Prisoner of the Vatican (6 page)

Word of the French emperor's threat to pull his troops out of Rome spread quickly. Gregorovius, in reporting the rumor in his diary on June 7, added somewhat maliciously: "Many seriously believe that the Pope is out of his mind. He has entered with fanaticism into these things, and has acquired votes for his own deification." The German scholar predicted that "important events" would transpire before the year's end. In this, he could not have been more prescient.
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Anticlericals in Italy, meanwhile, were having a field day skewering the pope's claim to be the voice of God on earth. One satirical journal put the matter in verse:

When Eve bit the apple, and told Adam he can
Jesus, to save mankind, made himself a man;
But the Vicar of Christ, Pius number nine
To make man a slave, wants to make himself divine.
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The pope's mood, meanwhile, swung between his proverbial affability and his no less characteristic flashes of anger. That large numbers of prelates opposed the pronouncement of papal infallibility enraged him. For Pius, infallibility was less a matter of theological learning—an area in which he recognized his own inadequacies—than of faith, commitment to the Church, and loyalty to the pope. His deep dislike of Catholic liberals turned him especially against the substantial segment of the French episcopate that sided with the opposition. His comments to visitors in these months about the French prelates were anything but diplomatic; he dubbed Bishop Henri Maret a "cold soul, a snake," and Georges Darboy, archbishop of Paris—who would the next year be murdered by the revolutionaries in Paris—"bad and wrong-thinking." When carried away, the pope sometimes made statements he later regretted, as when, in the midst of the Council, he told a Jesuit confidant: "I am so committed to going ahead with this, that if the Council decides not to act, I'll send them all home and proclaim the doctrine myself."
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As month after month of deliberations in St. Peter's droned on, the bishops complained ever more insistently about the seemingly interminable Council. Many of the bishops were old and infirm, and even the fittest found it wearying to sit hour after hour, struggling to understand the endless speeches—all in Latin—in the vast church. The opposition was slowly being worn down as it became clear that the infallibility forces had a majority and that voting in the minority could prove hazardous to a bishop's career. The most the minority could hope for was a less sweeping version of the infallibility proposition.

Yet on June 18, in one of the more memorable speeches at the Council, Cardinal Filippo Guidi briefly gave the anti-infallibility forces something to cheer about. Guidi held the title of archbishop of Bologna but had never been able to take up his position there. Having served for a number of years as a papal emissary in Vienna, he was viewed with suspicion by the Italian government—then fresh from two wars with Austria—and so never received permission to assume his post, a necessary step in his taking charge of Church property. When he rose to speak in St. Peter's that day, he did so as the designated representative of the Dominicans. Rivals of the Jesuits, the Dominicans believed that the Church's infallibility was embodied in the bishops and cardinals as a whole, not in the pope alone.

No sooner had the cardinal finished his speech and returned to the monastery where he was staying than a messenger told him that the pope wanted to see him right away. He hastened to the pope's apartments, where Pius impatiently waited.

"I would never have thought that Your Eminence would give a talk designed to please the opposition," the pope told him. "Whose orders are you following?" he asked. "You, on whom I myself bestowed the cardinal's hat! I who brought you up from nothing! Who is it who teaches you to speak of papal infallibility in such a way?"

Cardinal Guidi tried to stand his ground, not easy with Pius IX even under the best of circumstances.

"Blessed Father, I am prepared to defend what I said, because I haven't said anything that does not conform to the doctrine of St. Thomas."

"No, no, that's not true," the pope replied. "You said, and I know you did, that the pope is obligated by binding decrees to follow the traditions of the Church. But that's an error!"

Still, the cardinal held his ground: "It's true. That is what I said. But it is not an error."

This was too much for the pontiff, who struggled unsuccessfully to contain his anger. "It is an error," he thundered, "because I, I am the tradition! I, I am the Church!"

As soon as the cardinal had gone, the pope called for his personal physician. "This friar," the pope said, "has made my blood boil." The doctor struggled to calm Pius down and took his pulse. With the pontiff still fuming, he ordered a purgative.

Cardinal Guidi had a more pleasant evening in store: all night a succession of bishops came to congratulate him for his courageous speech. So great was the press of the bishops' carriages that they overflowed the piazza outside the monastery and filled the streets nearby.
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For both sides the stakes could be no higher, for, as they saw it, the fate of the Church itself lay in the balance. The majority was certain that unless the papacy was strengthened, the Church's enemies would soon destroy it; the opposition feared that the Council would lose the Church the few influential political allies it still had left.
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The anti-infallibility forces ultimately lost their battle, but they did succeed in watering down the more potent version of papal infallibility that Pius favored. The final text limited the pope's infallibility to those occasions on which he articulated the Church's most solemn teachings, ex cathedra. Such a restricted view would not, for example, cover the pope's condemnation of the basic principles of civil liberties in the Syllabus.
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On July 18, in the midst of a frightening storm, with thunder booming and the skies flashing with lightning, the episcopate gathered in St. Peter's to cast a final vote. While some of the opposition—including twelve of the seventeen German bishops—stayed away, others came and dutifully cast their yes vote.
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Of the 549 present, only two voted in opposition, in one case more likely from confusion than conviction. When the balloting was completed, at five minutes to noon, cries of "Long live the infallible pope!" went up from the spectators' gallery. The rumbling of applause signaled a mixture of excitement and relief that the six-month ordeal was over. Notably missing were the ambassadors to the Holy See from the principal Catholic countries of Europe—France, Austria, Spain, and Portugal—an expression of their governments' displeasure.

Nor was there any sign that the people of Rome were particularly excited by the historic event. The Holy See's efforts to have the city illuminated that evening in celebration—lighting up Bernini's colonnade outside St. Peter's, placing special lights on the Jesuits' Church of Jesus and on the tower at the top of the Capitoline hill—found little echo among the population, whose dwellings remained dark. The next day, the pope found it necessary to reassure his entourage, who had nervously commented on the inauspicious weather that had greeted both the convening of the Council and the concluding vote. Did not God, Pius asked them, choose to give Moses the Tablets on Mount Sinai amid just such celestial fireworks?
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Throughout Europe, emperors, kings, and prime ministers voiced their anger. If the pope was now infallible, where did this leave their authority when the pope's wishes conflicted with their own? Within days of the decision, the Austrian government voted to abrogate its concordat with the Vatican; within months the Swiss government, citing the new proclamation, unleashed a campaign against the Catholic clergy. Bismarck was reported to have been delighted at the infallibility proclamation, believing that the negative popular reaction to it in Germany would undercut the pope's influence there. Odo Russell's remarks in his report to the British foreign minister, written on the very day of the vote, were typical. That the final version of infallibility was substantially toned down from the original was lost on Russell, as it was on other political leaders in Europe. "The independence of the Roman Catholic hierarchy has thus been destroyed," he wrote, "and the supreme absolutism of Rome at last been obtained."
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O
N JULY
27,1870, saying only that their troops were needed elsewhere, the French announced plans to remove their forces from Rome immediately. The pope would now be on his own. After informing Cardinal Antonelli, the French ambassador said that he would come back later in the day to learn the pope's reaction.

"What did the Holy Father have to say when he heard the news?" asked the French ambassador on his return.

"After he heard the telegram read," replied Antonelli, "he simply shrugged his shoulders."

"Without saying anything?" asked the ambassador incredulously.

"He added," responded Antonelli, "that he hoped that this time the French would never come back."
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The French soldiers appeared to share the pope's sentiment. Reports coming in from Civitavecchia, the port from which the troops were leaving, told that, as they boarded their ships, some shouted "Down with the pope! Down with the government of the priests! Vive l'ltalie!" Embarrassed, the French commander, still in his nightclothes, had had to run into the streets to silence them.
²

Count Kulczycki, whose reports informed the Italian government of these developments, described the upheaval then under way in Rome: "News of the pullout from Pontifical territory has produced consternation in the Vatican, where up to the last minute people had deluded themselves about what was going to happen." According to Kulczycki, with the recollections of the French bishops' opposition at the Council so fresh, suspicions quickly turned in their direction: "It is being said in the Vatican that it is the bishops of the minority and Monsignor Darboy in particular who, on their return from Rome, persuaded the Emperor to deliver this terrible blow."

Diplomatically, the pronouncement of papal infallibility could not have come at a worse time for the Church. With the French troops being pulled out of Rome, a war that would redefine the balance of power in Europe about to break out on the French-German border, and the Italian government under intense internal pressure to send troops into Rome, Pius had succeeded in antagonizing even his friends in foreign governments.
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In retrospect, the disaster that awaited the French on their decision that month to go to war against Prussia seems so predictable that the question naturally arises of how an intelligent and crafty leader like Napoleon III could have made such a fateful blunder. But the Napoleon of 1870 was only a shell of the charming, bright, competent leader of earlier years. He was enfeebled by a series of illnesses, his left arm was paralyzed, and his eyes glazed over. Able to walk only haltingly, he was in constant pain, taking an ever-increasing dosage of drugs, and his judgment was not what it used to be. In the hallowed tradition of blaming the king's advisers, historians have tended to hold the people surrounding Napoleon responsible for the decision to go to war. Of them, none has drawn more attention than his wife, the Empress Eugénie. A Spaniard, eighteen years his junior, she was consumed by hatred of the Prussians in general and of Bismarck in particular. As the French parliament was debating the war budget, she remarked that "
ma petite guerre
"—my little war—was about to begin.
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No sooner had Napoleon proclaimed war on Prussia than the lack of even minimal preparations for the campaign became apparent: the French generals did not even have maps of the land they were supposed to invade. As August came without a French offensive, the Germans could not believe their good luck, having ample time to move their troops by train from all over Germany to the French border. With news of the German troop movement spreading fear among the French troops, Napoleon III himself came to the front to take charge, a move that proved to be among his last as emperor. Even in the best of health he had no talent for military leadership, and he was now, in addition to his other ills, so wracked by pain from kidney stones that he was barely able to mount his horse. At the beginning of August, France's squabbling generals, unable to agree on a plan, sent the troops under their various commands on a bewildering series of uncoordinated marches. On August 6, Prussian troops defeated the disorganized French forces across a broad front, and the specter of ultimate catastrophe began to appear. Dreams of repeating France's victories under another Napoleon in 1806 gave way to the horrifying realization that France itself was about to be overrun.
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When war between France and Prussia first broke out, many assumed that Italy would come to France's aid, not least the French government itself. They had reason to expect such help, for Italy's king, ever ready to put himself at the helm of military adventure, continued to dream of the triumphs that had so notably eluded him in the past. Although Prussia had shown its military might four years earlier in easily defeating Austria, Victor Emmanuel was certain that the French would prevail. The previous year he had conducted secret negotiations with Napoleon III behind the back of his own prime minister, promising that the Italian army would come to France's aid in a war with Prussia in exchange for some unnamed territorial concessions.

The republicans, the left, and public opinion in general in Italy opposed siding with France, which they viewed as their enemy, for it was France that had for the past decade kept them out of Rome. By contrast, it had been Prussia that, in 1866, through its defeat of Austria, had given Italy the city of Venice and the lands around it. At rallies from Palermo to Turin, shouts of "Viva Garibaldi!" and "Viva la Prussia!" mixed with cries of "To Rome! To Rome!"
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