Prisoner of the Vatican (44 page)

On June 19, 1888, just four days after the new German emperor's death and before he could even be buried, Rampolla gave Galimberti new instructions, this time to be carried out in Vienna. The nuncio was to approach the Austrian emperor, as best he could, to ask him to confirm his willingness to provide refuge for the pope. The urgency of the matter, it appears, arose from the dramatic defeat of the Catholic candidates in Rome's municipal elections, which had been held just a few days earlier, and the victory of Crispi's handpicked candidates.

Galimberti was told to inform Franz Josef "that the pope is, more or less directly, being forced by the Italian government and by the radical elements behind it to temporarily leave Rome. Should this happen, it is important to know in advance if the Holy Father can rely on Austrian hospitality and also if he can count on the assistance and cooperation of His Majesty's representative to allow him to leave Italy's borders freely." The pope had an additional request as well. Even if he remained for the time being in Rome, he needed to plan for the eventuality of his own death, for he was an old man. Should "the Sacred College of Cardinals deem it necessary to celebrate the Conclave outside Italy to permit the free and tranquil election of the Holy Pontiff, could this," Galimberti was to ask, "take place in His Majesty's dominions?"
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Galimberti succeeded in speaking with Count Kalnoky on July 4. As he had no doubt suspected, the Austrian was not sympathetic. "Count Kalnoky was quite surprised about the matter," Galimberti reported, "and then expressed the opinion that neither he nor the wider diplomatic community gave any credence to the notion that Crispi wants to force the Holy Father to leave Rome." Crispi may have said some radical things when he was a young parliamentary deputy, Kalnoky added, but as prime minister he would act very differently. In any case, said the Austrian leader, Crispi was constrained by the Italian monarchy, by European diplomacy, and by the moderate liberal element in Italy, all of whom opposed the pope's departure from Rome.

Galimberti tried a different tack. We are only talking hypothetically here, he said. Let's not, for the moment, enter into the question of whether the pope will judge it necessary to leave. The question is whether Austria would be willing to take him in if he did.

"Well," asked Kalnoky, "in which of Austria's lands might His Holiness take up residence?"

"Perhaps the city of Trent," Galimberti replied.

"Do you not know, Monsignor, that Trent is a city in which a liberal Italian spirit predominates? The pope would most certainly be uncomfortable there, amid hostile demonstrations, and the incitements coming from the nearby Italian border would certainly not be conducive to his dignity."

The alternative of Salzburg was then raised but dismissed on the grounds that its winters were too cold.

It makes no sense to discuss such details at this point, interjected Kalnoky, since it would be difficult for Austria to consider taking in the pope given current circumstances in Europe. "If it were up to me, or to the Emperor, we wouldn't have to spend a moment to think about it. The Holy Father would always be welcome, and we would be proud to host him and leave it up to him to choose the place where he would most like to live. But," he pointed out, "the Emperor is a constitutional sovereign. I have to answer to the Houses, both of which have to consider both public opinion and the press, which is in the hands of the Jews and those favorable to the Masons." Yet, despite all these problems, Kalnóky said he would take the question up with the emperor at the first opportunity and get back to him.
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True to his word, the Austrian foreign minister met with Franz Josef at the imperial summer residence and on his return to Vienna on Thursday, July 21, summoned the papal nuncio. Galimberti, to his surprise, was told that the emperor had agreed to invite the pope to take up residence anywhere in the Austrian empire that he chose. "The emperor," said Kalnóky, "has asked me to give the Holy Father the most formal assurances on this point." The emperor also promised to allow the Sacred College to hold its next conclave in Austria should it desire.

Although the emperor left the decision to the pope, he was clearly not eager for Leo to take him up on his offer, and Austria's ambassador to Italy was instructed to speak with Crispi. Not surprisingly, Crispi blamed the Vatican for provoking the latest crisis. If the pope would simply stop trying to undermine the Italian state, Crispi said, he would find that he had greater freedom in Italy than anywhere else in the world. Crispi added that he had no intention of forcing the pope to leave Rome; he was all too aware of the difficulties that such a departure would create for his government.
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While Leo was putting all the pressure he could on the Austrians, he continued to look with special favor on Europe's other major Catholic power, France, which had the virtue of distrusting the Italian government as much as he did and shared his interest in weakening it.

In mid-July, with the pages of Europe's newspapers filled with threats of the pope's departure from Rome, the papal nuncio to France, Monsignor Luigi Roteili, met in Paris with René Goblet, the French foreign minister.

Roteili regaled Goblet with the Vatican's latest litany of woes, listing all of the measures that Crispi's government had recently taken against the Church.

"Yes," Goblet observed, "Monsieur Crispi is extraordinarily fearless. He charges ahead without being afraid of anyone."

"But the European powers should not let themselves be intimidated, much less get bamboozled by the Italian prime minister," objected the nuncio.

"The European powers!" Goblet scoffed. "They're too busy forming an alliance against France to do anything else."

"And all of them," replied Rotelli, "are abandoning the pope. Yet it is in this very isolation of both France and the papacy that we once more see their parallel historical destinies. Doesn't this seem an opportune time, Signor Minister, for the two isolated forces to join together against their common enemies for the well-being of both?"

"But how could republican France do so," asked Goblet, "if Austria itself, an empire that is both Catholic and a monarchy, is allied with Crispi to the detriment of both us and the pope? We French can do no more right now than exercise the greatest caution and reserve to avoid being attacked."

Yes, Rotelli admitted, France was certainly in a difficult situation, but "papal Rome will never give up its historical hopes in its first-born child."

Goblet expressed his pleasure at hearing France's privileged position acknowledged in this way, but he hastened to add that his government could do nothing. He then tried to put the nuncio on the spot.

"The pope's position is very serious, it's true, but who knows whether there isn't some exaggeration in what is being said in the newspapers. Do you really think that the question of the pope's departure from Rome is now being seriously discussed in the Vatican, as the papers say?"

"I know nothing of it," replied the nuncio. "But I think that the latest decision [by the Italian government], saying that the Vatican is on Italian territory, may have revived Pius IX's old project of leaving Rome."

"And where would you think Pope Leo would be able to go? Is it true that he would head for Malta?"

It was the opening that Rotelli was waiting for: "I repeat, I know nothing. But I recall having read in a history of Pius IX that, after 1870, he asked Signor Thiers if he would be able to find exile in France, and that Signor Thiers replied through his ambassador with these precise words: 'Regardless of how disastrous a situation we find ourselves in because of the war and the revolution, we are not yet in such poor shape as to be unable to give refuge to the Pope.'" The nuncio then asked: "If, hypothetically, the Holy Father were to pose the same question today to the French government, could he count on getting the same reply?"

"As this possibility has never been discussed in the cabinet," said Goblet, "I do not believe I am authorized to respond in any way." Instead, he asked a question of his own: "What effect would the Pope's departure produce in Italy?"

"It would be viewed by all Italians—aside from the atheist sectarians and the anarchists—as a true religious and national disaster."

"Well then, why don't the Italians themselves act to ward off such a serious danger?"

"The great majority of Italians," Rotelli replied, "have always done everything that they could to support the Holy See's rights ... But the Pope's current situation cannot be improved without the joint action of both Catholic and non-Catholic governments."

The papal nuncio concluded by trying a different tack, appealing to France's colonial ambitions.

"One way or another, sooner or later," he told Goblet, "the Holy See will prevail. But what about France?...Be warned, two races—the Germans and the Slavs—are now planning how to decide the question of the Orient without France, indeed against France, which is to say without and against the Catholic element, in order to divide European supremacy between themselves. We are always there [in the Orient], France's interests tied always to those of the Church."
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Meanwhile, trainloads of pilgrims from across Europe were pouring into Rome to pay homage to the pope and to show their support for his claim to be the one true, divinely appointed ruler of the Holy City. Typical was a gathering of over four thousand northern Italian priests, presided over by the archbishop of Turin, received by Leo on September 27. "None of you, most beloved children," the pope told them, "are unaware of how cunning they are in trying to fool the Italian people regarding the current conditions of the pontificate as they continue to tell the people that the Pontiff has broad and full freedom in Rome and that his authority and his person are respected. But the whole world knows and sees the shameful and intolerable condition to which it has been reduced, at the mercy of the power of others." He went on: "You tirelessly keep repeating that the supreme authority vested in the Pontiff cannot, by its very nature, be subject to any earthly power, and that to be truly free and independent, at least in the current order of Providence, the Pontiff must have real Sovereignty."
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Events of the next month did little to reassure the pope, for he faced one of the greatest embarrassments of his papacy. Ever since 1870, when the Italians had taken Rome, no European ruler had set foot there, warned first by Pius IX and then by Leo XIII that visiting the Italian king in Rome would be tantamount to recognizing his right to rule the Holy City. Time after time Italian prime ministers, working with the Italian court, had tried to get one or another of Europe's rulers to pay such a visit and so provide his stamp of approval, but to no avail. The most that the German emperor Wilhelm I had been willing to do was to visit Milan, thirteen years earlier, following a visit earlier that same year by the Austrian emperor, Franz Josef, to Venice. In each case Victor Emmanuel II had been put in the awkward position of traveling far from his own capital to meet emperors whose capitals he had visited.

The breakthrough for the Italians came when Germany's new twenty-nine-year-old emperor, Wilhelm II, shortly after ascending the throne in June 1888, announced that he wanted to visit his fellow monarch Umberto I in his capital. Angered by the news, the pope again threatened to leave Rome. On July 15, Crispi telegraphed his ambassador in Vienna to report the Vatican's latest efforts: "I have it from an excellent source," Crispi wrote, "that on the 13th of this month Cardinal Rampolla sent a highly confidential note to the papal nuncio [in Vienna], to try to ensure that should Emperor Wilhelm visit our king, the Austro-Hungarian government and the apostolic Imperial Court would use all its influence to see that the visit not occur in Rome. Rampolla has apparently threatened that the Pope would leave the Vatican should Leo XIII's desire not be granted." This threat was duplicitous, Crispi charged, used solely "to frighten Catholic consciences," for the pontiff in fact had no desire to leave. "I hope," Crispi told his ambassador, "that Count Kalnoky and His Majesty the Emperor will not want to lend their support to such a disgraceful maneuver."

That same morning, Crispi sent a similar warning to his ambassador in Berlin. If the Germans paid any heed to the Vatican's pleas and altered the planned visit to Rome, wrote Crispi, not only would it damage their friendship, but it would also lead popular opinion in Italy to shift away from Germany toward France. In such circumstances, Crispi warned, "my authority would be shattered, and I might well be forced to cede my position to men who would not be in favor of the alliance with Germany." Again trying to play the Germans against the French, Crispi urged his ambassador to tell Bismarck that "a large role in Cardinal Rampolla's intrigues is being played by the French ambassador to the Vatican."
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At 4:10
P.M.
on Thursday, October 11, the twelve-car German imperial train, adorned for the occasion with German and Italian flags, pulled into Rome's central station, a cannon blast announcing the long anticipated arrival. Waiting to receive the emperor were King Umberto, Prime Minister Crispi, and other royal and governmental dignitaries, the men of the royal family wearing full dress uniforms covered with medals. Out stepped the German emperor, dressed in a brilliant red uniform, as a band struck up the Prussian anthem. Embracing, Wilhelm II and Umberto I kissed each other's cheeks four times. To the delight of the cheering crowd, the young emperor then saluted smartly with two fingers to his forehead. Emerging too from the train was a heavy man with a huge bushy mustache, his suit a sign of his diplomatic status. Greeted by Crispi, Herbert von Bismarck, the son of the German chancellor, accompanied the prime minister to his carriage, the first to follow the two carriages bearing the sovereigns and members of their royal families.

In all, twelve horse-drawn carriages, at half-trot, carried the delegation through the streets of Rome, lined by soldiers and cheering and curious citizens, on to the Quirinal Palace. The coach drivers were themselves quite a sight in their red livery, both their wigs and their stockings made of silk. Flowers showered down on them, along with small pieces of paper bearing patriotic inscriptions in both German and Italian. Crispi had ordered triumphal arches built along the route, and a cluster of unsightly buildings facing the Quirinal Palace were torn down before the emperor's arrival.