The Inquisition

by Michael Baigent

  In the wake of Napoleon's final downfall in 1815, attempts were made to restore the old order in Europe, and the continent embarked on a period of conservative reaction that prevailed in most quarters for some twenty years. In Italy, however, the old order had been definitively ruptured. Most of the peninsula was ruled directly or indirectly by the Austrian Habsburgs; but the Habsburgs themselves had become increasingly enfeebled. The rest of the country was divided between Habsburg and Bourbon duchies, the Papal States nominally ruled by the Pope, the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples and the Two Sicilies which encompassed the south and, in the northwest, the fledgling Kingdom of Piedmont, ruled from Turin by the House of Savoy. The Italian peninsula was thus as fragmented as it had been before the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and even less stable. It could hardly be expected to retain whatever precarious equilibrium it possessed. The nationalism and desire for unification that swept across the whole of Europe during the nineteenth century were soon to erupt in Italy as well. By 1815, events were already in motion that would lead some fifty-five years later to the unification of the country and the emergence of a new European power.

  One of the key factors in this process was the Carbonaria, a network of secret societies dedicated to revolution, to the expulsion of all foreign powers from Italian soil, to the unification of the country and the establishment of democratic independent government. The Carbonaria were organised along Masonic lines. Indeed, many commentators have described them as an essentially Masonic institution. Certainly there was considerable overlap between the Carbonaria and Freemasonry, with prominent members of the former also belonging to the latter. One such was Giuseppe Mazzini, exiled to France in 1830 where, two years later, he created a new secret society, ‘Young Italy’. In the following year, Mazzini was joined by a twenty-six-year-old revolutionary, Giuseppe Garibaldi. By this time, the joint membership of ‘Young Italy’ and the Carbonaria numbered more than 60,000. So far as the Papacy and the Holy Office were concerned, they were all Freemasons, and their activities were deemed to constitute evidence for an alleged Masonic conspiracy. Papal pronouncements against Freemasonry began to increase in both frequency and vehemence.

  In 1848, virtually the whole of Europe was swept by revolution, and Italy did not escape the contagion. On 9 January, Palermo revolted, and the remainder of Sicily rapidly followed. In March, the Habsburg territory in the north, Lombardy and Venetia, declared its independence, and Piedmont, seeking to annex it, declared war on Austria. By May, the Piedmontese invasion of Lombardy had been rebuffed by Austrian troops, and conservative troops from Naples had embarked on the reconquest of Sicily. In November, however, the Papal Prime Minister was assassinated in Rome and Pope Pius IX was forced to flee the city in disguise. The following February, Mazzini, aided by Garibaldi, proclaimed a Roman republic in place of the old Papal States.

  From then on, civic and political turbulence was to continue almost uninterrupted. For a time at least, the forces of the old order gained an ascendancy. A second Piedmontese attack on Austria was defeated, and the Roman republic of Mazzini and Garibaldi was toppled by French troops dispatched by Louis Napoleon, subsequently the Emperor Napoleon III. Towards the latter part of 1849, however, a new king, the moderate Victor Emmanuel II, ascended the throne of Piedmont. A year later, he brought into his cabinet a dynamic moderniser and progressive, Camillo di Cavour. For the duration of his life, Cavour was to dedicate himself to the creation of a united Italy. By 1857, he had established a monarchist and unionist political party. Garibaldi had become his vice-president.

  In 1859, Piedmont again went to war with Austria for control of northern Italy. This time, however, by dint of Cavour's clandestine machinations, Piedmont's ineffectual forces were reinforced by a full-sized French army under the command of Napoleon III in person. Two major battles ensued, at Magenta and Solferino, and the defeated Habsburgs were expelled from Lombardy. In January of the following year, Garibaldi, discreetly supported by Cavour, sailed from a port near Genoa with a force of volunteers known as ‘the Thousand’. In May, they landed in Sicily and quickly conquered the entire island. In August, they captured Naples. On 26 October 1860, Victor Emmanuel met Garibaldi in what had formerly been Neapolitan territory, and Garibaldi proclaimed the Piedmontese monarch King of Italy. The Kingdom of Italy was officially proclaimed on 17 March 1861, at the Piedmontese capital of Turin. With the exception of the Papal States, the whole of Italy was now united.

  In July 1862, Garibaldi dispatched a circular letter to all Masonic Lodges in Sicily, urging that

  Brethren, as citizens and as Masons, must cooperate so that Rome will be an Italian city, and the capital of a great and powerful Nation. And it is their duty not only to help the patriotic undertaking with every means at their disposal but also to persuade the non-initiated that without Rome the destiny of Italy will always be uncertain and that with Rome all sorrows will end.1

  To advocate the conquest of Rome and the Papal States was one thing, to translate this aspiration into practice quite another. The Papacy was still protected by the French army, deemed at the time to be invincible. And Napoleon III had no desire to see the European balance of power upset by a united and potentially dangerous Italy. When Garibaldi attempted to annex the Papal States by force in 1867, he was thwarted by French troops.

  Another opportunity was soon to present itself, however. On 19 July 1870, Napoleon III – grievously overestimating his own military resources and underestimating those of his adversary – was lured into war with Prussia. As one French disaster followed another in catastrophic succession, the troops protecting the Papacy were recalled. Their transfer to the front made scant difference. In less than three months, the Franco-Prussian War was effectively over. On 1 September 1870, the sequence of French reverses culminated in the débâcle at Sedan. The French army surrendered, Napoleon III abdicated and the Second French Empire collapsed. Three weeks later, on 20 September, Italian soldiers marched triumphantly into Rome, brushing aside the largely symbolic, token resistance of the Pope's miniature army. Refusing to accept the defeat, the Pope, sulking, withdrew into the Vatican. The Kingdom of Italy now encompassed the entire peninsula, and its capital was soon to be moved from Turin to Rome.

  The threats posed to the Church by science, by archaeology and biblical scholarship, by the ‘cult’ of the arts exemplified by Bayreuth were all real enough. The unification of Italy, however, was an altogether different matter, a veritable and definitive coup de grâce to the Church of former centuries. The Papacy was now entirely divested of all temporal power, was left incapable of imposing authority by physical force, was bereft of the capacity to inflict physical punishment on those who professed defiance. For all its wealth, majesty, pomp, circumstance and tradition, the Roman Catholic Church was now as impotent in the secular world as it had been in the semi-legendary days of the ‘early Christians’.

  Who Holds the Power in the Church?

  In addition to the array of external pressures, the Church was also threatened by dissension within. As so often in the past, this dissension stemmed in large part from France. And when it did not actually arise from France, it was conditioned by events there.

  France had traditionally been regarded as the ‘eldest daughter of the Church’, but had often been a recalcitrant and rebellious daughter. In the early fourteenth century, Philippe IV had kidnapped the Pope, established the Papacy at Avignon and effectively turned it into an instrument of his own policy. The resulting schism had lasted for 108 years and irrevocably compromised Papal authority. In the seventeenth century, two French cardinals, Richelieu and Mazarin, had ruthlessly subordinated the Church's interests to those of the French Crown. At the end of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution had exterminated an estimated 17,000 priests and twice that many nuns, had destroyed or confiscated Church buildings and lands, had plundered Church treasures and, if only briefly, installed a regime that did not even pay lip service to Rome. Shortly thereafter, Napoleon had tr
eated the Papal States as just another conquered territory, had imprisoned the Pope, had made off with the treasures of the Holy See and the Vatican's secret archives, had dismantled the Holy Roman Empire which represented the Church's temporal dominion, had driven the Knights of Saint John from their abode on Malta and had definitively ruptured the relationship in France between Church and State.

  During the Second Empire of Napoleon III, the Church in France, though no longer yoked to the government, had managed to regain a measure of equilibrium. By 1870, however, that, too, had become precarious. By 1870, the Second Empire and the stability it had afforded were in process of collapse; and that collapse would be complete by the end of the year. No one, of course, could foresee the precise sequence of events that would follow – the Prussian investment and siege of Paris, the fratricidal days of the Commune, the tentative emergence of the Third Republic, the triumphant creation of the German Empire. But even by the middle of 1870, it was clear that the Church, whatever happened, would suffer. Four years earlier, after all, the Prussian war machine had almost casually crushed Habsburg Austria, the only remaining Catholic power of consequence on the continent, in a mere six weeks. Whether the Second French Empire could withstand a similar onslaught was doubtful; but even if it could, the Church's position would be severely shaken. And so far as military might was concerned, there would soon be only one ‘superpower’ in Europe, a monolithic martial state to the north where Rome enjoyed no official currency whatever and where the hated Lutheran Church was effectively an adjunct of the War Office.

  Against this backdrop, French ecclesiastics had begun to agitate within the Church itself. Since the Middle Ages, there had been incessant dispute about where ultimate authority in the Church lay. Did it reside with the Papacy and with the individual personage of the Pope? Or did it reside with the scattered bishops of Christendom, expressing their collective voice through Church councils? Was the Pope ultimately subordinate to councils of bishops? Or were the councils of bishops subordinate to the Pope? What would happen, for example, if the throne of Saint Peter were to be occupied by an heretical pontiff? Who would have the power to remove him? Rome, needless to say, insisted on the supremacy of the Papacy. The bishops of France, supported by many in Germany, advocated the supremacy of their councils.

  The contingency of an heretical Pope had been confronted and addressed by Church lawyers since the thirteenth century. To protect the Church from such a possibility, the lawyers had argued that supreme authority resided ultimately with a ‘General Council’. The persuasiveness of their argument was reinforced during the so-called Avignon Captivity, when two or even three rival Popes and Antipopes contended with, condemned and excommunicated each other. In 1378, John Wycliffe had observed from England: ‘I always knew the pope had cloven feet. Now he has a cloven head.’2

  At last, in 1414, the Council of Constance was convened –a General Council of the sort advocated by Church lawyers – to resolve the intractable and embarrassing situation. On 6 April 1415, the assembled ecclesiastics resolved by decree that ‘the council is above the Pope’.3 All Christians, including the Pope, were declared subject to the decisions of a General Council, which was deemed to derive its authority directly from God:

  This holy Synod of Constance, which forms an ecumenical council… declares the following:

  First, this synod, legitimately assembled in the Holy Spirit, which forms an ecumenical council and represents the Catholic Church in dispute, has its authority directly from Christ; everyone, of whatever estate or dignity, even if this be papal, is bound to obey it in matters relating to the faith.4

  According to the modern theologian Hans Küng: ‘Authority in the church does not lie in a monarch but in the church itself, of which the Pope is the servant, not the master.’5 As Küng explains, ‘the legitimacy of… all subsequent Popes to the present day depends on the legitimacy of the Council of Constance’.6 And he adds that

  the fundamental binding character of the decrees of Constance may not be evaded. No Pope has ever dared to repeal the decree… or to declare that it is not generally binding.7

  The decrees of Constance, which established the supremacy of a General Council over the Pope himself, were embraced with particular enthusiasm by the Church in France. In 1682, a council of French bishops and other clergy enunciated their position – subsequently known as ‘Gallicanism’ – in four central points, the so-called ‘Gallican Articles’. The ‘Gallican Articles’ stated that the Pope had no authority over temporal affairs and that kings were not subject to Papal rulings. The decrees of the Council of Constance were endorsed, and General Councils were declared to have greater authority than the Pope. The traditional independence of the Church in France was reasserted, and certain of its prerogatives – the right to appoint its own bishops, for example – were declared beyond the Papacy's power to rescind. And finally, the ‘Gallican Articles’ stated that no Papal decision was irrevocably fixed until a General Council had consented to it.

  Through the ensuing vicissitudes of French history, ‘Gallicanism’, with its adherence to ‘Conciliar’ authority, was to characterise the Church in France. By its very nature, it was potentially inimical to the Papacy. Pursued to its logical conclusion, ‘Gallicanism’ would effectively demote the Pope to what he had originally been – merely the Bishop of Rome, one among numerous bishops, enjoying some kind of nominal or symbolic leadership, but not any actual primacy or power. In short, the Church would be decentralised.

  The opposing position, which advocated the Pope's supremacy over bishops and councils, became known as ‘Ultramontane’, because it regarded authority as residing with the Papacy in Rome, ‘on the other side of the mountains’ from France. By 1870, the developments of the nineteenth century had brought the 450-year antagonism between ‘Gallican’ and ‘Ultramontane’ positions to a head. Out of this situation, the modern Papacy, the Papacy as we know it today, would emerge.

  11

  Infallibility

  Writing in the 1950s, an historian and Catholic apologist described the Papal States of the immediate post-Napoleonic period as ‘a benevolent theocracy’.1 Between 1823 and 1846, some 200,000 people in this ‘benevolent theocracy’ were consigned to the galleys, banished into exile, sentenced to life imprisonment or to death. Torture by the Inquisitors of the Holy Office was routinely practised. Every community, whether small rural village or major city, maintained a permanent gallows in its central square. Repression was rampant and surveillance constant, with Papal spies lurking everywhere. Meetings of more than three people were officially banned. Railways were banned because Pope Gregory XVI believed they might ‘work harm to religion’.2 Newspapers were also banned. According to a decree of Pope Pius VIII, anyone possessing a book written by a heretic was to be considered a heretic himself. Anyone overhearing criticism of the Holy Office and not reporting it to the authorities was deemed as guilty as the critic. For reading a book on the Index, or for eating meat on Friday, one could be imprisoned.

  In 1846, Pope Gregory XVI died and a new pontiff ascended the throne of Saint Peter under the name of Pius IX. It was a volatile moment in European history. Since 1815 – since Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo and the order imposed by the Congress of Vienna – Europe had passed through thirty years of relative stability, characterised by extreme reactionary conservatism. Now, the continent was stirring restlessly again. Among the diverse forces in the wind, two were particularly virulent – revolution and nationalism.

  Strangely enough, given his subsequent career, Pius IX began his reign with the reputation of a reformer. He was sympathetic to at least some form of Italian unification and nationalism. He envisioned himself, in his capacity of pontiff, serving as a divinely ordained conduit and instrument for Italy's rebirth. He dreamed of presiding over a confederation of Italian states. He even elicited hopeful appeals for support from Mazzini and Garibaldi, who in their naivety fancied they might find a new ally in the Church.

  Whate
ver illusions Pius may initially have fostered, they quickly evaporated, along with his popularity. It soon became apparent that the Italy the Pope had in mind bore little relation to any constitutional state. In 1848, he doggedly refused to lend his support to a rebellious military campaign against Austrian domination of the north. His studied neutrality was perceived as a craven betrayal; and the resulting violent backlash obliged him to flee Rome in ignominious disguise, as a priest in the carriage of the Bavarian ambassador. In 1850, Papal rule was restored by the arrival of French troops and Pius returned to his throne. His political position, however, now made no concessions of any kind to liberalism or reform; and the regime he established in his own domains was to become increasingly hated.

  As a result of the war between Austria and France in northern Italy in 1859, all the former Papal States were annexed by the new Kingdom of Italy except for Rome and the countryside immediately surrounding the city – a region of some 120 by 30 miles. Even in this shrunken domain, the Pope's position was precarious and had to be protected – in effect, guaranteed – by a perpetual French military presence. Thus shielded, Pius took advantage of developments in transport and communications to weaken further the authority of Catholic bishops and to centralise control increasingly in his own person. Alois Hötzl, for example, a distinguished Franciscan lecturer in philosophy and theology, was peremptorily summoned from Munich to Rome for having defended a writer the Pope and the Holy Office deemed inappropriate. Hötzl was promptly condemned and sentenced to a regimen of solitary spiritual exercises in a Roman monastery. His release was secured only by repeated appeals by the Bavarian ambassador, acting on the express orders of King Ludwig II; and even then, Hötzl was obliged officially to recant.