Prisoner of the Vatican (35 page)

When, two days later, the principal inspector for the minister of the interior arrived at Bacco's office, Bacco must have already had some idea of his purpose. Yet he proved to be a difficult witness, for he kept resisting the inspector's requests that he acknowledge that it had been the Catholics who were responsible for the mayhem.

"On my honor," Bacco replied, "I cannot say that the clericals provoked it, for they kept the agreements they made." Nor would he agree that the procession was political: "I could not see this as a demonstration against the institutions and against the State, because it was only a funeral transport followed by the faithful."

"It hardly seems possible to me," said the inspector, "that a
questore,
knowing of the numerous and close-knit clerical associations existing in Rome, did not know that they were preparing a political demonstration and that it would become a provocation."

"I believe that you begin from a false premise," replied Bacco. "I did not fail to warn the minster and the prefect of the many people on the
clericali's
side who would take part in the procession." But, he added, he had been told not to interfere. "The secretary general of the minister of the interior told me that I was exaggerating the number of
clericali,
and when at the last moment he saw that we had all erred in predicting how many there would be, I asked in vain for instructions." Yet, even with all of the
clericali
there, he added, "it would not have affected public order had there not been provocation."

"But," replied the inspector, "the provocations came from the
clericali
who shouted, 'Long live the Pope-King!'"

"As far as the shout 'Long live the Pope-King' goes," said Bacco, "it was limited and came only in response to great provocation. For the most part people were shouting 'Long live Pius IX! Long live the Pope!'"

"So you persist in making all these statements?" the inspector asked.

"Completely."

Depretis had found his scapegoat. On July 29 he reported to parliament that the investigation into the affair had been completed and appropriate action had been taken against those who had failed to carry out the government's instructions. Bacco was relieved of his duties that day.
¹³

Although those around the pope felt genuine outrage at the anticlerical sacrilege of that night, they were also excited by the political ammunition it offered. Cardinal Jacobini, the secretary of state, certainly lost no time using the episode to bolster the Vatican's cause. Within hours of the procession, he was sending coded telegrams to his nuncios, urging them to help organize a worldwide protest, although he cautioned them to be discreet. The protests had to be viewed as spontaneous.
¹⁴

On July 15, Jacobini sent a long account of the events both to his nuncios in Europe and to his emissaries in the Americas. He then highlighted the main lesson to be drawn from the affair:

From all this you can easily deduce just how much protection Catholics are offered in Rome in carrying out their duties, how much respect and freedom is provided the pope, who among other things is by law accorded the rights and honors of a Sovereign. If they let those paying their last homage of filial respect to a dead pope, a man loved and revered by all Romans, to be injured and attacked, what disorders would darken the streets of Rome if they were traversed today by the living pope? What disorders would break out if the Holy Father wanted to visit His basilicas and carry out the sacred rites in the midst of His devoted population with all of the majesty of His court? The pope's imprisonment has received full confirmation by these sad, but inevitable, events.

He concluded by instructing his nuncios to read his letter to the minister of foreign affairs in the country they served and then leave him a copy.
¹⁵

The same day, Pasquale Mancini, then minister of foreign affairs, sent out his own lengthy message, addressed to all the Italian ambassadors in Europe. "This telegram," he explained, "is for your information and to put you in a position to correct the erroneous versions of what happened on the occasion of the transfer of the remains of Pius IX from the Vatican to San Lorenzo." The facts he went on to recount were rather different from those in Jacobini's circular. Rome's prefect had received a request for a small, private transfer of the body of Pius IX to his final resting place, to be held without anyone following it. Authorization was given with these assurances. "But at the last minute a political demonstration was organized through calls by the heads of the clerical party of which I possess various copies, and a large and noisy procession of over two thousand people" followed. "Some groups of youths reacted against the provocateurs at various points along the route. Some jostling, which led to no injury, followed, as the police intervened immediately to protect the funeral procession, assuring its march to San Lorenzo, where the inhumation and religious ceremonies were conducted in tranquility." Mancini went on to report that the young men who had been arrested for disturbing the procession had been quickly brought to justice and that six of them had already been sentenced to two to three months in prison.
¹⁶

While the Catholic press throughout Europe denounced the Italian government and cited the chaotic procession to support its argument that Rome must be retaken, the secular press was divided. Some papers criticized the Italian government for allowing the disorders to occur, but many lashed out at the Vatican instead. Vienna's nuncio reported on a number of these stories on July 21. The German newspaper
Fremdenblatt,
like many others, asked how the Vatican could criticize the Italian government for failing to obey the law of guarantees when Pius had himself so loudly rejected it. The Austrian
Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung
charged that the Church was using the event cynically, to support its "fable" that the pope remained a prisoner. If the Italian government was to be accused of anything, the paper argued, it was for being too lenient toward those who would hold demonstrations in favor of the pope's temporal power. "The hypocritical complaints of violence committed against the pope will everywhere be received with a courteous shrug of the shoulders." The pope, the newspaper argued, "has the fullest freedom, no one threatens him, no one places obstacles in his way." And it concluded: "The 19th century will not see any crusade for reestablishing the popes' temporal dominion."
¹⁷

If Leo was hoping to use the frenzy to gain support for his efforts against the government, the initial signs were not promising. After a visit by the papal nuncio, who presented the Vatican's protests, the French foreign minister sent a letter to his ambassador to the Holy See. The disorders of the night of the twelfth, he said, were most regrettable. However, he noted, the Italian government was doubtless just as angered by the actions of the anticlerical rowdies as the French government was, and unfortunately in a large city such things could sometimes not be prevented.
¹⁸

But not all was going well for Depretis and his colleagues. The image of a holy funeral cortege, and that of a pope no less, being pelted with rocks and disrupted by obscenities was a great embarrassment. The Italian ambassador to Berlin shared in this discomfort and was angered by his government's excuses. Writing to Mancini, he was blunt: "As Your Excellency has encouraged me to speak frankly, allow me to add that your telegram [giving the official government account] produced a poor impression on me." That some people would try to mount such a noisy protest could not have been unknown to the government, and the scandal that would follow could have been entirely foreseen. "Police who serve only to put down disorders rather than try to prevent them from occurring in the first place," wrote the ambassador, "are neglecting an essential part of their job. I cannot help but lament," he added, "that we have given fodder to our enemies who are searching for just such pretexts to harm us. At the same time, we have paralyzed our friends—and certainly they are far from numerous—who also have to cope with the sentiments of their own Catholics who, in these circumstances, will not fail to exploit the matter to our detriment."
¹⁹

Sensing that it was gaining ground, the Vatican tried to step up the pressure. In a new circular, sent in code to the nuncios on July 30, the secretary of state raised the old threat of leaving the Holy City. The few malefactors who had been arrested for the violence, he reported, had received minimal sentences and had been released without bail, pending an appeal. The investigation that Depretis had promised the Senate had been conducted by one of his own men, who failed to interview any of the Catholics who had been attacked. The government's unofficial newspapers had joined the radical press in Rome in their polemics against Catholics, and various anticlerical clubs had recently been formed "with the goal of uniting all the enemies of the Church and the papacy." The secretary concluded on an ominous note. The nuncios were to inform Europe's foreign ministers that "because the position of the Holy Father in Rome has become so difficult, there are discussions in the councils of the Holy See seriously deliberating whether departure from the capital has become necessary."
²⁰

Rome remained tense. The funeral fiasco had fanned the intransigent flames in the Vatican, and now no rhetorical flourishes were being spared. In a long, combative article on August 4,
L'Osservatore Romano
called for the government to give the Holy City back to the pope. "No, Italy has no need of Rome as its capital. Italy can stay in Florence or go to Naples, it could be in Milan or Ravenna." The pope was a prisoner in today's Rome, the paper charged; "his imprisonment has been shown to be truer and more complete than ever. And so the dream of conciliation between the Papacy and the New Italy is impossible." The paper's language could hardly have been more melodramatic: "The pope is a prisoner, the Italian government his jailer." The article ended with a thinly veiled warning: "The Kingdom of Italy presents itself as if it were made of granite, but its base is made of clay, and the night of July 13 proved that at any moment the rock might slide off the mountain and will deal it the fatal blow."
²¹

In this overheated atmosphere, the police tripled the guard around the Vatican, having heard rumors of plans by anticlerical groups to destroy what they called "the vipers' nest." At the same time, known anticlerical agitators were ordered to be tailed.
²²

The police also learned that a huge anticlerical meeting was planned for Sunday, August 7, at the vast Politeama Theater, a meeting that would gain international attention. The government had banned all outdoor political demonstrations and rallies, but to ban an indoor meeting risked both undermining its claim to be supporting basic political freedoms and angering the more anticlerical of its supporters. The organizers provocatively addressed invitations to "all patriots, all former political prisoners from the reign of Pius IX, and all the relatives of the victims of the former pontifical government." In the evenings before the event, anticlerical youths covered the walls of the Holy City with epithets directed at Leo XIII and Pius IX, and several images of the Madonna and assorted saints on the streets were smashed or defaced.

The ingredients for another public relations disaster for the government had been assembled. The Italian ambassador to Vienna, who had been busy trying to repair the damage done by the funeral disorders, wrote to Mancini on August 4 to warn him about further demonstrations. "There is no point," he argued, "hiding the fact that the Vatican, taking advantage of the events of the night of July 13, which they so ably provoked, is trying to trigger Catholic agitation against Italy." While the Austrian government had so far resisted this campaign, he reported, "it is no less true that given current circumstances inside the Empire, clerical agitation could create serious embarrassment for the Government."
²³

Three thousand people crowded into the Politeama Theater, in Rome's Trastevere neighborhood, on the morning of the seventh for an event such as the Holy City had never seen. At ten-twenty the leaders climbed onto the stage. The chair was Giuseppe Petroni, a lawyer from Bologna who had spent seventeen years as a prisoner of the Papal States; he had originally been sentenced to death for his role in organizing an abortive uprising in 1853 and only released from prison when Rome was taken in 1870.
²⁴
A variety of other anticlerical heroes accompanied him, including the old Garibaldian firebrand Alberto Mario, along with two of Garibaldi's sons—Menotti and Ricciotti—and three members of parliament. Enthusiastic applause greeted them.

Petroni opened the meeting and helped set its tone. After recounting the hardships that he and his comrades had endured in prison, he turned to the law of guarantees. "While we thought we would have guarantees of freedom, of civil progress," Petroni told them, "we found instead the guarantees of despotism, obscurantism, and corruption." The law of guarantees, he insisted, must be abolished.

Petroni proceeded to read two telegrams. The first, from Garibaldi himself, was short but powerful: "I support the abolition of the Guarantees and the Guaranteed"—the latter referring to the pope himself. In fact, just the year before, angry at the government he believed had betrayed the ideals on which the nation was based, Garibaldi had re-signed his seat in parliament. He explained his action in a letter to his constituents: "I cannot continue to serve any longer in the legislature of a country where freedom is trampled and the law serves, in practice, only to guarantee the freedom of the Jesuits and of the enemies of Italian unity."
²⁵
The second telegram that Petroni read, from France, offered Victor Hugo's support: "French democracy is forever united with Italian democracy in combating the Vatican."

But the meeting's highlight was the speech by Alberto Mario, the editor of Rome's most fiercely anticlerical newspaper and Garibaldi's close friend and comrade. Mario was not to be equaled in his vilification of the papacy. The day after the funeral procession, in his paper, he praised the attack on Pius IX's "carcass" and added that "we would have applauded even more if the remains of that great fool had been thrown from the Sant'Angelo bridge into the Tiber."
²⁶
At the Politeama, Mario quickly warmed to his theme. "The Vatican," he said, "is a refuge and sanctuary for evildoers beyond the reach of the police." The government had allowed "Signor Pecci—at this disrespectful reference to the pope the delighted crowd laughed heartily—the freedom to publish letters and allocutions in such a way that Signor Pecci and his clergy are at the head of a separate state of 100,000 well-organized men. It is for this reason that suppressing the law of guarantees is a humanitarian act: for fourteen centuries the papacy has been eating away at Italy and Europe." What had the popes done to the pioneers of science and freedom? Mario asked. They had Giordano Bruno burned in Campo dei Fiori and forced Galileo to deny that the earth moved around the sun, "a truth that the Church has still not officially recognized." As for Pius IX, it was he "who called on four foreign powers to reduce Italy to slavery in order to prop up his tottering temporal rule, and who issued the Syllabus to combat modern civilization."