Absolute Monarchs (58 page)

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.