet and cried out, ‘Modo credo, sancte pater’ (Now I believe, Holy Father’). The voting and the solemn definition itself, proclaimed by the Pope, took place in a devastating thunderstorm. Rain bucketed down on to the dome of St Peter’s, and the dim interior was lit up by lightning flashes. Hostile commentators took the thunder as a portent — God, they said, was angry. Manning was scathing: ‘They forgot Sinai and the Ten Commandments.’28

The Council’s business was not finished, nor would it ever be. On 19 July, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and the Council was prorogued sine die. In the event, it never reassembled, and the first business of the Second Vatican Council almost a century later would be to declare Vatican One closed. The outbreak of the war precipitated the crisis of the temporal power. Napoleon III now needed every soldier he could get. The French garrison was withdrawn from Rome on 4 August, leaving the Pope defenceless. Within a month, Napoleon’s empire had come to an end, and King Victor Emmanuel had invaded the Papal States. On 19 September Pio Nono locked himself into the Vatican, instructing his soldiers to put up a token resistance to the royal troops, to make clear that he had not surrendered the city. The next day Rome fell, and within a year it would be declared the capital of a united Italy. A millennium and a half of papal rule in Rome was at an end.

Prisoner of the Vatican and Italian Anti-Clericalism

The pontificate of Pio Nono ended in gloom and confrontation. In November 1870 Italy passed the Law of Guarantees, to regulate the new relations between Church and state. At one level, it was a generous settlement. Though now deprived of territory, the Pope was to have all the honours and immunities of a sovereign, including a personal guard and a postal and telegraph service. He was to have the exclusive use (not ownership) of the Vatican, the Lateran and the papal country residence at Castel Gandolfo. He was to receive 3,500,000 lire annually as compensation for his lost territories. And the state surrendered any claim to the appointment of bishops, though it retained its rights over clerical benefices.

The Pope refused to recognise this law, or to accept the financial compensation. In practice, however, he tacitly adopted many of the provisions as a working arrangement, allowing clergy to accept the revenues of their benefices from the state, and taking over the appointment of all Italian bishops. This last was a move of enormous significance. Italy had a greater concentration of bishoprics than any other part of Christendom, and, as new territories were annexed to the kingdom, Victor Emmanuel had accumulated immense powers of appointment, greater than those of any other king in Christian history. By 1870 he had the right to appoint 237 bishops. All these appointments now came into papal hands, and not only transformed the relationship of the Pope to the Italian episcopate, but shifted expectation in episcopal appointments generally. From now on, there was an increasing and quite new assumption that the Pope appointed bishops. Paradoxically, the loss of the temporal power enormously increased papal control over the Italian church.

Meanwhile, however, relations between the papacy and Italy worsened. Most Italians were Catholics, but a high proportion of Italy’s tiny electorate (1 per cent of the population) were anti-clericals, and through the 1870s a series of anti-clerical measures were devised to reduce the Church’s hold on Italian life. In 1868 Pio Nono had issued the decree Non Expedit forbidding Catholics to vote or stand in Italian elections, and this ban on political participation remained in force till after the First World War, further alienating Church and state. Pio Nono never again set foot outside the Vatican, and withheld the customary ‘Urbi et Orbi’ blessing of the city and the world, as a protest against his status as the Prisoner of the Vatican.

German Kulturkampf

This confrontation with the Italian state was mirrored in Germany. The emergence of Prussia as the dominant European power after 1870 transformed the position of Catholicism in Europe, as the dominance of Catholic Austria was replaced by that of a strongly Protestant Prussia. The German church was extremely vigorous, with some of the best bishops of the age, like Archbishop Ketteler of Mainz, who had been a leader of the minority in the Council. In 1870 German Catholics organised themselves into a political party, the Centre Party, led by the brilliant tactician Ludwig Windthorst. The Chancellor of Prussia, Bismarck, detested and feared the Church as a potentially treasonous fifth column. Catholics in general wanted a larger pan-German state which would be less Protestant, and allied themselves with Liberal political critics of Bismarck’s regime. In 1872, with the appointment of a new minister of cults, Dr Falk, there began a systematic harassment of the Church, under the so-called Falk Laws. Catholic schools and seminaries were subjected to state control, religious orders were forbidden to teach, the Jesuits and eventually all religious orders were expelled. The Franciscan nuns celebrated in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ great poem ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ were refugees from this campaign. In 1874 imprisonment of ‘recalcitrant priests’ began, and in 1875 Pio Nono denounced the laws and excommunicated the few clergy who had submitted to them.

The Kulturkampf (struggle of civilisations) was devastating for the Church. More than a million Catholics were left without access to the sacraments, by 1876 all the sees in Prussia were vacant, and more than a thousand priests were exiled or imprisoned. Some German Catholics, led by Döllinger, had refused to accept the Vatican decrees. Bismarck systematically encouraged this schism, hoping to undermine Catholic unity. He also encouraged similar anti-Catholic campaigns elsewhere — in Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, though only Switzerland followed the Prussian example in launching its own Kulturkampf.

Bismarck’s hostility to Catholicism predated the Vatican Council, but the Vatican decrees were of course a factor. Bismarck claimed that the Vatican definition had revived the most extravagant claims of Gregory VII and Boniface VIII: this time, however, he promised, ‘We will not go to Canossa.’ Ultramontanes expected this opposition and revelled in it, their language full of violent images of strife and confrontation. Louis Vieullot had written that ‘Society is a sewer — it will perish — with the debris of the Vatican God will stone the human race.29

Pio Nono died on 7 February 1878, after the longest pontificate in the Church’s history. During those years the Church had been transformed in every aspect of its life. Almost the entire episcopate had been reappointed during his reign. The religious orders had experienced a renewal and growth which would have been unimaginable a generation earlier, not merely by the expansion of existing orders, but by the creation of new ones. Many of these new orders were dedicated to apostolic work in schools, hospitals and overseas missions, and they represent an astonishing flowering of Christian energy. In the three years from 1862, Pio Nono approved seventy-four new congregations for women religious. By 1877 there were 30,287 male religious and 127,753 women religious in France alone, many of them in brotherhoods and sisterhoods devoted to active works.The same vigour is in evidence in the spread of Christian missions outside Europe. After 1850 missionary orders multiplied, and men and women flooded into the mission field: by the end of the century there were in the region of 44,000 nuns alone working in mission territory.

Within established Catholic churches the same vigour is in evidence, and was deliberately fostered by Pio Nono. Responding to expanding Catholic numbers, he introduced new hierarchies into England (1850) and the Netherlands (1853) in the face of angry Protestant reaction. During his pontificate as a whole he created over 200 new bishoprics or apostolic vicariates. All this represented a massive growth of papal involvement and papal control in the local churches. The rapidly expanding church in the USA, in particular, whose bishops were effectively appointed in Rome, developed a strongly papalist character. That increased control was self-conscious. Pio Nono and his entourage saw to it that all these new religious energies were firmly harnessed to the papacy. Early on in his papacy he set up a special curial congregation to deal with religious orders, and he systematically encouraged greater centralisation, often intervening directly to appoint superiors for some of the orders — in 1850 for the Subiaco Benedictines and the Dominicans, in 1853 for the Redemptorists, in 1856 and 1862 for the Franciscans.

The drive to centralisation on Rome was seen at its starkest and least attractive in Pio Nono’s treatment of the Eastern Rite Catholic churches, the so-called ‘Uniates’.These local churches — in the Ukraine, India, the Middle East — were indistinguishable from the Eastern Orthodox in every respect: they used the Byzantine liturgy, had a married clergy, followed their own legal customs, elected their own bishops and held their own Eastern-style [p.235] synods.They differed from the Orthodox, however, in recognising the Pope’s authority. ‘Uniate’ Catholics had always had a difficult time, rejected by the Orthodox as traitors, suspect to the Latin authorities as half-schismatic.

Ultramontanism, however, had particular difficulty in accepting the value of these Eastern Rite Catholics. Ultramontanes identified Catholicism with Romanitas: they saw the unity of the Church as inextricably tied to uniformity. One faith meant one discipline, one liturgy one code of canon law, one pyramid of authority presided over by a proactive and interventionist papacy. Rome paid lip-service to the value of the Eastern Rite communities and their traditions as signs of the Church’s universality, and as potential bridges to Eastern Orthodoxy. In practice, however, it systematically undermined them. Latin missionaries were encouraged to wean congregations away from oriental rites, and pressure was brought to bear to phase out a married clergy. Rome tried to use patriarchal and episcopal elections to install pro-Latin candidates, and insisted on the presence of apostolic delegates at Eastern Catholic provincial synods, under whose pressure Latin customs were intruded. An attempt in 1860 to impose the Gregorian calendar on the Melkite Church (Syrian Christians under a patriarch at Antioch, who had been in communion with Rome since the late seventeenth century) drove some of the Melkite clergy into communion with the Orthodox, and came near to splitting the Church. When they protested against this erosion of their distinctive traditions, the Melkite leaders were treated as disloyal, and during the celebrations for the anniversary of the martyrdoms of Sts Peter and Paul in 1867 the Pope issued the bull Reversurus, which rebuked the Eastern Rite churches for their schismatic tendencies, insisted that close papal supervision was for their good, and reorganised the machinery for episcopal and patriarchal elections to exclude involvement of the laity and the lower clergy. Unsurprisingly, the patriarchs of the Melkite, Syriac and Chaldean churches were among the minority bishops who left the Vatican Council early.

These tensions were inevitable, for Ultramontanism was a form of absolutism, revelling in what Cardinal Manning called ‘the beauty of inflexibility’.30 It could give no coherent or positive value to diversity and independence. Papal invasion of the prerogatives, authority-structures and rites of the Eastern churches merely highlighted a process which was far more highly advanced within the churches of the Latin West itself. In addition to defining papal infallibility, the Vatican Council had asserted that the Pope had ‘immediate and ordinary jurisdiction’ over every church and every Christian. ‘Immediate and ordinary jurisdiction’, however, is what bishops have over their flocks, and the Council never addressed the problem of how two bishops, the Pope in Rome and the local bishop, could have identical jurisdiction over the same flocks. Indeed, it is an issue which has still not been satisfactorily settled. Under Pio Nono, the problem was resolved by the steady papal erosion of the authority and independence of the local hierarchies. Bishops were increasingly thought of as junior officers in the Pope’s army, links in the line of command which bound every Catholic in obedience to the one real bishop, the Bishop of Rome. The death of Pio Nono did little to halt or reverse these trends.

[6.] IV ULTRAMONTANISM WITH A LIBERAL FACE: THE REIGN OF LEO XIII

THE Conclave which began on 19 February 1878 took only three ballots to choose a new pope, Gioacchino Pecci, Cardinal Bishop of Perugia, who took the name Leo XIII (1878-1903). Pecci was virtually unknown outside Italy. He was not a member of the Curia, and had been bishop of the relatively obscure see of Perugia since 1846. A protégé of both Leo XII and Gregory XVI, he had been a highly successful administrator in the Papal States, before being sent as nuncio to Belgium in 1843. He made a hash of this post, however, by wading into a complicated and delicate political situation and encouraging intransigent Catholic opposition to government educational measures, and he was withdrawn at the specific request of the royal family. This was the end of his career in the papal service: Perugia was his not very splendid consolation prize. Pio Nono made him a cardinal in 1853, but, for reasons which are still unclear, the coarse and worldly Secretary of State Cardinal Antonelli, distrusted him and saw to it that he stayed in obscurity. A year before his own death, however, Pio Nono made him Camerlengo, the Cardinal who administers the Roman Church between the death of a Pope and the election of his successor. It was a back-handed compliment, for there was a well-established tradition that the Camerlengo is not elected pope. His election was probably based on three things:

Many of the cardinals felt that the apocalyptic denunciations of the world and political intransigence of Pio Nono had painted the Church into a corner. It was time for a little sweet-talk.

It was as if Cardinal Pecci had been waiting to be pope. Within hours of his election he declared, ‘I want to carry out a great policy: From his first day the new Pope displayed an astonishing sure-footedness in walking a tightrope, restoring the international prestige of the papacy without abandoning any of its religious claims. He would stand by the doctrines of the Vatican Council and the Syllabus, but he would abandon their shrillness of tone and confrontational manner.

His first encyclical, Inscrutabili Dei, was typical. In it he laments the evils of the time — rejection of the Church’s teaching, obstinacy of mind rejecting all lawful authority, endless strife, contempt for law. Out of this has sprung anticlericalism and the theft of the Church’s property. All this is misconceived, however, for the Church is the friend of society, not its enemy. It has led humanity from barbarism, abolished slavery, fostered science and learning, it is the mother of Italy. Italy must restore to the Pope what is his own, once more receive his authority, and society will flourish again. And Catholics everywhere, kindled by their clergy, must show ‘ever closer and firmer’ love for the Holy See, ‘this chair of truth and justice’. They must ‘welcome all its teachings with thorough assent of mind and will’. He recalled with approval Pio Nono’s ‘apostolic smiting’ of error.31

The world noted both the content and the manner. The Italian journal Riforma declared that ‘The new Pope does not ... curse, he does not threaten ... The form is sweet, but the substance is absolute, hard, intransigent.’32 Italian perceptions of Leo’s ‘intransigence’ were influenced by the continuing stand-off between the Pope and Italy.

Rome and the papacy, therefore, remained at odds. In 1881, when Pio Nono’s body was moved by night to its final resting-place at San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, an anti-clerical mob almost succeeded in throwing the coffin into the river. The 1890s saw the erection of an aggressive monument to Garibaldi within sight of the Vatican, and a statue to the heretic Giordano Bruno in the Campo di Fiori, deliberate gestures of defiance and rejection. Leo was never in fact to abandon hope that he would recover Rome, and a good deal of his political activity outside Italy was undertaken in the hope of exerting external pressure to recover his temporal power. He was to establish himself as a great ‘political’ pope. To that extent, however, he never faced political reality.

Outside Italy, he was anything but intransigent. He inherited confrontations

● with Prussia, where the Kulturkampf still raged,

● with Switzerland,

● with Russia over the oppression of Polish Catholics,

● with some of the Latin American states where anti-clerical regimes were attacking the Church,

● and with France, where the republican government was fiercely anticlerical.

He set himself to defuse all these situations. The letters in which he announced his election to European heads of state were uniformly conciliatory, conceding nothing of substance, but expressing a strong desire for an accommodation.

His most spectacular success was in Bismarckian Germany. Bismarck was weary of the Kulturkampf,,  for it had backfired.The Centre Party, far from shrivelling away, had increased its representation with every election, and its tactical alliances with other opposition groups, like the National Liberals and the Social Democrats, were causing government defeats. The strong leadership of the German bishops was holding Catholic resistance to the Falk Laws steady, and Catholic public opinion was increasingly vocal. The conflict was also complicating Prussian rule in Poland. For his part, Leo hoped that Bismarck, now the most powerful statesman in Europe, might help him recover Rome, and he feared long-term damage to the Church if the confrontation persisted. Secret negotiations were initiated by the nuncios in Munich and Vienna, and, although these eventually broke down, Bismarck began to suspend the worst of the anti-Catholic legislation. Between 1880 and 1886 the Falk Laws were dismantled, though the Jesuits were not readmitted to Germany till 1917, and bishops remained bound to clear all appointments of priests with government.

French Anticlericalism

It became clear, however, that Bismarck would do nothing to help Leo recover Rome. The Pope turned, therefore, to France. Most French Catholics were monarchists, sworn enemies of the principles of 1789. Most of the clergy were Ultramontanes, convinced that France should intervene to get the Pope his temporal power back. But from 1879 Republican anti-clericals were in the majority in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, and the government launched a campaign, like the Kulturkampf to reduce the Church’s influence in national life —

Throughout the 1880s Church and government were at each other’s throats, Church newspapers denounced the Republic, Catholics involved themselves in royalist plotting. It was the Syllabus given nightmare reality, and a total breach between the Church and French political culture seemed inevitable.

All through the 1880s, Leo did what he could to prevent this polarisation, and to conciliate the French state. He wrote a mild letter to the President in 1883, he published an encyclical to the bishops of France, Nobilissima Gallorum Gens, in 1884, expressing his love for France, recalling its ancient faithfulness to the Church, urging an end to hostilities, praising the Concordat of 1801, encouraging the bishops to stand firm on fundamentals but urging them to abandon extreme opinions for the sake of the common good. In 1885 he issued an encyclical on the nature of the state, Immortali Dei, arguing that Church and state are distinct but complementary societies, each with their own authority and freedoms. The state is truly free only when it supports the Church, and the Church is the best bulwark of a peaceful state. Liberty of religions, the press and oppression of the Church by the civil power are all damaging to society. But he insisted that no one form of government is privileged by the Church, and he urged Catholics to take a full part in the public life of their societies. With his eye on the ferocious divisions between liberal Catholics and Ultramontane royalists in France, he urged Catholics to put aside their differences in a common loyalty to papal teaching.33

Everyone thought the Church was the propaganda wing of the royalists, and papal utterances by themselves would not change that. The Pope made the Archbishop of Lyons and the Archbishop of Paris cardinals, and asked them to write a letter encouraging Catholics to support the Republic. Grinding their teeth, they wrote a diatribe against the government so bitter that he had to suppress it. So he summoned the great missionary Bishop Cardinal Lavigerie of Algiers, who had long believed that it was suicidal for the Church to make war on the state, and who needed French imperial support for his missionary efforts in Africa. On 12 November 1890, at a banquet for the mostly rabidly royalist officers of the French Mediterranean fleet, Lavigerie made an electrifying speech. To rescue the country from disaster, he said, there must be unqualified support for the established form of government (the Republic), which was ‘in no way contrary to the principles ... of civilised and Christian nations’. He was certain, he went on, that he would not be contradicted ‘by any authorised voice’.

The ‘toast of Algiers’ was a failure, and not merely in the eyes of the scandalised sailors who heard it. Everybody knew Lavigerie had been put up to it by Leo, and a few French Ultramontanes swallowed their horror and rage and said they would be loyal. Most, however, were too deeply alienated from the Republic to respond, and in any case the notorious Dreyfus affair was soon to unchain the worst of Catholic right-wing opinion and anti-Semitism, and further polarise French public life. Leo went on trying to force French Catholics into constitutional politics, but to little effect, for he was asking them to abandon attitudes and instincts rooted in a century of bitterness and conflict, and endorsed by several of his predecessors. His attempt to persuade the Catholics of France to ‘rally’ to the Republic, in fact, served only to demonstrate the limitations of papal influence, even over Ultramontanes.

Nevertheless, the Pope’s campaign in favour of ralliement did help exorcise suspicions that Catholicism and democracy were incompatible. It evoked from him a series of encyclicals which registered the Church’s acceptance of the legitimate autonomy of the state, and the compatibility of Catholicism with democratic forms of government. There was nothing strictly new about this teaching, and it did little more than codify the compromises with democracy which the popes had been making in practice since the Concordat of 1801. In many cases, his teaching repeats that of more uncompromising papal utterances like Mirari Vos or Quanta Cura and the Syllabus. But the tone of voice was utterly different and, having stated the ideal, he added the pragmatic qualifications. Libertas Praestantissimum, for example, the encyclical on liberalism published in 1888, reworks all that Mirari Vos and the Syllabus had to say in denunciation of freedom of religion, of conscience, of the press — and then goes on to say that the Church can nevertheless live with

religious toleration,
a free press,
and the rest of the modern ‘false liberties’,

‘for the sake of avoiding some greater evil’. It was as if Bishop Dupanloup had become pope.34

Social Reform and the Road to Rerum Novarum

The papacy had a bad record on social reform. The posture of reactionary condemnation into which it had been frozen since the publication of Mirari Vos in 1832 made it suspicious of any schemes for the transformation of society. From the early years of Pio Nono socialism was a particular bogey. The call of Lamennais, Henri Lacordaire the Dominican priest and political activist, and of Count Montalambert to the popes to ‘turn to the democracy’ had been rejected. Papal rhetoric was concerned with the obligation of obedience, the rights of princes and popes, it had nothing to say to people whose lives were captive to the market forces of laissez faire capitalism, and who had no stake in the political process of the societies that fed off their labour.

Other Catholics, however, felt the urgency of the social question. Industrialisation and urbanisation had brought massive hardship for the proletariat of Europe, and a widespread and deepening alienation from organised Christianity in both its Catholic and its Protestant forms. In England, Germany, Belgium and France, sensitive Christians wrestled with the plight of working people, and with the need for the Church to move beyond exhortation and almsgiving, to questions of justice, and to a Christian vision of society. This sensitivity was found among both Ultramontanes and liberals. In Germany such movements were represented by Bishop Ketteler, in England by Cardinal Manning, in France by Count Albert De Mun and the industrialist Lucien Harmel.

Harmel was a practical visionary. He had launched an experiment in social partnership at his factory in Val-des-Bois, where he introduced model housing, saving-schemes, health and welfare benefits, and workers’ councils to share in policy-making for the business. Harmel wanted other Catholic employers to follow suit, but was unable to persuade them. He decided to enlist the Pope. In 1885 he took 100 of his workforce on pilgrimage to Rome. Leo was impressed. Two years later 1,800 came, in 1889 10,000 came. These pilgrimages of working people, living proof that democracy and the Pope might shake hands, caught Leo’s imagination, and helped persuade him that industrial society need not be conflictual, that social peace under the Gospel was a possibility.

From 1884 Catholic social thinkers from France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland met annually at Fribourg to discuss the social question. The working papers of this conference accumulated as a summary of and stimulus to Catholic reflection on the condition of the working class. In 1888 Leo received members of the Union of Fribourg and discussed their ideas with them. Out of this conversation emerged the idea of a papal document which would address the social issue. The result was Leo’s most famous encyclical, Rerum Novarum, published in 1891.35

Rerum Novarum opens with an eloquent evocation of the plight of the poor in industrial society, in which ‘a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke which is very little better than slavery itself’. From this misery socialism offers an illusory release, fomenting class hatred and denying the right to private property. Defending this right to ownership, the Pope argues that class and inequality are perennial features of society, but need not lead to warfare. The rich have a duty to help the poor, and this duty goes beyond mere charity. Christianity is concerned with the healing of society as well as of individual souls, and in that healing the state must play a part. The state depends on the labouring poor for its prosperity, and must therefore protect the rights of labour, both spiritual and material. This protection extends to regulating working conditions, and ensuring that all receive a living wage, which will allow the worker to save and so acquire property and a stake in society. Labouring people have a right to organise themselves into unions, which ideally should be Catholic. Though the Pope thought strikes were sometimes the work of agitators, he thought they were often the result of intolerable conditions. He accepted the right to strike, but thought the state should legislate to remove the grievances that provoke strikes.

Rerum Novarum is one of those historic documents whose importance is hard now to grasp. Enough of what it had to say was couched in the traditional language of paternalism to allow conservatives to evade its radical thrust, and to pretend that nothing new had been said. Such people seized on passages like that in which Leo said suffering and inequality were part of the human condition, or exhorted the poor to be content with their lot. The Pope’s social analysis was elementary, and what he had to say about the unions was timid, and wrapped up in romantic tosh about medieval craft gilds. The Anglican Christian Socialist Henry Scott Holland said the encyclical was ‘the voice of some old-world life, faint and ghostly, speaking in some antique tongue of long ago’.36 Many Christians, many Catholics, in the 1880s and 1890s were saying more penetrating and more challenging things.

For the successor of Pio Nono to say these things, however, was truly revolutionary.

● Leo’s attack on unrestricted capitalism,

● his insistence on the duty of state intervention on behalf of the worker,

● his assertion of the right to a living wage

● and the rights of organised labour,

changed the terms of all future Catholic discussion of social questions, and gave weight and authority to more adventurous advocates of Social Catholicism. Without being either a democrat or a radical himself, Leo opened the door to the evolution of Catholic democracy.

Rerum Novarurn demonstrated that Leo was a more advanced social thinker than most nineteenth-century Catholics. With hindsight, he has come to be seen as a liberal pope, a courageous revolutionary transforming the Catholic intellectual and moral landscape, equipping the Church to deal with the modern world. As evidence for this view, one can put alongside Rerum Novarurn a whole series of measures which reversed the policies of his predecessor, and nudged the Church out of the rigid posture into which the reign of Pio Nono had frozen it.

A clear case in point is Leo’s reversal of papal policy towards the Eastern Catholic churches, and towards Orthodoxy in general. Leo called a halt to the drive to Latinisation  ^[p.241] and uniformity which had been such a feature of Pio Nono’s treatment of Eastern Rite Catholics.

In 1882 Leo stopped the offensive practice of naming Latin titular bishops to churches in Orthodox territory.

Many of these measures were in fact frustrated by unrepentant Latinisers among missionaries, the papal diplomatic corps and the Curia. Leo’s own intentions, however, were abundantly clear, and were the opposite of his predecessor’s.

Leo XIII Renewal of Thomism

Theology had suffocated under Pio Nono. Great and original theological work was done far from Rome in the German Catholic universities, and by isolated and idiosyncratic figures like John Henry Newman in England. In Rome itself, however, a rigid, defensive and largely second-hand scholasticism dominated, and everything else was viewed with suspicion. Leo was determined to change this. In 1879 he made Newman a cardinal, an extraordinarily eloquent gesture given that Cardinal Manning believed, and often said, that Newman was a heretic. The Roman authorities disliked and feared modern historical enquiry, which they thought was anti-Catholic and sceptical. In 1881 Leo opened the Vatican Archives to historians, including Protestant historians. The scholarly world recognised the revolutionary nature of this step, and applauded a liberal pope.

But, above all, Leo believed that the key to a renewal of Catholic theology lay in a return to the greatest of the scholastic theologians, St Thomas Aquinas, and with the encyclical Aeterni Patris of 1879 he initiated a renaissance in Thomistic and scholastic studies to break the straitjacket of the Roman schools. He established an Academy of St Thomas in Rome, imported distinguished theologians, philosophers and textual scholars, and encouraged the establishment of Thomistic studies at the Catholic University of Louvain. From 1882 the future Cardinal Mercier was appointed to lecture on St Thomas at Louvain, where his classes became the focus for a theological renaissance in the university and beyond.

All these measures infused new life and confidence into Catholic theology, and the 1880s and 1890s saw a flowering of scholarship in biblical studies, Church history and philosophy which had all suffered from the paranoia and narrowness of Pio Nono’s later years. The foundation of the Ecole Biblique under Dominican management in Jerusalem, the publication in 1893 of the encyclical Providentissimus Deus, which, however cautiously, accepted the legitimacy of scholarly study of the Bible using the resources of modern science and historical and textual criticism, and the establishment of the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1902, with relatively liberal-minded personnel, all contributed to a sense of new openings.

Leo’s preoccupation with St Thomas, however, points to the limits of his vision. St Thomas was indeed a transcendent genius, and the rediscovery of his teaching and his method opened a world of intellectual discourse and source-material which proved enormously fruitful. There were limits, however, to the usefulness even of Thomas in dealing with the intellectual problems of the late nineteenth century, yet Leo saw Thomism not as the starting point of theological enquiry, but as the end of it. In 1892 he sent a letter to all professors of theology, directing that all ‘certain’ statements of St Thomas were to be accepted as definitive. Where Aquinas had not spoken on a given topic, any conclusions reached had to be in harmony with his known opinions. Within a generation of the publication of Aeterni Patris, ‘Thomism’ had itself become an ossified orthodoxy in the Roman schools.

Leo XIII condemnation of Americanism

The limits of Leo’s liberalism were shown also in the condemnation of Americanism. The intransigents and the party of ralliement (rallying to the Republic) in France had their counterparts in America. A substantial group of conservative Catholics, led by Archbishop Corrigan of New York and Bishop McQuaid of Rochester, campaigned for a complete withdrawal of Catholics from the state educational system in America. Others, led by Archbishop John Ireland of St Paul, wanted a compromise which would allow continuing Catholic participation in the public schools.

Archbishop Ireland’s attitude reflected a more general openness to the distinctiveness of American social and religious culture, which was demonstrated by the participation of Cardinal Gibbons in the Chicago Parliament of Religions during the Exhibition there in 1892.

For ten days Christian Churches and denominations took part with Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims in a public affirmation of ‘basic religious truths’. Gibbons closed the proceedings by leading the assembly in the Lord’s Prayer and giving the Apostolic Blessing — a sharing in public worship with Protestants and even non-Christians unheard of at the time, for which, remarkably, he had obtained permission directly from Leo XIII.

Such a display of ‘indifferentism’ would have been inconceivable in Europe, and many in America were disturbed by it. Leo himself condemned ‘inter-Church conferences’ in 1895. The continuing eagerness of ‘progressive’ Catholics to participate fully in American life and to integrate Catholic values as fully as possible into the ‘American way’ led many to fear a dilution of Catholic truth. Monsignor Satolli, the Apostolic Delegate in the USA, having initially supported Ireland and the progressives, came increasingly to feel that there was ‘nothing of the supernatural’ about the American church.

In 1899 these tensions came to a head when a French translation appeared of a life of Father Hecker, founder of the Paulist order and a leading figure in the progressive wing of American Catholicism.

[Hecker had been an idealistic reader of Kant in his youth and disciple of Orestes Brownson, a controversial Catholic convert and extremely gifted pro-emancipation orator.

The Catholic controversial works Brownson had tried to read were written in “a dry, feeble, and unattractive style and abounded with terms and locutions which were to me totally unintelligible. Their authors seemed to me ignorant of the ideas and wants of the non-Catholic world, engrossed with obsolete questions, and wanting in broad and comprehensive views”. Brownson through his own studies had concluded, nevertheless, that Catholicism was intellectually liberating, the perfect religion for self‐ confident citizens of the American republic. The convert’s job was to make this openness more apparent. An intelligent Catholic’s mind, he said, “is no more restricted in its freedom by the authoritative definitions of an infallible church than the cautious mariner by the charts and beacons that guide his course” (Catholic Converts, P. Alitt, 1987, p. 64)

Hecker was a mystic.  In 1842 he wrote:

“I saw a beautifull angelic pure being, and myself standing alongside of her feeling a most heavenly pure joy and it was as if it were that our bodies were luminous and they gave forth a moonlike light which I felt sprung from the joy that we experienced. We were unclothed pure and unconscious of anything but pure love and joy and I felt as if we had always lived together and that our motions actions feelings and thoughts came from one centre and when I looked towards her I saw no bold outline of form but an angelic something I cannot describe but in angelic shape and image . . . this vision continually hovers o’er me and prevents me from its beauty of accepting any else.” Isaac Hecker, The Diary: Romantic Religion in Antebellum America, ed. John Farina ( Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1988), 105-6.

He converted to Catholicism, joined the Redemptorists in Belgium in 1849 and was ordained by Cardinal Wiseman in England, but was expelled from the order by the superior-general in Rome for having undertaken an "unauthorized" journey to Rome to plead for missionary-methods better suited to American culture (in fact the journey had been encouraged by four young Redemptorist fellow-converts and some members of the US hierarchy.  He won the favor of Cardinal Alessandro Barnabo and Pius IX and was permitted to found the Paulists together with his four Redemptorist former-confreres.  Accepted into the Archdiocese of New Yourk they devoted themselves to preaching, parish mission, and retreats for non-Catholics.]

The biography was prefaced by an enthusiastic essay by Father Felix Klein of the Institut Catholique in Paris, which ‘out-Heckered Hecker’ in recommending the adaptation of Catholic teaching to the modern world.

[He compared Hecker to Lincoln and quoted priase for his spirituality from Pius IX, Archbishop Ireland and Cardinal Newnan. Klein compared Hecker's journal to the Confessions of St. Augustine and the writings ot St. Teresa, called him a doctor, a leader in the new paths which the faithful were called to tread.]

Critics fastened on this preface, and besieged Rome with demands for condemnation. The outcome in 1899 was Leo’s letter Testeni Benevolentiae addressed to Cardinal Gibbons, condemning the ideas that

Many Catholics, and many bishops, in America were grateful for this papal warning against the over-enthusiastic adoption of pluralist values, the ‘false liberalism’ which they believed threatened the integrity of the American church. Cardinal Gibbons, however, who had tried to fend off the condemnation, indignantly denied that any American Catholics held such views, and believed that the use of the word ‘Americanism’ to describe them was a slur on a great church. Certainly the condemnation had wider implications. There is no doubt that European tensions had a good deal to do with the condemnation of Klein’s preface to the Hecker biography, and the condemnation was a sign that the liberalising forces released by Leo’s own style of papacy were here being called to a halt, the limits of assimilation were being set. In America, the condemnation had a serious impact on American Catholic theological scholarship, inaugurating a phase of conservative anti-intellectualism which had a sterilising effect on American theology. In Europe, it was a straw in the wind which would turn to a gale in the pontificate of Pius X, and the Modernist crisis.

The fact is that however much Leo’s tone of voice differed from that of his immediate predecessors, like them he believed that the Church — and therefore the Pope — had all the answers. If he thought less confrontationally, more historically, than Pio Nono, he had no doubt that the questionings and uncertainties of his age could all be resolved painlessly, by attention to what the Church, through St Thomas, through the popes, had long since taught. There is a numbing smugness about the insistence in many of his encyclicals that the Church is responsible for all that is good in human society, human culture. It is the voice of a man who has worn a cassock and lived among clerics all his life. In recommending the study of St Thomas, he was not calling Catholic scholarship to an open-ended encounter with historical and philosophical texts, but proposing a new standard of orthodoxy. It is no accident that the canonisation of St Thomas’ writings was accompanied by the condemnation not only of the influence of Kant and Hegel, but of other, specifically Catholic, schools of thought, like the posthumous condemnation of the philosophy of Antonio Rosmini in 1887. He genuinely desired reunion with the Churches of the East, but could imagine such an outcome only in terms of their ‘return’ to Roman obedience. In the Churches of theReformation he had no interest, and his condemnation of Anglican ordinations in 1896 as ‘absolutely null and utterly void’ was the inevitable outcome of ill-judged overtures by naively hopeful Anglo-Catholics.

He himself could not bear contradiction. When his Secretary of State once questioned his decision on some minor administrative matter he tapped the table and snapped at him, ‘Ego sum Petrus’ — (‘I am Peter’). That authoritarianism is in evidence in everything he did. He insisted punctiliously on the style and ceremony of a sovereign, and he systematically exalted the papal office. His encyclicals are littered with paragraphs urging the faithful — and their pastors — to undeviating obedience to papal teaching. The sheer quantity of that teaching in itself testifies to his extraordinary commitment to a teaching office. Its quantity, however, was not its most significant characteristic. Until the time of Leo XIII, papal doctrinal interventions had been relatively rare, and their form generally reflected the papacy’s role as a court of final appeal. Popes judged and, therefore, sometimes condemned. One of the attractions of Leo’s encyclicals is that they rarely merely condemn, but we should not allow relief to blind us to the radical shift in the nature of papal teaching which his collected encyclicals represent. Here, for the first time, we have the Pope as an inexhaustible source of guidance and instruction. No pope before or since has come anywhere near his eighty-six encyclicals. Leo taught and taught, and expected obedience.

He expected obedience, too, in the day-to-day running of the Church. Despite his reversal of Pio Nono’s centralising measures over the Eastern Rite Catholics, he himself tightened papal control over all the Church. He greatly increased the role of papal nuncios and apostolic delegates, insisting on their precedence over local hierarchies and other ambassadors as representatives of the Holy See. From 1881 the rise of international devotional rallies, known as Eucharistic Congresses, provided a platform for public manifestations of Catholic enthusiasm, in which the papacy played a growing role. From the late 1880s these events were routinely presided over by apostolic delegates or specially appointed groups of cardinals; in 1905 Leo’s successor Pius X would personally preside over a eucharistic congress in Rome.

In negotiating with the ralliement and with Bismarck, Leo overrode the wishes of the local bishops and the leaders of the German Centre Party, in Germany even organising a secret settlement from which they were excluded. He kept a tight reign on episcopal conferences — the American hierarchy’s momentous Third Council of Baltimore in 1884 was planned in Rome, and Archbishop Gibbons presided at it as the Pope’s personal representative.The first Conference of Latin American Bishops was actually held in Rome under the Pope’s personal chairmanship. Nor was his policy of support for the Republic an indication of liberal political views. He told the Bishop of Montpellier that if Catholics threw themselves into republican politics they would soon have the upper hand: If you follow my advice, you will have 400 Catholic deputies in France and you’ll establish the monarchy. I’m a monarchist myself.’37 His denunciations of socialism so delighted Tsar Nicholas II that he had them read out in Orthodox churches in Russia.

Leo’s conception of the papacy, in fact, was no less authoritarian or Ultramontane than that of Pio Nono. He surrounded himself with the trappings of monarchy, insisted that Catholics received in audience kneel before him throughout the interview, never allowed his entourage to sit in his presence, never in twenty-five years exchanged a single word with his coachman. And all his actions tended to consolidate and extend papal involvement at every level of the Church’s life. In a world in which the Church was increasingly being pushed to the margins, he retained grandiose ideas of the popes as arbiters of nations, elder statesmen at the centre of the web of world politics. Most of this was self-delusion: when Bismarck asked him to arbitrate in a territorial conflict between Prussia and Spain over the Caroline Islands he was offering a sop to Leo’s vanity. Leo imagined he was being invited to give a ruling, and was dismayed when Spain insisted he was no more than a go-between.

Yet he lived long, and by the end of his pontificate the papacy had indeed recovered much of the prestige which it had forfeited in the fraught years between the Revolutions of 1848 and the Vatican Council. It had also become the unquestioned focus of policy-making and doctrinal teaching in the Church. Pio Nono had made the Vatican Council; Leo XIII was its principal heir and beneficiary.

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