Prisoner of the Vatican (21 page)

Marinelli returned to the Vatican, anxiously awaiting word. He waited in vain.
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That same day, having heard of the king's illness, the priest at the Church of Saints Vincent and Anastasio, the parish of the Quirinal Palace, began to get nervous as well. Fearing that he might be called on to perform last rites, Father Pietro Desiderj requested instructions from the cardinal vicar of Rome, Raffaele Monaco La Valletta. The cardinal said that he was only to administer the sacraments if the king first apologized formally for having taken Church lands.

Two days later, at five minutes after noon, an official from the Quirinal arrived breathlessly at the church, saying that he had come on a matter of the greatest urgency. He handed the priest a letter written by the royal chaplain, Father Anzino, which said simply, "Give me the bag with the holy oil." But, to the royal aide's consternation, Father Desiderj refused, insisting that he could not give the chaplain the materials needed to administer the last rites without first having spoken to him.

"But the chaplain cannot leave, for the king is in danger of dying at any moment," said the aide. Their argument was soon interrupted by the frantic Father Anzino himself, who urged the parish priest to give him what he needed.

"Before I can give you what you want," the priest insisted, "I have to know whether the king has provided some kind of apology, for without one I cannot agree to your request."

Father Anzino replied that he had taken confession from the king earlier that day, following the authorization he had received from the pope by way of his sexton. In his confession, Father Anzino said, the king had told him to tell the pope that he intended to die a Catholic, that in all the laws he had promulgated he had never intended to offend the Holy Father, and that he apologized for any offense he had caused.

Still Father Desiderj would not hand over the sacraments. "First give me a written document recording what you have said, so that I can show it to my ecclesiastical superiors," he demanded.

The impatient Anzino quickly scribbled simply "I administered confession to His Majesty. I beg you to give me the Extreme Unction so that everything necessary is done."

The parish priest still held out. "I told him that such a document was not sufficient," the priest later recalled, "and I added: 'The Monsignor Vicegerent [the cardinal vicar's primary aide] lives just a few steps away. Let's go there together and let him decide.'"

They raced off, but the vicegerent, Archbishop Giulio Lenti, was not at home. The priest then forced the hapless Anzino to go to the quarters of the cardinal vicar, but he too was away. Although the chaplain was now bursting with impatience—fearing that the king might die before he returned—the parish priest would not relent, forcing him to see the cardinal vicar's secretary. The secretary, afraid to take responsibility himself for such a momentous decision, told them instead where they could find the vicegerent. The parish priest and the chaplain, now joined by the vicar's secretary, set off to find Archbishop Lenti, reaching him just before 1
P.M.
in a nearby church.

Hearing of the king's imminent death and his wish to receive the holy sacraments, the archbishop asked Father Anzino whether the king had begged forgiveness for all of the evil deeds he had done to the Church.

"The king spoke to me as follows," Anzino responded. "'Tell the pope that I intend to die a Catholic, that I repent for the wrong done to him.'" Anzino added that it had been impossible to get any of this in written form, or even to have someone witness it, but he was convinced that the king had sincerely sought forgiveness. The archbishop then made his decision: under the circumstances it would have to suffice. The sacraments could be administered.
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Father Anzino rushed back to the parish church with Father Desiderj, where they learned that messengers from the Quirinal had been sent repeatedly to see what was taking so long. The priest dressed the chaplain in surplice and stole, and gave him the box containing the viaticum, the pouch with the holy oil, and the other materials he needed. As Anzino rushed out, Father Desiderj sent one of his altar boys with him to light his way with a lantern. The altar boy was stopped at the entrance to the palace, but the chaplain was ushered to the king's bedside, where Victor Emmanuel, breathing with great difficulty, awaited him.

A surrealistic scene unfolded. With the king was not only his son, the prince, who would shortly become king himself, but also the fiercely anticlerical government ministers—among them Mancini and Crispi—each holding a lit candle from the room's candelabras. Father Anzino administered the last rites as they looked on.
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The king then said that he needed to rest, and as they left, an aide helped him onto a chaise longue. A few minutes later he drew his last, tortured breath. It was 2:30
P.M.
Italy's first king was dead.

That evening, writing the news of the king's death to Paris, the French ambassador to the Holy See charged that it was Prime Minister Depretis and his minister of the interior, Francesco Crispi, who had prevented Bishop Marinelli from bringing the pope's salutations to the dying king. The ambassador also recalled that Victor Emmanuel, having long had a presentiment that he would be struck dead in the Quirinal, had frantically tried to get his doctors to move him to Turin or at least to his estate outside Rome. Anywhere but the palace that he had taken from the pope.
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For many in the Church, the king's death offered God's long-awaited response to his conquest of Rome. Turning the king's famous (if apocryphal) pronouncement on first arriving in Rome against him,
Civiltà Cattolica,
in reporting his death, envisioned him arriving at the gates of Hell and once again proclaiming, "Here we've come and here we shall remain." The Jesuit journal also noted that General La Marmora, who oversaw the occupation of the Quirinal Palace and the king's move to Rome, had himself been struck dead a day earlier. Surely it was no coincidence. And in one more sign of the Lord's displeasure, January 9, the day of Victor Emmanuel's death, was the date on which, five years earlier, Napoleon III had died.
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In another—equally triumphant—twist of the king's famous phrase, Davide Albertario, the legendary editor of one of Italy's most influential Catholic newspapers, Milan's
L'Osservatore Cattolico,
wrote: "'We are in Rome and in Rome we shall stay!' And in Rome he did stay, just as he himself had prophesied, but he stayed there as a cadaver." Such disrespect for the monarch was not to the liking of the clergy or the Catholic faithful, especially in a city such as Milan, where—as opposed to the former Papal States or even the south of Italy—Victor Emmanuel was regarded by many in the Church as having a firm claim to rule. A hundred priests in Milan and the surrounding area signed a petition lambasting Albertario and expressing their regrets at the king's death.

That it was Albertario and not the hundred protesting priests who was closer to the pope's way of thinking became clear when the archbishop of Turin, Monsignor Gastaldi, voiced his own regret at Victor Emmanuel's death. On January 17,
L'Osservatore Romano
made the Vatican's displeasure known: "Various newspapers have been publishing the pastoral letter of the archbishop of Turin. Being unable to associate ourselves with all the opinions expressed in it, we do not reproduce it here." Furious, the archbishop demanded that the secretary of state disassociate himself from the story. But in his response on February 1, Cardinal Simeoni informed Gastaldi that the note that he judged so offensive had been ordered by Pius himself. On the same day as the
Osservatore Romano
snub, the pope wrote a personal note to Albertario and his newspaper, lauding them for their loyal defense of his policies. This note was printed in the newspaper later in the month. Not only did the pope praise the intransigent editors for warning the faithful against the evil teachings of the Church's enemies, he also complimented them for cautioning the faithful against "others, who, using the pretext of prudence and charity, spin tales of absurd and impossible reconciliations."
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On January 11,
L'Osservatore Romano,
recounting the king's last rites, reported that on his deathbed he had "asked the pope's forgiveness for the wrongs for which he was responsible." Other Catholic papers followed suit, trumpeting the king's supposed repentance when faced with his Maker.

Crispi hastily prepared a counterattack. Reporting the circumstances of the king's death, he wrote in an official government statement that the Catholic press "is asserting things that are not true. His Majesty King Victor Emmanuel did not make any declaration that repudiated his glorious life as Italian king."
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For both Crispi and Depretis, much was at stake. That the king had died a good Catholic could be used to great profit, a new demonstration of what they had long been claiming; there was no conflict between loyalty to the state and devotion to the Church. But any suggestion that on his deathbed the king had expressed regret for conquering the Papal States threatened the very existence of the Italian nation.

In the meantime Umberto, the thirty-three-year-old heir to the throne, was eager to burnish his own Catholic credentials. The day after his father's death, he sent an aide to the Vatican to thank the pope for his recent expression of interest in the king's welfare. The Vatican was dumbfounded, having long viewed Umberto as a "
mangiapreti
" a priest eater, who was even less well disposed toward the Vatican than his father.
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With the king's death, the Vatican faced new pressures. Throughout the country people mourned their vigorous founding father, who had been taken from them so unexpectedly. They not only wanted a funeral fit for a king in Rome but stately funerary observances from Turin to Palermo.

The cardinals of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs gathered in the Vatican to advise the pope on what course he should take. Formed in 1814 after Pope Pius VII's return from his exile in France, the Congregation was the pope's primary source of advice on questions of the relations between church and state in Italy and beyond. Composed of two dozen of the most influential cardinals, its weekly agenda was set by the secretary of state and its recommendations sent to the pope for his approval. At the time of Victor Emmanuel's death, its members included not only the secretary of state but the cardinal vicar of Rome and a number of former papal nuncios.
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The cardinals found themselves in a difficult spot. Depretis and his government were undoubtedly eager to exploit the emotions surrounding the king's death to bolster popular allegiance to the regime. And after not only excommunicating the king but also insisting for so long that the government had no right to be in Rome, the Vatican could hardly give its blessing to a royal funeral in the Holy City. Yet having a Catholic monarch's funeral in Rome without the participation of the clergy was likewise unimaginable. They had to find a way out.

The solution, from the cardinals' perspective, depended on the claim that, on his deathbed, the king had fully repented for his crimes against the Church, begged forgiveness, and received absolution. Because they knew how vigorously the government would deny this view, the cardinals instructed the priests involved in his last rites to prepare written accounts of what had happened. The parish priest, Father Desiderj, and the vicegerent, Archbishop Lenti, lost no time in preparing detailed statements. But for the man whose testimony was most important, Father Anzino, the matter was far from simple.

The royal chaplain found himself in a terrible quandary. The same day as the cardinals of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs gathered, he was summoned by Crispi, a notorious anticleric, former Garibaldian, and now the powerful minister of the interior, who warned him of the gravity of the situation: the future of the Italian state and the monarchy rested in his hands. Should he claim that Victor Emmanuel expressed regret over the taking of Rome and the rest of the Papal States and asked divine forgiveness for these acts, he would be delivering a potentially lethal blow to the state and to the royal family he had long served. But Crispi was taking no chances. Unwilling to place all his faith in the priest's patriotic bent or sense of loyalty to the Savoyards, he also threatened him. Should Anzino make any embarrassing claims of royal retraction, he would find that he was a royal chaplain no more.

In stark contrast to the long statements of Father Desiderj and Archbishop Lenti, the letter that Father Anzino sent to the Vatican could hardly have been shorter. Dated Rome, January to, 1878, it said simply: "His Majesty King Victor Emmanuel II, in the act of receiving the Holy Sacraments, expressed himself in these terms: 'I authorize you to declare that I intend to die as a good Catholic, with a feeling of filial devotion to the Holy Father. I am sorry if I caused any displeasure to His August Person, but in all these matters I never had the intention of causing any damage to Religion.'"
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Having drafted the note, Father Anzino first took it to Umberto. The prince expressed his approval, adding that it was a sentiment to which he could affix his own signature. "I too am a good Catholic and I want to die as one," he said. "And my position is better than my father's," he noted with some satisfaction, if unheroically, "because it was he who did everything, while I need do nothing more than preserve what he has left me." Victor Emmanuel's ambiguous apology had the virtue of serving the needs of both the Vatican and the Italian state, allowing each to offer its own interpretation.
¹²

Just what Church involvement the pope would permit in the king's funeral observances remained unclear. Cardinal Simeoni sent a secret communiqué to every Italian bishop on the tenth. It forbade "any ecclesiastical service that may be ordered or requested by the Civil or Municipal authorities," but it then weakened this categorical ban by adding "especially if such a service may take on the character of a political demonstration." Two days later, citing "some uncertainty about the meaning" of the instructions of the tenth, Simeoni specified that the earlier statement "was not intended to absolutely prohibit funeral services in present circumstances, as long as there is no attempt to give them the character of a political demonstration, which is left to Your prudent judgment to determine." In any case, the secretary of state added, no funeral services should be sponsored by the Church, nor should any higher Church authorities take part.
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