Prisoner of the Vatican (38 page)

At a mid-January 1887 meeting of the pope's secret commission, a cardinal warned that, given all the tensions plaguing Europe, a general conflagration could erupt at any time. If that were to happen, he said, the pope should immediately announce his departure from Rome, explaining that it was necessary both to ensure his ability to perform his religious mission freely and to put himself in a position to play the role of peacemaker. As for where he should go, it was important that he find a party not at war. The cardinal suggested two possibilities: Monaco and the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino in Switzerland.

But the cardinals were divided. Any flight from Rome under such circumstances, said one, risked outraging the Italians, who would accuse the pope of going abroad so that he could better conspire with foreign nations against them. Another questioned the choice of destination: Monaco was fine, but not Ticino, for Switzerland was swarming with the very sects that were the Church's worst enemies

At this point Leo asked Father Giuseppe Graniello, a Barnabite monk whose advice he greatly valued, to prepare a report on these issues to help guide their discussions. The report, a remarkably rich document, was presented to the cardinals in mid-February.

The effect that a European war would have on Italy, wrote Graniello, was not easy to predict. Italy might end up on the winning side, but there was a good chance that it would be defeated, in which case foreign armies would certainly occupy the Italian North. Of particular concern to the monk was the distinct possibility that, in the face of this occupation, popular revolts would sweep the rest of the peninsula, leading to the fall of the monarchy and leaving Rome at the mercy of the republicans and other anticlerics.

Rather than hasten the return of temporal rule, Graniello warned, the pope's leaving Rome might well make it more difficult. Should Italy win the war, there was of course no chance that temporal power would be restored to the pope. But if the pontiff had in the meantime fled Rome, Graniello warned, "the government would place the most humiliating and harshest conditions on his return." As a result, he would have to remain abroad "as long as the sacrilegious usurpation lasts."

If, on the other hand, the Italians lost the war but still held on to Rome, Graniello advised, the crucial question was whether an armistice would mandate an international congress to determine Rome's final status. If such a congress were held, the pope's temporal power might be restored, at least in some form. Yet even in this situation, Graniello warned, much could go wrong. Many European governments, he noted, were in the grip of the sects. They were hardly interested in restoring the papacy's powers and cared nothing for public opinion. And there was another problem. Even if they sympathized with the pope's plight, the European powers were likely to be influenced more by their own political calculations. From their perspective, a territorially reduced Kingdom of Italy whose legitimacy continued to be contested by the Church was an attractive prospect, for such a state would be perennially weak.

Yet, the monk acknowledged, there were some grounds for hope. An international postwar conference might well decide to return Rome to the pope. For one thing, Europe's governments were tired of being pestered by their Catholic populations about the pontiff's imprisonment. Second, all were worried about the revolutionary movements that were sweeping Europe. They saw the pope and the Church as bastions of the conservative social order and the main source of legitimacy for authoritarian regimes, especially in the Catholic portions of the continent. A pope restored to the fullness of his power could work to their advantage. It was also in these governments' interests, Graniello argued, for Italy to be stable. As it was, Italy was a cauldron of unrest, and the embattled state of the papacy simply encouraged further instability.

Clearly, the best outcome of a war for the Holy See would be, not only Italy's defeat, but also the seizure of Rome by foreign forces in the course of the fighting. In such a case, he concluded, the restoration of the Papal States, at least in the area around Rome, was "very probable."
⁷

When the cardinals began discussing this report, the politically savvy, aristocratic Wlodzimierz Czacki, whose aunt had married one of Rome's foremost noblemen and who had recently served as papal nuncio to Paris—a Pole surrounded by Italians—was the chief opponent of any departure from Rome. Picking up on Graniello's own hesitations, he asked where Leo would go. No one was eager to take him in, he said. All were urging him to stay in Rome, and all feared that having him in another country would undermine Europe's balance of power. "Any power that took him in for long would ruin its relations with other powers and with Italy. It would have to do a great deal at home to rein in the enthusiasms of the one side while repressing the sectarian hatreds of the other. No power would want to give the pope extraterritorial rights, nor allow a foreign diplomatic corps accredited to him, a precious legacy of temporal power." It appears that what most worried Czacki, one of the foremost champions of French Catholic interests in the Vatican, was the chance that the pope might end up in Germany. Such an exile, as some had suggested, Czacki warned, "would place us in the worst light in the eyes of all the Catholic powers, who would accuse us of having put ourselves at the service of a Protestant Power." And, he added, if the pope were to flee, the Italians would likely seize all of the Vatican's treasures, claiming them as part of the national patrimony.

Cardinal Monaco, the commission's imposing president, said that the critical question was whether, if the pope were to leave Rome, he would be able to return fairly soon, and to return with honor. Even if Czacki's fears about the Vatican palaces were exaggerated, Cardinal Monaco warned, "it is nonetheless certain that the Powers would not lift a finger if the Holy See were robbed of its property, and nothing suggests any improvement in their behavior in the future. Now, given the current state of things, there would be no certainty of any sufficiently rapid return, much less a return with honor." And so, he concluded, "the Pope should stay, except in the case of extreme violence."

But not all of Cardinal Monaco's colleagues agreed with him. To await the outbreak of war before taking action would be reckless, said one cardinal, for it would expose the pope and the members of the Curia to great danger. Once war began, departure might well become impossible, and so, he urged, the pope should leave immediately. History held many examples of such departures from Rome, the cardinal pointed out, and they had all ended well, with the pope back in Rome and the Papal States restored.

Although most cardinals shared the more cautious views of Czacki and Monaco, they dutifully turned to the pope's question of where he might go. The principality of Monaco was dismissed as being defenseless and lacking suitable quarters. One cardinal proposed Malta, but it was deemed too isolated by the others. Gradually the cardinals converged on the choice of Spain. True, it had a liberal government that was not sufficiently respectful of the Church, and some of its political parties were hostile. But in Spain, they were sure, the people would venerate the pope and feel honored to have him in their midst. If a proper agreement on conditions could be reached with the Spanish government, they concluded, the pope and his Curia could feel safe there.
⁸

A
LTHOUGH LEO XIII SAW HIMSELF
as strong-willed, he was painfully torn. Something, he thought, had to be done to save the Church. Simply hewing to Pius IX's uncompromising stance, he realized, risked isolating the Church further. Surrounded by intransigents urging him to reject all compromise with the Italian state, the pope was tempted to try to find a way of making peace.

He was encouraged, not only by a number of churchmen whose advice he valued, but also by some signs of an opening on the part of the Italian government itself. The visceral anticlericalism of its leaders—men like Depretis and Crispi—had not changed, but they were increasingly coming to appreciate how much could be gained by reaching an agreement with the Church. The Vatican's opposition meant that Italian diplomats were constantly on the defensive. And the rift with the Church was exacting new costs in the 1880s, for Italy's rulers were beginning to dream of a colonial empire, something they thought no self-respecting European power could do without. With Catholic missions scattered throughout many of the lands the Europeans sought to colonize, the Italians realized that Church support could be tremendously helpful.

On the Vatican's side, too, were those who believed it was time—more than a quarter of a century after the founding of the Kingdom of Italy—for the Church to find a way to recognize the state. Most notable of these champions of reconciliation was Monsignor Luigi Galimberti, by 1886 the secretary of the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs and the man who in 1887 would go to Berlin and successfully negotiate an end to the anti-Church
Kulturkampf.
Born in Rome to a modest family in 1836, as a young priest he became professor of Church history at the college attached to Propaganda Fide, the congregation in the Vatican that oversees the Church outside Europe—thus explaining the derisory characterization given him by the noble Cardinal Czacki, who called him "that little teacher of Negroes." Galimberti came to the attention of the pope soon after his elevation to the papacy and quickly rose to influence.
¹

Galimberti distrusted the republican French government, believing that the two central empires of Germany and Austria offered the Church greater protection in the long run. He also distrusted the French Catholics, whose strident opposition to the Vatican's reconciliation with Italy he thought posed a great danger. These feelings were fully reciprocated by France's conservative Catholics. One of the more acerbic of them characterized Galimberti in the darkest of terms: "There is also in the Vatican a spy of the [German] chancellor, masquerading as priest, who has as his mission that of playing on the pontiff's pride. This ecclesiastic is named Galimberti ... It is he who works to make of the present [papal] reign one of the most inauspicious ever." Several years later, one of France's correspondents in the Vatican described Galimberti—by then a cardinal—more charitably:

Cardinal Galimberti has a fox's brain in an artist's head. He offers a contrast with Cardinal Rampolla, his rival. A historian, he has read Machiavelli and Gioberti [a liberal Italian priest and political philosopher of the 1830s and 1840s] above all. A diplomat, he has frequented the courts of Vienna and Berlin. A philosopher and a man of the Church, he has the soul of an old-fashioned liberal and idolizes the Italian and Roman traditions. A lucid mind ... lover of all that is beautiful and elegant; a tactician of the highest order, Cardinal Galimberti is not the skeptical opportunist that his enemies would like to paint him as. He has a clear, precise, particular view ... He is an 1830s liberal in the body of a sixteenth-century prelate.
²

Galimberti was not alone in pushing the pope toward reconciliation. Geremia Bonomelli, the highly respected bishop of Cremona, sent Leo a note of Christmas greetings in 1886. "In the brief span of little more than eight years," he told the pope, "you have accomplished many great things ... above all finding a way to end so many serious conflicts that had arisen between other States and the Holy See." Following this effusive preface, he got to his point: "Holy Father, in this most propitious year of Your Jubilee, you can crown your achievements with the most arduous yet most necessary of all work, the pacification of our Country, offering relief to all people of good faith." Time was short, said the bishop: "Let us not delude ourselves, today's educated youth, who one day will be the leaders of Society, are slowly growing ever more distant from the Church, setting the stage inevitably for the apostasy of the entire nation. What then will become of the Holy See, in the midst of a society made up not only of unbelievers but of those who are fiercely hostile?"

The pope replied in a letter that, together with the bishop's note, was widely circulated in the Italian press: "That you pray for help from the Father so that peace can also be procured for our own lands from the war [against the Church] that has afflicted us, corresponds perfectly to Our own wishes, for seeing the harsh condition of things, we can only put our faith in God's help." This typically ambiguous papal reply was viewed by some as suggesting that Leo might in fact be contemplating a new approach to the Italian state.

Hopes of conciliation sprang from another source in late January 1887 as a result of events in Ethiopia, connected to Italy's early (and characteristically disastrous) colonial exploits. Five hundred Italian soldiers, on their way to relieve their comrades in Eritrea, were massacred. At scores of funerals and commemorations for the victims back home, the mixture of Catholic clergy, Catholic rites with patriotic themes, and government officials led to a growing belief that a way would be found to end the church-state divide. Among the most widely reprinted patriotic remarks were those given at one such ceremony by Bishop Bonomelli in Cremona.
³

The intransigent forces in the Vatican were growing increasingly alarmed, blaming Galimberti for the pope's vacillation. Meeting on March 4, the cardinals complained that Leo seemed to be entrusting the Church's affairs to Galimberti and in so doing was insulting the Sacred College of Cardinals. They were all the more concerned because Cardinal Jacobini, the secretary of state, had died a few days earlier, and there was widespread speculation that Galimberti would take his place.

On the Italian side, those favoring conciliation were convinced that it was now time for a new government initiative. On April 10, Giuseppe Toscanelli, a member of parliament known for favoring the Church, wrote to the prime minister, Depretis. His letter soon appeared in the press.

Arguing that the current law of guarantees was inadequate, Toscanelli proposed a solution: "I believe that, if one recognizes that the supreme Head of the Catholic Church is both the sovereign by right and the de facto sovereign of the Vatican, and if he were given land stretching out toward the countryside, sufficiently large to construct the buildings that form part of the universal Church, as for example those for Propaganda Fide and the headquarters of the religious orders, then one would have a profane Rome and a sacred Rome. Foreign rulers, coming to Rome, would visit both of the sovereigns." Toscanelli went on to assure Depretis that he was not proposing a return to the old temporal power of the pope but something much more modest: "In this way, which would change the current situation of our government very little and would greatly improve that of the universal Catholic Church, there would be, in addition to the Republic of San Marino, a Catholic republic with its elected sovereign, and peace would return between State and Church." Later, Toscanelli recalled telling Depretis that "the whole question came down to a strip of land that gave the Vatican access to the sea, it being understood that the strip remained Italian territory, although Vatican immunities would be extended to it."
⁴