The Inquisition
Page 20
Within his own domain, Pope Pius IX ruled as an absolute monarch. The old restrictions, such as those curbing the right of assembly, still applied. No independent newspapers were allowed. Dispatches from reporters and correspondents working within the Papal State were intercepted by the police before they could be sent abroad. Any adverse criticism was censored or suppressed, and critics themselves were often banished. Undesirable books and journals were denied entry. All writings advocating ecclesiastical reform, or even the ‘Gallican’ position, were automatically placed on the Index.
The values and attitudes of the age could not, however, be altogether ignored. Thus, for example, the Holy Office no longer enjoyed the prerogative of burning people. There were also some curbs on torture. But the Holy Office, by Papal decree, still retained the powers of ‘excommunication, confiscation, banishment, imprisonment for life, as well as secret execution in heinous cases’.3 Papal police and spies continued to be ubiquitous and were quick to act against political or theological transgressions. Arrests were common and numerous. Political offences were heard by special courts and judged solely by priests exercising unchallenged authority. ‘In the best traditions of the Inquisition’, those accused were never allowed to meet witnesses brought against them by the prosecution, nor were they permitted to be defended by a lawyer. Doctors were forbidden to continue treating any patient who, after a third visit, did not consult with his confessor. Jewish doctors were prohibited from practising at all. By dint of pressure from the Pope, they were also banned from the adjacent territory of Tuscany.
Such was the temporal regime of Pius IX. As if to surround himself with an army of celestial enforcers as well, the Pope proceeded to create an unprecedented number of new saints. In 1862, for example, he created twenty-six of them at once by canonising twenty-six missionaries killed in Japan in 1597. He packed the episcopate with bishops of like mind to his own and established more than 200 new dioceses. Acting on his own authority – without, that is, the consent of a General Council supposedly required by the Council of Constance – he elevated to the status of official dogma the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Contrary to the misapprehension of non-Catholics, this did not refer to Jesus's alleged virgin birth. It posited, rather, that Mary, in order to serve as vessel for God's incarnation in Jesus, had herself to have been born free of original sin. By virtue of the Pope's declaration, her purity became retroactively ‘true’.
In 1864, as the American Civil War attained its bloody climax and the Prussian military machine under Bismarck crushed Denmark in six days, the Pope declared his own war against ‘progress, liberalism and modern civilisation’. These things were officially denounced in an encyclical letter issued to all Roman Catholic bishops, in which the pontiff expressed his dream of seeing the entire world united under one religion – that of Rome.
Appended to the encyclical letter was a formal ‘Syllabus of Errors’, a catalogue or inventory of all the attitudes and beliefs the Pope deemed dangerous, wrong and heretical. Not surprisingly, the ‘Syllabus’ condemned rationalism, secret societies and Bible societies. According to the Pope, it was also an error to believe that every individual ‘is free to embrace and profess that religion… he shall consider true’.4 Equally erroneous was the belief that ‘it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship’.5 It was wrong to believe ‘that persons… shall enjoy the public exercise of their own peculiar worship’.6 The eightieth and last error condemned by the Pope was the belief that he himself, the Roman pontiff, ‘can and should reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilisation’.7
The ‘Syllabus of Errors’ was accompanied by a short introduction from Cardinal Antonelli, Secretary of State for the Papal States and one of the cardinals presiding over the Holy Office – which had now taken to referring to itself as the Sacred Roman and Universal Inquisition. Antonelli wrote that the Pope
has willed that a syllabus of the same errors should be compiled, to be sent to all the Bishops of the Catholic world, in order that these Bishops may have before their eyes all the errors and pernicious doctrines which he has reprobated and condemned.8
One historian has commented that ‘the Syllabus was widely regarded as a gesture of defiance hurled by an outraged Pope against the nineteenth century’.9 Such a conclusion is apt. In effect, the Pope was trying to outdo King Canute. His ultimate desire was for God to abrogate and annul the nineteenth century in its entirety. When God failed to comply, the Pope attempted to commandeer and usurp the divine prerogative by declaring himself infallible.
For some years prior to this step, Pius IX had been implementing measures that would transform the Papacy. At a time when even the most autocratic secular regimes had begun to inch their way towards representative democracy, the Church, under Pius, was moving in precisely the opposite direction – towards neo-feudal absolutism. It was as if the Pope and the rebranded Inquisition sought to compensate for the increasing loss of temporal power by arrogating an ever greater psychological and spiritual authority. If the Grand Inquisitor could no longer legally send people to the stake, he would now undertake to penalise them from within, working through their con-sciences by means of techniques similar to those of voodoo. In effect, the spirit of the Papacy sought to ‘possess’ the faithful. Having been dispossessed of worldly sovereignty, the Church now endeavoured to establish a new domain for itself primarily within the vulnerable confines of the Catholic mind.
This shift in the Church's ‘theatre of operations’ was inaugurated by the First Vatican Council, which convened under the auspices of Pius IX in December 1869. It continued for some ten and a half months, and when it ground to a halt on 20 October 1870, the Papacy had been transformed.
The Council began in a predictable enough fashion, with more or less conventional condemnation of atheism, materialism and pantheism. Before long, however, its real thrust was to become apparent – to resolve definitively the centuries-old struggle for authority between bishops, who wanted a more decentralised Church, and the Papacy, which sought supreme and autocratic power. By the time the Council concluded, it was the Papacy's aspirations that had emerged triumphant.
Vatican I was not a free Council. On the contrary, it was characterised by bullying, intimidation and coercion. It was dominated entirely by the Pope's wishes, and there were no secret ballots to protect dissenters. Those who opposed Pius's will were under no illusions about what they would incur. At best, they would be forced to resign or simply be removed from their posts. At worst, they could expect to be arrested by the Papal police, who operated in accordance with the Inquisition.
At first things did not come to anything so extreme or so dramatic. After all many bishops were financially dependent on the Vatican and thus on the goodwill of the Pope. More than 300 of them had been brought to Rome at the pontiff's expense. Having thereby placed them in his debt, he could feel confident enough about their loyalty in any ensuing controversy.
Having stacked the odds in his favour, the Pope could deal swiftly, ruthlessly and decisively with any dissent. When, for example, a Croatian bishop dared to assert that even Protestants were capable of loving Jesus, he was loudly shouted down. When he dared further to ‘dispute the feasibility of deciding dogmatic questions by majority rule’, the majority erupted with the rabid fury of a lynch mob, screaming across the floor of the Council: ‘Lucifer! Anathema! A second Luther! Throw him out!’10
Nor was the Pope himself above personal intimidation. When the Chaldean Patriarch, for example, presumed to challenge a proposed Bull that augmented the Papacy's power to appoint ecclesiastics, he was angrily summoned to a private meeting in one of the Pope's chambers. No sooner had he entered than the pontiff, shaking with rage, bolted the doors behind him. He must either consent to the Bull in writing or resign. Unless he did one or the other, he would never leave the room. On this occasion, the Patriarch
submitted. When he defied the Pope again later in the Council, he was summarily dismissed from his position.11
In this atmosphere of bullying and menace, few ecclesiastics possessed sufficient courage to protest openly. Many of them left the Council before it had finished its business. The Pope encouraged their flight, pleased to be rid of rebellious voices.
It soon became apparent that the ultimate objective and governing purpose of the First Vatican Council was to promulgate the doctrine of Papal infallibility. This issue, however, was not announced in advance. Indeed, it was kept rigorously secret. The Prefect of the Vatican Secret Archives was sacked for allowing certain friends to see the Pope's rules for debate; and lest he had a key he might pass on to his successor, the door affording access from his rooms to the archive was walled up.12
The Inquisition, in contrast, was privy to the Pope's plans. It was instrumental in keeping them secret until the appropriate moment and then in railroading them through whatever opposition might arise. Of the five men presiding over the First Vatican Council, three were cardinals, all of them members of the Inquisition. Of the various commissions operating behind the Council, the most important was the one devoted to theology and dogma. On the advice of Cardinal Giuseppe Bizzari, also a member of the Inquisition, it was established ‘that the Holy Office must form the core of the commission entrusted with doctrinal matters’.13 When one cardinal expressed anxiety about introducing the question of Papal infallibility, he was told not to worry, to leave everything to the Inquisition and let the Holy Spirit take care of the rest.14
In the Bull that announced the gathering of the Council, there was no mention whatever of Papal infallibility. There was no mention either in any preparatory literature or preliminary agenda. The issue was not even raised until February 1870, by which time the Council had already been in session for a full two months and the ranks of the Pope's opponents thinned. When the matter of Papal infallibility was finally introduced, therefore, most of the assembled bishops were caught by surprise and off guard. Many of them were profoundly shocked. More than a few were genuinely horrified.
As in matters of lesser consequence, dissenters were subjected to extreme pressure and intimidation. Some were threatened with curtailment of financial support. When an abbot-general of an Armenian monastic order spoke out against infallibility, he was told he would be dismissed, then sentenced by the infuriated Pope to a regimen of ‘compulsory spiritual exercises’ in a local monastery – a form, in effect, of house arrest.15 Another Armenian ecclesiastic received a similar sentence. When he defied it, the Papal police attempted to arrest him in the street, and the ensuing brawl escalated into a riot. Immediately thereafter, all the Armenian bishops requested permission to leave the Council. When this was refused, two of them fled.16
Altogether, 1,084 bishops were eligible to attend and vote at the First Vatican Council, of whom some 700 were actually present. Approximately fifty were fervent supporters of the Pope's desire to arrogate infallibility to himself, some 130 were militantly opposed to it, and the remainder were initially indifferent or undecided. By the time it came to a vote, the Papacy's strong-arm tactics had tipped the balance decisively. In the first vote, on 13 July 1870, 451 declared themselves in favour and eighty-eight opposed.17 Four days later, on 17 July, fifty-five bishops officially stated their opposition but declared that, out of reverence for the Pope, they would abstain from the vote scheduled for the following day. All of them then left Rome, as a good many others had already done. The second and final vote occurred on 18 July. The number of those supporting the Papacy's position increased to 535. Only two voted against, one of them Bishop Edward Fitzgerald of Little Rock, Arkansas. Of the 1,084 bishops eligible to vote on the issue of Papal infallibility, a total of 535 had finally endorsed it – a ‘majority’ of just over 49 per cent.18 By virtue of this ‘majority’, the Pope, on 18 July 1870, was formally declared infallible in his own right and ‘not as a result of the consent of the Church’.19 As one commentator has observed, ‘this removed all conciliarist interpretations of the role of the Papacy’.20
The decisive vote of 18 July occurred against a background of increasingly turbulent political events. On the very next day, 19 July, the French Empire under Napoleon III suicidally declared war on Prussia. The chaos that ensued in France distracted attention from religious affairs and no doubt blunted what might otherwise have been a rebellious reaction from the independent-minded French clergy. Elsewhere a backlash did occur. Prejudice against the Church seemed to have acquired a new justification; and anti-Catholic sentiment erupted across the whole of Europe and North America. In Holland, there was virtual schism. In the Habsburg imperium of Austria-Hungary, a concordat previously concluded with the Papacy was abrogated by the government. The Papal Nuncio in Vienna reported to the Vatican's Secretary of State that ‘almost all the bishops of Austria-Hungary now returned from Rome are furious over the definition of infallibility’;21 and two of them publicly demanded that a debate be opened to reverse the decision of the Council. For more than a year, the bishops of Hungary refused to accept the Council's ruling.
The Bishop of Rottenburg openly branded the Pope the ‘disturber of the Church’.22 In Braunsberg, a distinguished professor published a manifesto castigating the pontiff as ‘heretic and devastator of the Church’; and the local cardinal and the local bishop both tacitly concurred in this condemnation.23 In Prussia, Bismarck introduced laws that radically altered the Church's status and relationship with the state. Jesuits were effectively banned from the kingdom. Legal proceedings were instituted for the appointment of clergy. Civil marriage ceremonies were made obligatory. All schools were placed under state supervision.
In the face of such reactions, the Papacy simply became more aggressive. All bishops were ordered to submit in writing to the new dogma; and those who refused were penalised or removed from their posts. So, too, were rebellious teachers and professors of theology. Papal nuncios were instructed to denounce defiant ecclesiastics and scholars as heretics. All books and articles challenging, or even questioning, the dogma of Papal infallibility were automatically placed on the Index. On at least one occasion, attempts were made to suppress a hostile book through bribery. Many records of the Council itself were confiscated, sequestered, censored or destroyed. One opponent of the new dogma, for example, Archbishop Vincenzo Tizzani, Professor of Church History at the Papal University of Rome, wrote a detailed account of the proceedings. Immediately after his death, his manuscript was purchased by the Vatican and has been kept locked away ever since.24
Against the tide of history, however, the Pope's newly acquired infallibility proved of little avail. At the beginning of September, the French army surrendered at Sédan, Napoleon III abdicated and the Second Empire collapsed. In a hopelessly belated attempt to avert catastrophe, the French troops protecting the Vatican were recalled. On 20 September, Italian soldiers marched triumphantly into Rome. Deliberations of the First Vatican Council juddered to a halt, and the Council itself closed a fortnight later. In July 1871, Rome became the capital of the newly unified and newly secularised Kingdom of Italy. The monarch, Victor Emmanuel, installed himself in the former Papal palace of the Quirinal.
Two months earlier, in May, the Italian government had enacted the Law of Guarantees. According to this measure, the Pope's safety was assured and he was accorded the status of a reigning sovereign in the Vatican. Vatican City – a tract of land totalling some 108.7 acres within the ancient walls of the Vatican itself – was declared an independent principality, not part of Italian soil.
Unappeased, the Pope embarked on a highly publicised sulk. Refusing to leave the Vatican, he complained that he was being held prisoner. Within the confines of his own miniaturised domain, he endeavoured to remain oblivious to the external world; and there is some evidence that infallibility by then had gone to his head. In the account of one commentator at the time:
The pope recently got the urge to try out his infallibility. While
out on a walk he called to a paralytic: ‘Get up and walk.’ The poor devil gave it a try and collapsed, which put God's viceregent very much out of sorts… I really believe that he's insane.25
For the next fifty-eight years, the Papacy persisted in refusing to acknowledge the Italian state. During the whole of that time, no Pope visited Rome or deigned to set foot on Italian soil. At last, in February 1929, the Lateran Treaty was concluded. Vatican City was officially recognised and ratified as a sovereign state under international law, and Catholicism was proclaimed the state religion of the Italian people. In return, the Papacy formally recognised the Italian government – the government of Benito Mussolini.
By that time Pope Pius IX was long dead. He had died in 1878. He had been one of the most influential of modern Popes, but also one of the most unpopular. In 1881, his body was moved in an elaborate funeral procession from Saint Peter's across the Tiber and through Rome. Mobs gathered and yelled abuse: ‘Long live Italy!’ ‘Death to the Pope!’ ‘Throw the pig in the river!’ Along the route of the procession, stones were hurled and six individuals were arrested – apparently for attempting to seize the dead pontiff's coffin and tip it into the Tiber. They were charged with ‘disturbing a religious function’, and the reigning Pope, Leo XIII, lodged a formal protest with the Italian government for the ‘outrage’ to the Papacy's dignity.26 Despite such hostility, however, Pius IX had made an indelible mark on history:
When he died, he had effectively created the modern papacy, stripped… of its temporal dominion but armed with vastly enhanced spiritual authority in compensation.27