Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (76 page)

43. Revolution in Rome: The Pope's Jews

F
OR THE CATHOLIC CHURCH,
the century of revolution culminated in Vatican Council I (December 1869-October 1870). It was the twentieth ecumenical council, and took its name from the place it met—St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican. Nearly eight hundred bishops convened, almost all Europeans (forty-eight bishops represented the United States, but many of them would have been immigrants). The council was presided over by Pope Pius IX, who had set his face against everything associated with liberalism. As the archbishop of Paris would soon learn, there were good reasons why the Catholic Church was defining its struggle against the spirit of modernism as a fight to the death. The pope's authority over his own territories was being threatened by the movement of Italian nationalism, and nationalism itself was seen as incompatible with the Church's exercise of civil and theological authority across borders. Catholic theology was perceived as being undermined by liberal ideas. Pius IX's solution to all of this was to draw from the bishops gathered in council an unprecedented affirmation of his own authority as pope, and he succeeded.

Vatican I's declaration in support of Pius was issued as the constitution
Pastor Aeternus.
"When the Roman Pontiff speaks
ex cathedra
" it said, "that is, when ... as the pastor and teacher of all Christians in virtue of his highest apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine of faith and morals that must be held by the Universal Church, he is empowered through the divine assistance promised him in blessed Peter, with that infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer willed to endow his Church."
¹

It is well known that the Catholic Church claims that its leader, the pope, is endowed by God with the charism of infallibility in matters of "faith and morals." What is not so widely appreciated is that the first formal declaration of this doctrine did not come until this moment of crisis when so much was tearing at the fabric of traditional faith and institutional power. This is not a book primarily about papal power, but we have already seen how absolutist theological claims and institutional universalism have led directly to Church oppression of Jews. We shall see in later chapters that the Church's relationship to the modern fate of the Jews is intertwined, in a particular way, with efforts to extend the spiritual and political power of the papacy. The declaration of the infallibility of the pope is therefore a pivotal event for this story. The context within which it occurred tells us everything we need to know about its meaning for Catholics and for Jews.

The doctrine of papal infallibility was defined on July 18, 1870,
²
only two days after Napoleon III announced his suicidal mobilization against Prussia and one day before the Franco-Prussian War was formally begun.
³
This Napoleon was heir to the ethos of the French monarchy, not to the republican spirit of the 1789 Revolution. As such, his soldiers had been stationed in Rome as the pope's protectors since 1866. He was the only thing standing between the Roman Catholic Church and the final disaster it had been staving off for centuries. Within weeks of the French declaration of war against Prussia, Napoleon Ill's army would be routed in a decisive battle at Sedan, a city on the Meuse in northeastern France. Within months, the war would end in the catastrophe of the Paris Commune—and the murder of the archbishop.

In Italy, the Risorgimento, the movement for independence, unification, and constitutional government, was on the rise. The anti-papal nationalists, who had succeeded in stripping the pontiff of temporal sovereignty over all the papal territories outside Rome and its environs, were closing in for what had to feel to the council fathers like the kill. Popes had exercised political authority over various domains since the fourth century, but the tide of history had turned. In 1791, papal territories in France, centered in Avignon and memorialized in the vintages of chateauneuf du Pape, had been ripped away by the French Republic. Then, in 1861, Italians under Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) and Victor Emmanuel II (1820–1878) had taken the swath of papal land across the midsection of the boot, sweeping up to the second papal city of Bologna.

The opening section of
Pastor Aeternus
makes the thing clear: "And seeing that the gates of hell, with daily increase of hatred, are gathering their strength on every side to upheave the foundation laid by God's own hand, and so, if that might be, to overthrow the Church: we therefore ... do judge it necessary to propose to the belief and acceptance of all the faithful ... the doctrine ... in which is found the strength and solidity of the entire Church."
⁴

The imminent "upheaving" of one kind of absolute Church authority therefore required the extraordinary promulgation of another. It was a case of responding, in the scholar Hans Kühner's phrase, to "the political nadir" with "the dogmatic zenith."
⁵
In reply to questions from reluctant Vatican Council fathers who saw little support in the tradition for the doctrine (some 20 percent opposed the definition of infallibility;
⁶
once it was voted, 61 bishops walked out in protest), Pope Pius IX declared, "I am the tradition!"
⁷
Nevertheless,
Pastor Aeternus
refers to the pressing political and social crisis of the moment—"in this very age"
⁸
—as a justification for its astonishing pronouncement: "Hence we teach and declare that ... all of whatever rite and dignity, both pastors and faithful, both individually and collectively, are bound, by their duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience, to submit not only in matters which belong to faith and morals, but also in those that appertain to the discipline and government of the Church throughout the world ... under one supreme pastor ... the Roman Pontiff. This is the teaching of the Catholic faith, from which no one can deviate without loss of faith and of salvation."
⁹

Obviously, those who were inclined to "deviate" included a swelling population of liberals, republicans, nationalists, and revolutionaries of various kinds. The papacy had made itself the century's bulwark against the new idea. It is "false and absurd or rather mad," Gregory XVI had declared in 1832, "that we must secure and guarantee to each one liberty of conscience; this is one of the most contagious of errors ... To this is attached liberty of the press, the most dangerous liberty, an execrable liberty, which can never inspire sufficient horror."
¹⁰
Viewed from the twenty-first century, such Church opposition to liberalism, and that opposition's late-twentieth-century renewal during the pontificate of John Paul II, can seem to have been about little more than power, yet the questions underlying this conflict went to the heart of what it is to be human. "The entire liberal world-view appeared to many leading nineteenth-century Catholic theologians," as the sociologist Alan Wolfe sums it up, "to be premised on the notion of the person as a solitary individual lacking connectedness to any sense of meaning or purpose."
¹¹
Indeed, as the twentieth century showed, the legacy of nineteenth-century liberalism would be profoundly ambiguous, but Catholicism, at first, would be attuned far more to what it threatened than what it promised.

Ironically, Pope Pius IX had come to the Chair of Peter in 1846 as a kind of liberal himself, determined, as we saw, to loosen the siege mentality that had closed like a vise on the Church. He began his reign by announcing an amnesty for political prisoners and, most tellingly, by ordering the walls of the Roman ghetto torn down. "On Passover night in 1848, the seventeenth of April," Hermann Vogelstein writes, "the Jews in the Roman ghetto, in the midst of the celebration in their homes, were startled by the threatening sound of ax strokes. But anxiety soon changed into exultant joy ... It was the end of three hundred years of what the Book of Joshua calls 'the reproach of Egypt.'"
¹²

Before the liberation of Rome's Jews was fully accomplished, however, and before the pope's initial liberalizing impulse bore fruit, the revolution of 1848 struck in cities across Europe. As elsewhere, the workers, the urban poor, and the disgruntled took to the streets of Rome. Pius IX was forced to flee the city, disguised as a common priest, afraid for his life. While he was in exile in Gaeta,
¹³
the revolutionaries declared themselves a government. As it happened, several Jews were elected to the governing body of the Roman Republic.
¹⁴
The status of Jews was as much an emblem of the new order as of the old—by the rule of reversal.

Austria, Spain, and France under the emperor Louis Napoleon aligned themselves against the revolutionary movements, and they rallied to the pope. He was restored to power after the French army laid siege to Rome, a brutal struggle that lasted more than a month. Pius IX was traumatized by it all, and when he resumed control of the Papal States, he was a changed man. "And now the blackest reaction made its entry," Vogelstein writes of what happened in Rome. We already saw how Jews were now scapegoated. "Revolutionaries were persecuted, Jews thrown back in the Ghetto ... violent regulation against the Jews followed." Now the one-time reconciler was a tyrant, and the Jew-imprisoning walls went up again.

Pius IX excommunicated Italian nationalists, including the entire Sardinian House of Savoy.
¹⁵
He swore his enmity to every kind of liberal. By 1864, Pius IX had compiled a "Syllabus of Errors," a list of eighty mistakes of philosophy, theology, and politics to which, in the encyclical
Quanta Cura,
he attached the anathema. In issuing the proclamation, he denied that "the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile and align himself with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization." With that broadside, the Holy See had launched its counterattack against "Modernism," which eventually would be condemned as "the synthesis of all heresies."
¹⁶
Before Pius IX was finished—his reign as pope would be the longest in history (1846–1878)—he would see himself in a fight to the death. And seeing himself as losing that fight, he would summon that First Vatican Council to rally all the bishops of the world as his defenders. The safety of the Church and of the pope had become the same thing.

But not only the Church. Liberalism and modernism were seen as bearing the seeds of the destruction of civilization itself, and the dark side of the new order would make itself all too clear in the twentieth century. There was much in the new age that the Church was right to suspect, so the Catholic strategy of arming the leader of the Church with the spiritual mace of infallibility made some sense. Joseph de Maistre (1754–1821) was a French royalist who had made the case for papal absolutism in his
Du Pape
(1819).
¹⁷
He had argued along a set of connected propositions, each of which was firmly tied to the tradition he wanted to defend. "No public morality and no national character without religion," he said, "no European religion without Christianity, no Christianity without Catholicism, no Catholicism without the Pope, no Pope without the supremacy to which he is entitled."
¹⁸
Catholics who made this argument would prove to be so fiercely devoted to it precisely because they understood themselves to be defenders of far more than the mere prerogatives of the institutional Church. De Maistre's logic could seem irrefutable to those who accepted it: "There can be no humane society without government, no government without sovereignty and no sovereignty without infallibility."
¹⁹
In this way of thinking, the pope is the lad with his finger in the dike, holding back the flood of—whatever one chooses to label the imminent social disaster. Infallibility is the pope's finger.

"The Council of the last century was called by Pius IX to condemn the errors of modern times," wrote the theologian Walter Kasper, "just as the Council of Trent was called to repel the false doctrines of the sixteenth-century Reformers. The object was to present the infallible authority of the Pope as the remedy for the crisis of modern society that was already beginning to take shape."
²⁰

Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–1890) was one of those who had his doubts about such logic, and therefore about a conciliar definition of infallibility. For one thing, he knew Church history, as others of the bishops gathered in St. Peter's did. They knew that the line of popes had included not only moral degenerates but heretics—one pope, Honorius I (625–638), had been condemned by a Church council not for being a sinner but for getting doctrine wrong.
²¹
Newman predicted that a subsequent council would be needed "to trim ... the barque of St. Peter," as Roland Hill summarized Newman's position, "in its unnavigable Infallibilist course."
²²
That subsequent council was the one convened by John XXIII in 1962, and despite a resolute beginning, Vatican II would do little to alter that course. So profoundly had the contest with "Modernism" affected the mind of the Church that, even after Vatican II, which had implicitly affirmed much of what "Modernism" had been condemned for, a formal rejection of those "errors" was still required of young clerics, the "Oath Against Modernism." It would not be abolished until the late 1960s—I would be presented with it as a precondition of my own ordination. Even so, the Church would take up the anti-modernist fight again, rallying against "relativism." As Wolfe writes, "Pope John Paul II, for all his heroic opposition to communism, is one who harkens back to the Church's nineteenth-century crusade against liberalism."
²³
It is he, more than anyone, who sponsored the beatification of Pius IX in September 2000.
²⁴