Prisoner of the Vatican (20 page)

Under pressure from the anticlerical groups, Lanza and his colleagues moved quickly to combat the Church's hold over Rome's schools. The government seized the Collegio Romano, the Jesuit institution that offered the only secondary education in Rome, and created a public school in its place. Under Italian law at the time Rome was taken, religious education by priests was mandatory in the public schools. On September 29,1870, in an attempt to placate the anticlerics, a government order made attendance at such lessons optional. Yet the clergy's influence on education was never entirely eliminated. Not only were there not enough qualified teachers for all the new public schools, but municipalities found it cheaper to hire priests than laypeople.
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The Vatican, predictably, was horrified by these attempts to substitute secular for Catholic education, but it was even more angered by the government's efforts to weaken the religious orders. These efforts had a long history. Back in 1848, new Piedmontese laws banned the Jesuits from the lands of the Savoyard monarchy, followed by an 1855 law suppressing other religious orders. The contemplative orders, especially, were seen as parasitic, the monks and nuns suspected of a variety of sins, from sloth to sex. The teaching and preaching orders, on the other hand, were suspected of spreading disloyalty to the government and regarded as a public threat. As the old regimes fell in the battles of unification in 1859–1860, among the first acts of the provisional governments that came to power was the suppression of monasteries and convents.

The government faced a special set of problems in moving to Rome, for over a third of the land both in the city and in the surrounding province was held by the Church. The early 1871 law on the transfer of the capital to Rome included a clause authorizing the expropriation of the buildings belonging to religious corporations on the grounds that they were needed to house government offices. Church libraries became the basis of new public libraries, Church art the foundation for new municipal museums, Church hospitals the hospitals of the new state.

Bowing to foreign pressure, the government allowed the headquarters of the general of each religious order to remain in Rome. And while the orders were technically dissolved, and many did suffer greatly, for the most part they were allowed to reconstitute themselves under the fiction of being civil corporations. While many convents and monasteries were seized—and even today many of Rome's major government buildings consist of expropriated Church property—most of the orders found ways around the new rules

As usual, the Jesuits were a particular target. Driven from the city, they found refuge elsewhere in the country and abroad. But it was not just Italy that fought them, for Austria, France, Germany, and other countries were hounding them as well. In 1880, the Italian Jesuit Francesco Altini, having taken refuge in Spain, told his sister of his travails: "After being kicked out six times, from Verona, Padua, Rome, Tramin, Brixen, and Alleux, I am patiently awaiting the seventh."
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In June 1873, when the Law of Suppression of Religious Corporations went into effect, Pius responded by excommunicating Victor Emmanuel by name, including as well all his ministers and the members of parliament who had voted for the law. The next day, Italian police seized all the copies of the newspapers that carried the text of the papal decree. The Vatican's
Osservatore Romano
responded with a threat of its own: "Everyone says that we have returned to 1848 [when the pope was driven out of Rome]. We must console ourselves with the knowledge that 1848 was followed by 1849."
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Two years later, the pope protested yet another of the king's actions, although this time, rather than issue an excommunication, he addressed a special plea directly to Victor Emmanuel. Parliament had just passed a law extending military conscription to the clergy. With tears in his eyes, on April 13,1875, Pius IX told a group of visitors: "Majesty, I beg you, I beseech you in the name of your illustrious ancestors, in the name of the Virgin Mary ... in the name of God Himself and, I would add, for your own interest, do not sign yet another decree harming the Church! Stop your course ... and go no further down the slippery slope that is leading you into the deepest abyss!" But Victor Emmanuel, unmoved, signed the bill on June 7.
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When, early the following year, the right—in power since the birth of the Kingdom of Italy—fell, the pope had new reason to fear for the Church. Italy's new rulers were men who had, years earlier, cast their lot with Mazzini and Garibaldi. The new prime minister, Agostino Depretis, was himself a Freemason; in choosing his cabinet, he selected men known for their hostility to the Vatican. Yet, with a trace of bravado, Milan's Catholic newspaper,
L'Unità Cattolica,
claimed to be pleased that they no longer had to deal with the hypocrites formerly in power. "The men of the Left do not pretend; they are wolves like those of the Right, but they are wolves both in words and in deeds. At least we now know whom we have before us: it is an impious, cruel, tyrannical adversary, but one that is clear about it ... They do not want reconciliation with the Church, but its destruction."
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Depretis was hardly less combative. In October,
La Libertà
carried his latest thoughts on the Church: "Let us not delude ourselves. There is in Italy and in Europe a party which conceals its worldly aims and its thirst for dominion under the mantle of religion. The traditions of Gregory VII are not yet extinct within the papal Curia; the Syllabus is still its
modus agendi;
and it is a formidable power because of its new despotic constitution, its complete and perfect organization, the breadth of its ramifications, the great influence which it continues to exert over the masses." The new prime minister concluded: "I am a defender of religious liberty ... but when religious sentiment turns against the political organization of the state, it is time to sound the alarm in order that provision might be made for the latter's defense. The war has begun, and it will be necessary to wage it
à outrance."
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The fall of the right in Italy coincided with an important transition in the Vatican as well, for on November 6, 1876, Giacomo Antonelli drew his last breath. Despised by his fellow cardinals for the power he wielded and the way he kept them from the pope, Antonelli was probably more intensely disliked in the Vatican than he was among Italy's liberals. Although jealous cardinals had long whispered to the pope about Antonelli's alleged mistresses and thirst for wealth, Pius had always viewed him as the astute judge of political realities that he himself was not.

By September, Antonelli, who had long suffered from painful episodes of gout, had to be carried on a couch into the pope's study to present his daily briefings. On November 5, told by his doctor that the end was near, he called in his Jesuit confessor. Never an ordained priest, Antonelli had not been a particularly religious person and made no pretense now of any great religiosity. Yet he remained faithful to Pius and despaired at what the unworldly pontiff would do without his sober advice.
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Pius's reaction to Antonelli's death was the subject of much speculation. Some in the Vatican claimed that the pontiff was relieved to be rid of his secretary of state and shed no tears for the man who for over a quarter of a century stood at his side. In one account, on hearing that Antonelli had called for his confessor, the pope exclaimed, "God be praised!" The belief that Pius was happy was further fueled by the cardinal's funeral being practically a furtive affair, held at 5
A.M.
But another account reports that on hearing the news, the pope, himself in weak health, murmured, "Our separation will not be long." He then canceled all his appointments and went to his private chapel and spent the day in prayer.

Whatever the truth of these accounts, there is no doubt that the relationship between the two men had been peculiar. Despite their many years together, the pope had never developed a real friendship with Antonelli, a man so unlike himself. Nor did later events do much to burnish Antonelli's reputation. When his will was read, it was discovered that he had left relatively little of his large fortune to the Church. Then, in a case covered in sordid detail by the press, the estate was itself sued by a young woman claiming to be his illegitimate daughter.
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The new government's offensive against the Church began within weeks of Antonelli's death when the new minister of justice, Pasquale Mancini, viewed by the Vatican as a notorious anticleric, introduced a bill aimed at combating "the abuses of the clergy." Prison terms and large fines would be levied on any priest found to be inciting hatred of the government or encouraging disobedience of the law.

A Neapolitan lawyer famous for his oratorical powers in parliament, Mancini was deeply suspicious of the Church hierarchy. While believing that people should be free to hold any religious beliefs they liked, he thought it a matter of survival for the state to oversee the affairs of the Church to ensure that the public good was served. He had, in fact, opposed the law of guarantees.
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In January 1877, the House of Deputies, now dominated by the left, approved the bill on clerical abuses, 150–100. As the Senate prepared to discuss the measure, Pius once more denounced the king and called on Catholics throughout the world to come to his aid. He had never been clearer in declaring that Italian unification could not be reconciled with his own spiritual freedom and could not be allowed to stand. Church leaders abroad urged the restoration of the Papal States. In France, the bishop of Nimes proclaimed: "Italian unity has not been consummated; Pius IX is still king; the temporal power will exist again." He added his own prophecy: "After a great crash, in which perhaps many armies and crowns will go under, the nations of the world will call out in a single voice: 'Return Rome to its former ruler; Rome belongs to the pope; Rome belongs to God!'"
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In March, Mancini instructed government offices on how to deal with the newspapers that were publishing the pope's new denunciation. Throughout the country, the minister of justice wrote, true Italians were learning of the papal allocution with horror, aghast at "the excessive and violent language adopted in this document against the Kingdom of Italy and its laws and institutions." The pope, he charged, clearly aimed "to profit from every opportunity to unmake the new Italian Kingdom, if at all possible, and to bring back the papacy's temporal power." Pius IX, wrote Mancini, continued to insist "that the pope must either be the Sovereign of Rome or he can be nothing other than a prisoner" and was urging the world's bishops "to use every means in their power to set the foreign governments against Italy and its government."

What then should be done about the publication of this call to arms against the Italian state? asked Mancini. While the Vatican's publication was protected under the law of guarantees, there was no question that the reproduction of such a seditious document by anyone else was illegal. "Nonetheless," Mancini concluded, "the current Minister, deep in his faith in the unity and liberty of the fatherland, and vigilant against the machinations of the clerical party, believes this a propitious occasion for giving the world a solemn proof of forbearance, although provoked beyond all reasonable limits by those who speak, not the mild language of a religion of charity and peace, but who without any inhibition go so far as to express the political desire for the destruction of the State and its government." The simple reproduction of the papal allocution would not be prevented, he said. But newspapers that printed favorable comments about it were another matter. Their editors were to be arrested and charged with attempted subversion of the state.
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Two months later, the pope finally had some good news. Italy's more conservative Senate had (narrowly) voted down the clerical abuse law. This round, at least, had gone the Vatican's way.
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V
ICTOR EMMANUEL WAS NEVER
comfortable in his new home. He was plagued by the sight of the Vatican, which seemed to taunt him, and ever mindful of the prophecy that his new palace, stolen from the pope, would be his premature tomb. He also periodically suffered from malaria, a curse of the Holy City, which did nothing to encourage a positive attitude toward Rome.

He had returned to Rome from Turin just in time for the obligatory festivities greeting the new year of 1878, yet he arrived feeling somewhat ill and was eager to leave again, planning to depart after a state dinner scheduled for Sunday, January 6. But on the fifth he came down with a high fever. Sunday evening, he seemed to be getting better, but on Tuesday he took a turn for the worse, and his doctors began to be concerned, diagnosing a case of pleuri-pneumonia.
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News of the king's illness reached the pope on Monday. Although he had excommunicated Victor Emmanuel many times, the pontiff still had an odd affection for the wayward monarch. He feared for his soul and, at the same time, no doubt hoped that the prospect of dying outside the grace of the Church and fear of eternal damnation might finally bring him around. The pope summoned his sexton, Bishop Francesco Marinelli, and gave him the task of going to the Quirinal, gaining entry to the king's chamber, and seeing to his spiritual health. Realizing his task would not be easy, the bishop asked the pope's permission to seek the help of Father Valerio Anzino, the king's chaplain. With the pope's blessing, on Monday morning he headed for Anzino's rooms at the Church of St. Sudario and told the chaplain of his mission. Anzino assured the bishop that the king would be pleased to learn of the pope's concerns for his well-being, but, he warned, it would not be easy for the bishop to see him. Anzino, they decided, would speak with one of the royal aides and have him get word to the king, so that the king himself could issue orders allowing the bishop to enter.