The conclave that, on its third ballot, elected Cardinal Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci Pope Leo XIII on February 20, 1878, was the first to be held by the Holy See since its loss of temporal power. The cardinal was ten days short of his sixty-eighth birthday and known to be in poor health, but those who saw him as little more than a stopgap pope soon had cause to revise their opinions. He was to run the Church with remarkable efficiency for over a quarter of a century.
His early career had been unpromising. A nunciature to Belgium in 1843 had ended in disaster, with his ignominious departure at the request of King Leopold I. His next thirty-two years were spent as the not particularly important Bishop of Perugia. In 1853 Pius IX had made him a cardinal, but the all-powerful Antonelli had disliked and distrusted him, and it was only after Antonelli’s death in 1876 that Pecci had been recalled to Rome. He was then appointed camerlengo, the cardinal who administers the Church between the death of a pope and the election of his successor; but even this was less significant than might have been supposed, since there was a long-standing tradition that camerlenghi did not become popes.
The problems that Leo inherited were formidable indeed. Throughout the 1870s and ’80s, and especially under the ministries of Agostino Depretis and Francesco Crispi, the attitude of the Kingdom of Italy to the Papacy was frankly hostile; the Law of Guarantees was infringed again and again. Leo was not even allowed to bless the crowd from the loggia of St. Peter’s in the traditional manner after his coronation; instead, the ceremony had to take place in the seclusion of the Sistine Chapel. Over the next few years the situation grew steadily worse. Processions and outdoor services were banned; the bishops suffered from unremitting government interference; tithes were withheld; priests were conscripted into the army, while fewer and fewer of them were allowed to involve themselves in education. The Catholic faithful, alarmed by what was beginning to look suspiciously like persecution, implored the pope to form his own parliamentary party in order to tackle the government on its own ground; but Leo remained firm. If Catholics wished to express their feelings by voting in the local or municipal elections, they might do so; anything more would mean recognition of the Italian state—and that remained out of the question.
As Supreme Pontiff, on the other hand, he could speak out for the Church, which he regularly and vigorously did. The views he expressed were essentially those of his predecessor, of the Vatican Council, and even of the “Syllabus”; but the tone was markedly different. Gone was the shrillness which had informed so many of Pius IX’s later pronouncements; Leo spoke with a voice of calm, of reason and regret. Why was the Kingdom of Italy so hostile? Surely the Church should be a friend, not an enemy. Had it not led humanity out of barbarism and into enlightenment? Why, then, was its teaching rejected? As anyone could see, that rejection was causing nothing but lawlessness and strife. If Italy would only return to the Catholic fold, all her present troubles would vanish.
With other nations, Leo adopted an even gentler approach. The Franco-Prussian War had changed the religious face of Europe. The dominant power was no longer Catholic Austria but fiercely Protestant Prussia, and this new dispensation had left the Catholic areas of Germany, particularly Bavaria, gravely concerned. German Protestants had been outraged by Pius IX’s “Syllabus” and by the definition of infallibility, while the Catholics had organized themselves into a powerful political party, which made a considerable nuisance of itself in the Berlin Parliament; Bismarck had consequently come to look upon them as a potentially dangerous enemy. With the help of the odious Dr. Adalbert Falk, whom in 1872 he made his minister of education, he had instituted what was known as the Kulturkampf—the Culture Struggle—and this in turn had given rise to the so-called Falk Laws, which expelled the Jesuits and several other religious orders, subjected all Catholic educational establishments to rigid state control, and made any discussion of politics from the pulpit punishable by imprisonment.
Once enthroned, Leo lost no time in seeking a reconciliation. Fortunately for him, Bismarck was already losing confidence in his anticlerical policy, which was proving singularly unsuccessful; it had aroused furious protestations, one or two serious riots, and even some occasional bloodshed. He was now only too pleased to find an excuse to abandon it, and the overtures made by the pope provided a perfect face-saving opportunity to do so. The chancellor could not, of course, be seen to give in too quickly, but by the end of 1880 the worst of the anticlerical laws had been rescinded, and by 1886 the Kulturkampf was a thing of the past. The only important exception was the ban on the Jesuits, which was to remain in force till 1917.
Unfortunately, just as Prussia was giving up her anticlericalism, France was reviving hers. The recent war had been followed by the horrors of the Paris Commune, in the course of which the Archbishop of Paris and several other distinguished churchmen had been executed by firing squad; the atrocity had led, not surprisingly, to a right-wing reaction which had continued through most of the decade. By 1879, however, this in turn was spent, and the French political scene was dominated by Léon Gambetta, who two years before had defined his position with the words “Le cléricalisme, c’est l’ennemi.” On the last day of 1882 Gambetta died at the age of only forty-four, in the company of his mistress, from the accidental discharge of a revolver; but his policies lived on after him. Throughout the 1880s and ’90s in France, it was the Kulturkampf all over again. Under the famous Article VII of the educational code of the radically left-wing Jules Ferry, religious and lay schools could no longer compete on an equal footing. Just as they had been under Louis XV, the Jesuits were driven from their religious houses. They, the Marist Fathers, and the Dominicans were deprived of the right to teach in either state or private schools. Primary education was completely secularized. Seminarists were no longer excused from military service. The first state secondary schools for girls were established, a major—and to many a shocking—reform, since the education of young women had until now always been the preserve of the Church. Finally, divorce was permitted for the first time.
With the Third Republic and the Church at daggers drawn, Pope Leo did his best. In encyclical after encyclical, he urged the French government to put an end to its hostility, damaging, surely, to the very soul of France: Church and state, he endlessly repeated, were not incompatible; they were complementary and should consequently be working together for the general good of the French people. But to the right-wing, monarchist, Catholic faction he was just as outspoken. There was, he declared, nothing illegal or immoral in the principle of republicanism as such; whatever their feelings, it was the duty of all good Catholics to support the established republic. The Church could fight hostile legislation; it must never oppose a legitimate constitution. But the pope’s words had little effect, and France’s narrow escape in 1888–1889 from a dictatorship under the consumingly ambitious but ultimately somewhat absurd General Georges Boulanger1 did still more to polarize the Catholic Right.
From 1893 to 1898 France was governed by a set of rather more moderate ministers, and it seemed at first that the worst of the Church’s troubles might be over. Another of Pope Leo’s encyclicals assured French Catholics that a bishop might quite reasonably support a republican candidate so long as that candidate gave him guarantees of religious freedom. This led to the establishment of a Catholic Republican Party, which caused the parliamentary majority to shift toward the center. But then in November 1894 came the conviction on a charge of treason of the Jewish Colonel Alfred Dreyfus and his subsequent sentence to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. On the question of his guilt or innocence, France was split in two, with the always anti-Semitic Catholic right predictably campaigning against Dreyfus. (Of all the publications involved, the most venomously malignant was the journal of the Assumptionist order, La Croix.)2 The affaire was to drag on until the summer of 1906, when Dreyfus was finally restored to his former rank, promoted, and decorated.
By then, however, Catholicism in France had suffered its greatest blow of all. In June 1902 the government was taken over by Émile Combes, a provincial politician who had himself studied for the priesthood but had later developed a bitter hatred of the Church and everything it stood for. The wholesale expulsion of all “unauthorized” religious orders was now set in train; on April 19, 1903, the entire monastic community of the Grande Chartreuse was forcibly ejected by two squadrons of dragoons with fixed bayonets. By the end of 1904 more than ten thousand Catholic schools had been closed. Thousands of priests, monks, and nuns had fled France to escape persecution, and in December 1905 the Concordat of 1801 was formally abrogated, bringing about the complete separation of Church and state.
It was a sad day for the pontificate; happily for him, Leo XIII did not live to see it.
LEO’S MOST SIGNIFICANT work, however, was not political or diplomatic but sociological. He was the first pope to face up to the fact that the world had moved into an industrial age. It was not that the appearance of a teeming urban proletariat in Italy had somehow escaped the notice of his predecessor; Pius IX had been bitter indeed in his repeated attacks on socialism, nihilism, and what he saw as the other evils of the age. He had failed, on the other hand, to appreciate that this immense new working class was the responsibility of the Church, which was largely ignoring it. It was Leo who reopened the dialogue between them and introduced programs of social action. His Opera dei Congressi e dei Comitati Cattolici sponsored fourteen congresses during his pontificate alone; but he also supervised the formation of Catholic trade unions, which also had a considerable success until in 1927 Benito Mussolini made voluntary withdrawal of labor a punishable offense.
His greatest monument is probably his encyclical Rerum Novarum, published in May 1891. It was in fact the Papacy’s shamefully belated response to Das Kapital and The Socialist Manifesto and was later to be described by Pope John XXIII as the Magna Carta of Catholic social doctrine. Already in the preamble, Leo nailed his colors to the mast. In the present industrial society, he wrote, “a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke which is very little better than slavery itself.… The conflict now raging derives from the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the wondrous discoveries of science; from the changed relations between masters and workmen; from the enormous fortunes of some few individuals and the utter poverty of the masses; from the increased self-reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes; and also, finally, from the prevailing moral degeneracy.”
Class and inequality, he emphasized, would always be present; at the same time he vehemently condemned the Marxist theory of class war. The fault lay in the unthinking callousness and greed of contemporary capitalism; every worker had the right to demand a fair wage and even, if absolutely necessary, to go on strike. The business of the state was to ensure that contracts between employers and employees were properly drawn up and respected and to regulate factory hours, safety measures, and working conditions. It should not, however, concern itself with the elimination of social abuses; this could be achieved only through Christian charity. Religion was thus the only sure guide to industrial peace. Without it the world would subside into godless anarchy, and in the spate of public assassinations which occurred during the last decade of his life—of the French President Sadi Carnot in 1894, of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898, of King Umberto I of Italy in 1900, and of President William McKinley of the United States in 1901—he seemed to see the realization of his worst nightmare.
There was nothing particularly revolutionary about all this; much of it was wrapped up in the old papal paternalistic language, and there were plenty of passages about the natural inequality of men and the duty of the poor to accept their station in life which, when taken out of context, could be used by right-wing apologists to argue that nothing was really changed. The true significance of Rerum Novarum is that it represents the thinking of the first pope of the twentieth century, of the successor to Pio Nono. From now on the door was open for future generations of Catholic socialists to develop that thinking further and to carry it forward.
Pope Leo XIII died on July 20, 1903, in his ninety-third year, as lucid as he had ever been and very nearly as energetic. Few popes had had to fight harder than he for the well-being—one might almost say the survival—of the Catholic Church in two leading nations of Europe which should have known better; and during his twenty-five-year struggle he had suffered many setbacks and disappointments. He could, however, look back on one tremendous achievement: he had proved that the pope, even when shorn of his temporal power, indeed even when “prisoner of the Vatican,” could still be a potent force in the world. He had given the Papacy a new image and a prestige greater than it had enjoyed for many centuries.
LEO XIII HAD been respected and revered around the globe; he had not, however, been loved. No temporal monarch had ever surrounded himself with more ceremonial. Leo had insisted that all his visitors should kneel throughout the audience; members of his entourage had been obliged to remain standing in his presence; we are told that not once in twenty-five years did he address a single word to his coachman. It was not surprising that after his death the cardinals wanted a change, and they got one. Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto, who took the name Pius X, was a peasant, the first since Sixtus V, more than three centuries before—the son of a village postman and a seamstress from the Veneto. He had spent eight years as a parish priest, and although he had later served as Bishop of Mantua and Patriarch of Venice, a parish priest was essentially what he had remained; throughout his pontificate he personally gave classes on the catechism every Sunday afternoon. There was about him not a trace of the grandeur, nor of the austerity or the cool detachment, of his predecessor; he was warm, approachable, and above all down to earth.
Once enthroned, he lost no time in introducing reforms within the Church itself. He streamlined the Curia, reducing its thirty-seven different departments to nineteen. He revised and recodified the canon law. He virtually rewrote the breviary and the catechism. He also made far-reaching changes in church music. In the nineteenth century its traditional medieval character had given way to compositions heavily influenced by Italian opera; the Verdi Requiem and Rossini’s enchanting Petite Messe Solennelle are obvious examples. This tendency the pope firmly denounced, calling for a return of Gregorian chant and plainsong. He also launched a campaign to encourage all Catholics to take Holy Communion more often. A few times a year, he stressed, was simply not enough—good Catholics should communicate every day, or at least once a week. The age of First Communion was another far-reaching change: previously, a child had celebrated it between the ages of twelve and fourteen; henceforth the age was to be seven. This was the beginning of the tradition still seen all over the Catholic world—the little girls in their white dresses and veils, the little boys with their sashes, the presents and family celebrations afterward.
Pius X worked hard and achieved much, but he failed altogether to make an impact on Europe and the world in the way that Pius IX and Leo had done. He was too quiet, too humble, too holy, and his very holiness closed his mind to original thought. The Catholic intellectual theologians in Italy and France, Germany and England, doing their best to free religion from the shackles of medieval scholasticism and to reconcile their faith with the philosophical ideas and the thrilling scientific, historical, and archaeological discoveries that informed the opening century, found the pope not just unsympathetic but an active and implacable enemy. In 1907 he published the encyclical Pascendi, which ran to no fewer than ninety-three pages, condemning what he called “modernism” as “a compendium of all the heresies.” This has been described by one recent historian as “the opening shot in what rapidly became nothing less than a reign of terror”;3 the pope and his secretary of state, Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, an English-bred Spaniard, personally approved an organization, the Society of St. Pius V, which amounted effectively to a secret police, suppressing liberal Catholic newspapers, steaming open letters, even using agents provocateurs to trap liberals into incriminating themselves. It was run by a distinctly sinister priest, Monsignor Umberto Benigni. Among its victims were the cardinal archbishops of Paris and Vienna and the entire Dominican community of Fribourg.
Despite his inwardly turned preoccupation with Church affairs, during the second half of his pontificate Pius X saw all too clearly the relentless advance of the European powers toward war—a war which would inevitably involve Catholics fighting Catholics and would probably wreak more destruction than any war in history. This caused him deep distress, the more so since he knew that he was powerless to prevent it. Its outbreak at the end of July 1914 is often said to have hastened his death, which occurred only three weeks later, on August 20. Indeed it may well have done so; but he was already seventy-nine and had suffered a heart attack the previous year. He would probably not have lasted very much longer anyway.
Especially in the theological field, Pius had his detractors, but no one doubted his essential goodness of heart. After the appalling earthquake which struck Messina in 1908, he filled the Vatican with homeless refugees long before the Italian government lifted a finger. He sought no favors, either for himself or for his family: his brother remained a postal clerk; his three sisters lived together in straitened circumstances in Rome; his nephew continued as a simple parish priest. In consequence he was loved as neither of his two immediate predecessors had been, and before long crowds of pilgrims were coming to pray at his tomb in the crypt of St. Peter’s. In 1923, twenty years after his enthronement, the long process of canonization began. It did not go altogether smoothly: the secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, gave evidence that the pope had “approved, blessed, and encouraged a secret espionage association outside and above the hierarchy … a sort of Freemasonry in the Church, something unheard of in ecclesiastical history.” But such peccadillos were ignored, and in 1954, before a crowd estimated at some 800,000, Pope Pius XII formally declared him to be a saint—the first pope to be so elevated since Pius V, who had died the best part of four centuries before.4
THE ELECTION OF a Genoese aristocrat, the appropriately named Cardinal Giacomo della Chiesa, as Benedict XV caused an immediate problem in the Vatican: owing to a dangerously premature birth, he had never attained normal height; even the smallest of the papal robes kept in readiness for the new pope hung on him like a curtain. He is said to have turned to the Vatican tailor and said with a smile, “Caro, had you forgotten me?” In Bologna, where he had been archbishop, he had been known as il piccoletto; but it was less on account of his size than of the fact that Pius X and Cardinal Merry del Val deeply distrusted him that membership in the Sacred College, which normally went with the see, had been deliberately withheld; he had finally received his red hat little more than three months before his papal coronation. He might not even have been particularly surprised immediately after, when one of the very first documents that appeared on his desk proved to be a denunciation of himself, recently prepared at the request of his predecessor. One of his first actions was to dismiss his old chief, Merry del Val, to whom he hardly gave the time to clear his desk. He went on to eliminate Monsignor Benigni and his espionage network, and the Curia once again breathed more easily.
Benedict’s pontificate was doomed before it started, overshadowed as it had to be by the First World War. With so many of his flock fighting on each side he could assume only a position of the strictest neutrality, blaming both sides equally for the bloodshed and devoting all his energies to bringing about an end to what he described as “this horrible butchery” by means of a negotiated peace. Meanwhile, he did everything he could to mitigate the suffering: opening an agency in the Vatican for exchanging wounded prisoners of war—it eventually achieved the repatriation of some 65,000; persuading Switzerland to accept tuberculosis patients from whatever army they came; and almost bankrupting the Vatican with his countless relief operations.5
Alas, strive as he might to be impartial, the inevitable result was that each side accused him of favoring the other—the Allies arguably having rather more reason to do so, since the Germans had actually offered, once the Italians were defeated, to help him recover temporal authority over Rome for the Papacy.6 He was terrified, too, in the event of a victory by the Russians, of a vast westward expansion of Orthodoxy. With the advent of the Russian Revolution this fear suddenly turned to hope—that at last it might be possible to arrange a reconciliation with Orthodoxy, bringing it back within the Catholic fold. As early as May 1917 he established a Congregation for the Eastern Churches, following it up with a Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome; but his efforts came to nothing—indeed, Lenin declared war on religion and on assuming power was immediately to subject both the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Churches in Russia to murderous persecution.
It was the success of the Italian government, on entering the war in 1915, in persuading the Allies to have nothing to do with the pope that denied him, to his unconcealed disappointment, representation at the peace negotiations of 1919. He could only denounce the government as “vengeful”—as indeed it was. The remaining years of his life were spent attempting to secure the position of the Church in postwar Europe. Here his success was remarkable. When his pontificate had begun in 1914, the number of foreign countries with diplomatic representation at the Holy See had numbered fourteen; when it ended in 1922, there were twenty-seven. These included Britain, whose chargé d’affaires was the first British representative there since the seventeenth century. In 1921 relations were even resumed with France, much mollified after the pope was tactful enough to canonize Joan of Arc in 1920. True, the Roman Question remained unsolved, but Benedict at least took the first steps toward its solution. In 1919 he gave his blessing to the Italian People’s Party founded by Don Luigi Sturzo, the father of Christian Democracy in Italy, thereby effectively abrogating Pius IX’s Non Expedit;7 three years later, it was the second largest group in Parliament. Then, in 1920, he lifted the Church’s ban on official visits to the Quirinal (since 1870 the official residence of the King of Italy) by Catholic heads of state.
Benedict’s death at the age of only sixty-seven, on January 22, 1922—an attack of influenza having suddenly turned to pneumonia—took Europe by surprise. Throughout his pontificate he had remained relatively obscure; a recent biography even bears the title The Unknown Pope. This was not due entirely to the war. Unlike his two predecessors, he was not handsome, nor was he remotely charismatic. “With his unimpressive figure and his expressionless face,” wrote an American journalist, “there is neither spiritual nor temporal majesty.” The secretary to the British legation went even further:
the present pope is a decided mediocrity. He has the mentality of a parochial Italian who has hardly travelled at all and a tortuous method of conducting affairs.… He is capable of rising neither to great heights nor of efficiently controlling the ordinary routine of his administration … he is obstinate and bad-tempered to a degree.
This is not altogether fair. Benedict had, after all, had twenty years’ experience at the Vatican, and his control of Bologna—always a difficult see—had been exemplary. He could not help his appearance or his public persona, nor could he, like Leo and Pius, impress himself on a constant stream of pilgrims whom they would daily receive in audience; thanks to the war, this stream had almost dried up. But the fact remains that, despite his immense humanitarian support to both sides, he made little impression either on Italy or on the world at large. It is somehow significant that, apart from his tomb in St. Peter’s, his only monument was erected by—of all people—the Turks, in the courtyard of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Istanbul. It bears the inscription “The great Pope of the world tragedy … the benefactor of all peoples, irrespective of nationality or religion.” At least somebody was grateful.
1. Boulanger came close to a coup d’état, but lost his nerve. He fled to Brussels, later shooting himself on his mistress’s grave. In the words of the journalist Caroline Rémy, who wrote under the pseudonym Sévérine, “he began like Caesar, continued like Catiline, and ended like Romeo.”
2. Civiltà Cattolica, the journal of the Jesuits in Rome, continued to proclaim Dreyfus’s guilt even after his pardon, the editor, Father Raffaele Ballerini, claiming that the Jews had “bought all the newspapers and consciences in Europe” in order to acquit him. A few years before, in 1881 and 1882, the same journal had claimed that the blood of a Christian child was required by a general law “binding on the conscience of all Hebrews.” Every year, it went on, the Jews “crucify a child,” who “must die in torment” (J. Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, p. 28).
3. Duffy, Saints and Sinners, p. 250.
4. “The extent to which Roman canonizations have meanwhile degenerated in our day to gestures in church politics is shown by the canonization of this very pope by Pius XII in 1954 and the beatification of Pius IX in 2000. That even most recently the Vatican has opened the archive of the Inquisition only up to 1903, to the accession of Pius X, shows how fearful people there are of the truth” (Küng, The Catholic Church, p. 173).
5. According to the Italian historian Nino Lo Bello, the secretary of state, Cardinal Gasparri, was obliged to raise a loan from Rothschild to pay for the 1922 conclave.
6. Papal relations with Germany were also greatly eased after 1917 through the smooth diplomacy of the nuncio, Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII.
7. The decree of 1868 forbidding Catholics to take part in Italian political life. See chapter 25, this page.