Prisoner of the Vatican (40 page)

How much difference would the choice of Rampolla make? And how much influence might Galimberti—known to be very close to the Perugians—continue to have, even from abroad? There were those who underestimated Rampolla, believing that Leo had appointed him thinking him to be young, weak, and unassertive. The French ambassador to Spain, who had observed the new secretary of state as nuncio in Madrid, described him as a tireless worker but lacking in any initiative of his own. "He carries out the instructions he has been given with the stubbornness and craftiness of a peasant," he wrote to Paris just weeks after Rampolla's appointment, but, he claimed, the pope had not deemed him sufficiently strong to serve as his nuncio in Paris. Nor was the new secretary of state especially well liked in the diplomatic community. As the Bavarian ambassador to the Holy See put it, describing the impression gained from Rampolla's first meetings with the foreign diplomatic corps at the Vatican: "Cardinal Rampolla is judicious, circumspect, and very unpleasant."
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But if Rampolla began his fifteen-year reign in a rather weak position, with the pope's Perugian secret cabinet continuing to have a great influence over the pope, the balance would soon change. With Leo becoming ever more slowed by age over the next years and with Rampolla increasingly gaining confidence, the pope found himself the subject of the same kinds of gossip that had plagued his predecessor. Bishop Bonomelli, no friend of the intransigent Rampolla, would lament in a letter to a friend: "It has always been a mystery to me whether Rampolla guided Leo or if Leo towed Rampolla along." But this comment came years later. For the moment, the battle was still joined, the victor not yet clear.
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If the situation in the Vatican was chaotic in these weeks, the Italian government was hardly more harmonious. Informed of Tosti's mission, King Umberto and the royal court hoped that reconciliation with the Church might finally be at hand. But the king did not trust Crispi, not only because of his notorious anticlericalism but also because of his penchant for acting in his own self-interest. And so the king sent one of his aides to feel out the Vatican directly, without informing his minister.
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Given Crispi's dense network of informers, it was not long before he learned of this move. When, on June 9, Crispi next met with Tosti, by now the object of fierce attack in the Vatican and Catholic press, he castigated him for dealing with the royal family behind his back. The beleaguered abbot tried to defend himself, insisting that he had only done what the king had asked of him.

The following day Giovanni Bovio, parliament's most prominent anticlerical deputy, rose to question the government about the stories of secret dealings with the Vatican. It is possible that Bovio was prompted by Crispi himself, who by this time was worried that matters were getting out of his control and wanted to prevent the king from striking a separate deal. What, asked Bovio, did they hope to accomplish by negotiating a formal agreement with the Vatican? Wasn't the current legislation sufficient to guarantee freedom of religion and the freedom of the Church? Such a deal, he fumed, would produce the worst of both worlds, "a pact of mutual mediocrity between State and Church, a pope who is half a prince, a State that is half Catholic, in a common morass of half institutions, half men and half religion."

Crispi rose to reply. The law of guarantees, he said, already offered the Church full protection. "We do not ask for any conciliations, nor are they needed," he insisted, "because the State is not at war with anyone." Cries of "
benissimo!
" rang out from the left. "Nor do we know or want to know what those in the Vatican think. Leo XIII is not an ordinary man. The times are changing, they are softening, extinguishing the fiercest animosities, and this might lead to greater understanding between Church and State. But for our part, none of the national law sanctioned by the plebiscites will be touched. Italy belongs to itself, and to itself alone. It has but one head: the king." With this final flourish, the banks of the deputies erupted in loud voices of assent.
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The Vatican charged that Crispi's combative speech had finally made his allegiances clear. He was, they said, a tool of the Freemasons, part of the conspiracy of the sects against Christianity. Although overdrawn, the charge had some credibility, for by the late 1880s the Freemasons were becoming increasingly influential in Italian politics, and Crispi himself had not only long been a mason but was an old friend of the dynamic new Italian grand master, Adriano Lemmi.

For years Lemmi, a wealthy banker from a Jewish family in Livorno, had funded a variety of republican and anticlerical organizations. But even before he became grand master in 1885, the masons' opposition to the Catholic Church was deeply entrenched.
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In early 1882, for example, the grand master of the time, Giuseppe Petroni—the same former longtime political prisoner of the Papal States who had chaired the Politeama anticlerical meeting a few months earlier—sent out a long letter to all the Grand Orient lodges in Italy. "The intolerance, the haughtiness, the unbridled ambitions of the Church of Rome, its avarice for honors and riches, its immoral dealings with the most despicable tyrannies, its most irrational superstitions, hatred for work, for science, and for truth have delivered the final blow." By contrast, the Freemasons, in Petroni's depiction, championed "the immortal principles of justice, of civilization, of progress, tolerance, freedom, equality, and human brotherhood." In many ways, although Petroni would not appreciate the comparison, the Freemasons' language echoed the Church's: each believed it was locked in a historic battle between good and evil, and each branded the other a demonic sect.
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When, shortly after Lemmi became grand master, Crispi became prime minister, Lemmi began firing off letter after letter to his old friend, urging him to resist efforts at compromise. A flavor of these missives comes from Lemmi's warning to Crispi in November 1887 about a prefect in the northern city of Pavia who, he complained, was too soft on the Church. He told Crispi that, despite the ban on the Jesuit order, Jesuits had set up schools and colleges in Pavia. Its city council and mayor had objected, and popular protests had filled the streets, but the prefect, who was responsible for such matters, had done nothing. Lemmi urged Crispi to act immediately. "Send the prefect of Pavia to Hell," he wrote, "and the others will realize that they can no longer get into bed with the priests." The government's task was clear: "The only enemy of our Institutions is the papacy. It is necessary to combat it and its allies without respite."
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If the Freemasons were outraged by the prospect of reconciliation, the French were displeased as well, if for very different reasons. Both the French Church hierarchy and, especially, Catholic organizations and publications were strong proponents of the intransigent line. When they learned earlier in 1887 that the pope might be opening the door to reconciliation, they were confused and upset. Nor was the French government—in the hands of men not known for their love of the Church—any more eager to see a reconciliation, especially now that Italy was part of the Triple Alliance. Italy's continuing battle with the Holy See meant the continuing weakness of the Italian state, something they welcomed. And France's ability to expand its own colonial empire—a national priority at the time—would be compromised if the Vatican's resources abroad, through its missionary network, were deployed on behalf of the Italians.
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A book published the following year by Jules Comely offers a clear—if chilling—view of the thinking then current among France's Catholics. He was convinced that reconciliation of the pope with Italy's king would be catastrophic. On the day that the pope first emerged from the Vatican and traveled through Rome's streets, he admitted, there would no doubt be "delirious enthusiasm such as to shake the Coliseum from its ancient supports." But the Catholics' elation would soon turn to despair, he predicted, for despite the pope's best efforts, and even those of the Italian royal family itself, the pontiff would inevitably become a mere vassal of the Italian king. "St. Peter's successor," Comely argued, "would be no more than the first among the Italian bishops." Europe's rulers would then understandably become suspicious of the devout Roman Catholics in their midst, viewing them as at the bidding of the Italian king. Fearful of such disloyalty, Europe's governments would establish separate, national churches in their countries. It would certainly be the case in France, where any reconciliation of the pope with the Italian state would produce a schism, a national French Catholic Church forming in opposition to a philo-Italian Roman Catholic Church. From the French Catholic point of view, then, reconciliation was the last thing to be desired. A captive pope was still a pope, proud and independent, concluded Cornély, but a "pope free and venturing outside the Vatican is a pope who is an Italian subject, that is a submissive pope, and a submissive pope is no longer a pope."
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Leo was now in full retreat. The time had come to make his rejection of conciliation clear, and he decided to do so in a letter formally addressed to his new secretary of state. That Leo's intended audience was in fact the larger Catholic world is clear, for the letter quickly found its way into the pages of newspapers across the continent. When it first appeared, on July 26, a number of observers expressed skepticism about its date, June 15, speculating that the pope had predated the letter to create the impression that he had abandoned his efforts at reconciliation earlier than he had in fact done so.
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The letter could not have been any clearer: no pope could give up the claim to temporal power. "Defending and maintaining civil sovereignty," Leo XIII wrote, was his "sacred duty" as pontiff.

With divine help, we certainly will not fail in our duty and, until there is a return to a true and effective sovereignty, which Our independence and the dignity of the Apostolic See requires, we do not see any other room for agreements and for peace ... Up until now the only means that Providence has provided for ensuring ... the freedom of the popes has been their temporal sovereign power, and when this means was lacking, the Pontiffs were always either persecuted, or imprisoned, or exiled or certainly in a condition of dependence and in continuous danger of seeing themselves cast on one or the other of these paths. The whole history of the Church attests to this.

Were Italy to give the pope the position that was rightfully his, wrote Leo, it would benefit enormously, for having been blessed by Providence with being "the nation closest to the papacy, so it is destined to receive the greatest reward if it does not combat or oppose it." Those who argue that restoring the pope's sovereignty would undermine Italian independence, he said, could not be more mistaken. "It is incontrovertible that the cities and the regions formerly subject to the pontiff's civil authority were for this very reason the same ones most often saved from falling under foreign domination, and they have always retained their purely Italian character and customs. Nor would it be any different today."
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The publication of this letter came only after the pope and his new secretary of state had laid the groundwork for a new Church offensive throughout Europe. In one of a number of such dispatches to his nuncios, Cardinal Rampolla wrote on July 17 to Galimberti in Vienna with word of the upcoming papal pronouncement and instructions for organizing support. "The Holy Father," the letter began, "is planning in the near future to publicize an act of the greatest importance ... which will in effect contain the program that the Holy See plans to follow in its beneficial action toward the various peoples and governments, and that will at the same time give the last authoritative word on the Roman question, aimed at removing any equivocations and illusions." Rampolla then spelled out the pope's message: "He will insist in the clearest and most explicit way on reclaiming territorial sovereignty as the indispensable means needed for the free exercise and independence of the apostolic ministry, and in particular Rome, destined by Providence to be the permanent seat of the Vicar of Jesus Christ."

The reason for alerting the nuncios to the upcoming papal announcement was to give them time to organize local support for the pope. "It is easy to predict that an act of such importance will provoke the ire and the complaints of the liberal and sectarian press, anger and complaints that will find an echo, albeit weaker, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire ... It is therefore necessary to begin immediately making plans for a proper defense so that the first impressions are favorable to the Holy See's cause." Rampolla went on to specify what exactly he had in mind: "Use all of your zeal in preparing a splendid campaign, both through articles, which you might very well write yourself, to publish in the newspapers, and through the publication of booklets written by someone who is highly respected ... In a word, use all means possible."
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But of equal concern to Leo was the state of the Church in Italy, where he feared that, outside the Vatican, his new intransigent stance was likely to meet resistance. Although he most enjoyed the world of international diplomacy, he knew that he had to tend as well to the thorny politics of the Italian Church hierarchy. Something had to be done to ensure that Italy's bishops—not known for their discipline or for their interest in working together—hewed closely to his new line.

O
N JULY
20,1887, Leo XIII instructed his secretary of state to arrange for a secret mission. The man they chose for the delicate task, the thirty-two-year-old Monsignor Giacomo Delia Chiesa, was not coincidentally a close friend and protégé of Rampolla. Having recently served as Rampolla's secretary in Spain, Delia Chiesa had returned to Rome with him just two months earlier. As it turned out, Delia Chiesa was a man with a bright future: a quarter-century later, he would become pope himself. Recognizing his talent, Leo and Rampolla entrusted the young priest with a series of private meetings with the archbishops of Florence, Bologna, Venice, Genoa, and Turin. The central message he was to convey, Rampolla told him, was simple: "The Holy Father declares authoritatively that Italy's reconciliation with the papacy is impossible except on the sole basis of the restitution of territorial sovereignty and the restitution of Rome to the Holy Pontiff." The archbishops were to see to it that the bishops under their jurisdiction kept their flocks from being seduced by the reconciliation movement.