Prisoner of the Vatican (22 page)

The Vatican also faced the problem of the funeral site. Much anguish could have been avoided if the government, respecting the sentiments of the royal family, had agreed to hold the ceremonies in Turin, with burial in the Savoyard mausoleum just outside the city. But Depretis, Crispi, and the other members of the government opposed such a move, for it risked provoking some uncertainty about the royal family's—and with it Italy's—claim to Rome. A stirring funeral procession through the streets of the Holy City and entombment in a place in central Rome that could become a permanent pilgrimage destination for Italian patriots was just what the government most needed. As one liberal newspaper put it, "It is the fervent wish of all Italians to place the first stone in the new national tradition, erecting it on the foundation of its ancient greatness against another tradition, which was, is, and will be forever the enemy of Italy." Citing this passage,
Civiltà Cattolica
asked: "And what exactly is the tradition that was and will always be the enemy of Italy?" It replied: "If we have not misunderstood, it is the Christian tradition."
¹⁴

Elsewhere in Italy, the bishops found themselves in an uncomfortable position. People were clamoring for funeral observances in the only churches fit for such royal ceremonies, the cathedrals, and expected the highest Church officials to take part. It was also clear that these ceremonies would be local apotheoses of the hero of Italian unification, the king who had defied the pope and taken his very palace from him. In most cases, the bishops refused to participate and did what they could to prevent the use of their cathedral for such rites, especially in the lands that had, until recently, been part of the Papal States. In one not atypical incident, a large group of men in Bologna, irate at the news that their archbishop, Lucido Parocchi, refused to allow funeral ceremonies for the king, surrounded his residence and pelted it with rocks, shouting, "Death to Parocchi! Down with the clergy! We want to be excommunicated!"
¹⁵

In the end, the pope agreed to bury the king on sacred ground in Rome, insisting only that none of the Holy City's basilicas be used. After considerable argument, and thanks to the mediation of Father Anzino, the Vatican permitted the use of the ancient Pantheon for the service and for the king's final resting place. The symbolism was most appropriate. The Pantheon was a consecrated church—St. Mary of the Martyrs—but long before it had become a Christian church it was a temple for worshiping Rome's secular rulers, dedicated to Augusta and Agrippa in 27
B.C.

While the government heads were pleased with the Pantheon for the king's tomb, they wanted a church with a much greater capacity for the actual funeral service. Not only did they expect many foreign dignitaries to attend, but they anticipated that patriots from all over Italy would flood into Rome. Yet on this the Vatican would not budge: none of Rome's major churches could be used.

Victor Emmanuel's body lay in state in the chapel of the Quirinal' Palace; six Capuchin monks, sitting by the coffin, took turns reciting the prayers for the dead as dignitaries filed by to pay their respects. On January 17, the royal funeral procession marched through Rome's streets from the Quirinal to the Pantheon. To encourage a large display of devotion, the government offered a 75 percent discount on train tickets to Rome; 150,000 people poured into the city. Behind the coffin, a general on horseback brandished the dead monarch's sword. Just behind him, the Savoyard royal crown was reverently carried. In front of the coffin marched government officials of all sorts, members of the judiciary, and university professors. Town officials from throughout the kingdom marched, holding their municipal crests aloft, with the city councilors of Rome and Turin given pride of place. A hundred uniformed generals—some gray and bent with age—marched by solemnly, as did soldiers bearing the banners of eighty regiments. Troops lined all the streets along the route as the crowds behind them threw flowers onto the royal coffin. Immediately in front of the funeral bier strode the king's younger son, Prince Amedeo, surrounded by representatives of Europe's royal families and the diplomatic corps. Depretis and Crispi marched near the coffin. The Vatican had forbidden any clergy beyond the simple priests of the local parish to take part, so no bishop or cardinal was to be seen, nor did the pope allow any Catholic confraternities, a mainstay of such processions, to join in. Most embarrassing for the government was that the king's own daughter, Clotilde, known for her devotion to the Church, was nowhere to be seen.

The immense procession lasted four hours, with the coffin arriving at the Pantheon at 2
P.M.,
greeted by the priests of St. Mary of the Martyrs. (The name Pantheon was viewed with distaste by the Church as a pagan term for what had for centuries been a consecrated church.) Only foreign royalty, diplomats, members of the Italian parliament, and other high state officials were permitted inside. After the ceremony the dignitaries left, and the huge crowd outside was allowed to file in. Throughout the day and into the night, all of Rome shook with the blast of a cannon fired every minute.
¹⁶

Some in the Catholic press, gleeful at the king's premature demise, trumpeted the point that the elderly pope had outlived him. But the pope himself was in no position to celebrate, for he was a very sick man.

Far from reconciling himself to his loss of temporal power, in his last years the pope had grown even more combative.
¹⁷
Among his strongest denunciations of the Italian state was that contained in one of his last formal allocutions, on March 12,1877, an address that some saw as announcing a new Catholic crusade against Italy. The following year, shortly after the pope's death,
Civiltà Cattolica
cited this speech, calling it a kind of last testament. "After having proclaimed the necessity of temporal power for the independence of the apostolic ministry," the Jesuit journal recollected, "he declared that in Rome the Head of the Church must either be ruler or prisoner."

The intransigent mood of the Vatican in Pius's last months was reflected in an incident in October 1877. The famed Jesuit scholar and journalist Carlo Maria Curci, one of the founders of
Civiltà Cattolica
and once very close to the pontiff, was suspended from the Jesuit order by papal directive. In March he had written a public appeal to the pope to make peace with the Italian state and abandon the call for reestablishing the Papal States. Under Pius IX, such language was blasphemous.
¹⁸

When Victor Emmanuel died, the elderly pope had been too sick to celebrate mass for over a month. Although a brief reprieve from his suffering allowed him to say mass on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his first communion on February 2, he quickly took a turn for the worse, and on the morning of Thursday the seventh, his doctors warned that the end was near. The pope himself, under no illusions, asked for the last rites. Dressed in white nightclothes and propped up on his bed by pillows, he alternately rested, prayed, and talked with one or another of the cardinals who came to comfort him. Just before noon, the man whom he had recently appointed as his chamberlain, Cardinal Gioacchino Pecci, asked Pius to bless all the cardinals. "Yes," the failing pontiff replied, "I bless the Sacred College, and pray that God will enlighten you to make a good choice." Grasping the small wooden cross that he always carried with him, he held it up and added, "I bless the whole Catholic world."

Shortly after noon that day, Francesco Crispi summoned Rome's police commissioner to his home to discuss the situation. He wanted to be notified the moment the pope died. At 4
P.M.,
the French ambassador to the Holy See, realizing that a conclave to choose a new pope was imminent, sent a telegram to Paris: "It is indispensable for the French cardinals to leave for Rome as quickly as possible." An hour and a half later, Pius IX, who had served as pope longer than any of his 255 predecessors, died. Catholics throughout the world went into mourning, although the news was greeted with relief, if not delight, in some of Europe's capitals. When Bismarck received word of Pius's death at one of his rural estates, it is reported, his spirits immediately brightened: "Let's drink to that!" he said, and told his servant to fetch a bottle of schnapps.
¹⁹

The following day, at 3
P.M.,
all of Rome's church bells rang out in an hourlong funereal chorus. Even the bell tower of the Campidoglio, Rome's municipal headquarters, joined in, if only for twenty minutes. The curious poured into St. Peter's Square, which by afternoon was mobbed although remarkably quiet. Having been criticized the previous night for not closing the theaters as a sign of respect, the government shut them down. On the evening of the eighth, the pope's doctors embalmed his body, placing the heart and intestines in a special urn and injecting a preservative into the veins.

Ordinarily, the pope's body would then lie in the Sistine Chapel for public viewing, but large crowds were expected to pay their last wishes to Pius IX, and the cardinals were not willing to allow the Italian police or military into the midst of the Vatican to help maintain order. As a result, arrangements were made for the body to be on display in St. Peter's, under the protection of Italian forces. On the evening of Saturday, February 9, the holy cadaver, dressed in white papal robes, was placed on a litter to transport it into the basilica. Beside the body lay a golden miter. The pope's hands were folded across his chest, one clutching an ebony cross, the other a cross made of ivory. Clergy bearing torches led the procession, striding slowly between two lines formed by the Swiss Guard. Behind them came the funeral litter, surrounded by the Noble Guard, who in turn were followed by the clergy of the basilica, holding burning candles, and then the members of the pontifical family. The cardinals marched two by two, carrying torches and chanting psalms, followed by a gaggle of princes and others of the Roman aristocracy. The body was placed behind a grate, with the pope's feet poking outside so that mourners could kiss them. There it remained on display from the morning of Sunday, the tenth, through Tuesday, the twelfth. An immense crowd packed St. Peter's Square and the surrounding streets, an endless line winding out of the vast basilica.
²⁰

For the government, it was crucial to show that the papal ceremonies could proceed smoothly. As early as September 1871, a year after Rome had been taken, the minister of the interior had sent a long list of instructions to Rome's police commissioner about what to do should the pope die. The police were to surround the Vatican, checking all those who entered. If such obvious surveillance proved to be a problem, plainclothes police were to be used as much as possible. "No demonstration, whether peaceful or not, will be tolerated either in the immediate vicinity of the Vatican or in the larger area around it... Newspaper and book vendors will not be permitted to shout out anything that offends religion and the papacy, or that offends public decency or in any other way is inopportune under the circumstances."

Many cardinals were opposed to allowing the Italian forces into St. Peter's, yet, aware of the immense crowd seeking entrance, they faced the choice of trying to keep out all but a relatively small number of guests or having to seek help from the government whose legitimacy they rejected. On the evening of Saturday, the ninth, a Vatican representative met secretly with Giuseppe Manfroni, the police inspector in charge of the Vatican, and told him that police were to be permitted in St. Peter's to help maintain order, but no Italian soldiers would be admitted. Manfroni, though, feared that more than a simple police guard was needed to ensure order. He would station Italian military forces outside the basilica doors, but, he said, the Vatican would have to permit him to allow the military to enter the church if needed.

Manfroni was under great pressure, as he later recalled: "My work was enormous, my position difficult. It was the first time that the body of a pontiff had been displayed to the public under the custody not of his own soldiers but of a force that the papacy insisted on considering an enemy." Veterans from opposing sides of the battles of Mentana and Porta Pia would be standing face to face, and emotions were running high.

On the morning of the tenth, with the huge crowd pushing toward the basilica's door, Manfroni told his Vatican contact that there was no way of maintaining order without sending soldiers inside. The crowd, despite the triple cordon of soldiers outside the gate and the large number of carabinieri and papal guards inside, was becoming increasingly difficult to control. Reluctantly, the monsignor agreed to let the Italian troops enter St. Peter's.
²¹

In fact, order was preserved, and even the Vatican newspapers complimented the Italian forces on their dignified behavior and effective work.
²²
Nor was the prime minister, Depretis, slow to trumpet this fact. At
2 A.M
. on February 11, he circulated a notice to all foreign governments: "Today the solemn exposition of the deceased pope began at St. Peter's. In agreement with the ecclesiastical authorities, police agents were stationed inside the church and perfect order was maintained. The greatest tranquility reigns in the city."

Manfroni estimated that at least three hundred thousand people filed into St. Peter's to view the pope's body. Among them, or so the French ambassador reported in a telegram sent in midafternoon on the twelfth, was Queen Margherita herself, King Umberto's notoriously Catholic wife, who had gone to kiss the foot of the dead pontiff, "a curious and gripping sight." The rumor, a great embarrassment to the Italian government, prompted Crispi to send his own telegram to the Italian embassy in Paris three hours later, to be passed on immediately to the French foreign minister. The report of the queen going to kiss the foot of Pius IX was utterly fallacious, Italy's minister of the interior wrote. "The Queen did not even leave the Quirinal Palace."
²³