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The Holy Office
As the last third of the nineteenth century unscrolled, the Church was more bereft of temporal power than it had been for more than a millennium and a half. Nor was there much to be done about the situation. In certain quarters there was sporadic talk of a new Holy League, similar to that of the sixteenth century, which united the Catholic powers of Europe. Subsequent to 1870, however, there were few officially Catholic powers left on the continent. The most important was the Habsburg dual-monarchy of Austria-Hungary; but she, as Robert Musil later said, ‘spent only enough on her army to ensure her position as the second weakest of the great powers’. The weakest of all was the recently unified Kingdom of Italy, whose population was still largely Catholic but whose government, having finally wrested control from the Church, was hardly prepared to become the Church's sword arm. Neither could the Kingdom of Italy be expected to enter into alliance with the old Austrian enemy.
Like Italy, France remained largely Catholic in her population; but the Third French Republic had rigorously preserved the old revolutionary separation of Church and State. And after the cataclysmic defeats of the Franco-Prussian War, the fragile French government was in no position to pose a challenge to the newly created German Empire, the Second Reich, now the supreme military power on the continent. Spain and Portugal were still officially Catholic, but they no longer ranked as major powers. At the same time, a new threat had arisen in the east. For centuries, the Eastern Orthodox Church had played second fiddle to Rome in temporal might. Now, as the official Church of Tsarist Russia, she could muster far greater temporal resources than Rome; and in such Balkan principalities as Bosnia, she was actively encroaching on what had been Catholic territory. The friction between Catholic and Orthodox Churches intensified. By 1914, that friction had contributed more than a little to the shots in Sarajevo that precipitated the First World War.
If it was painfully vulnerable in the secular world, however, the Church believed itself newly armed and equipped in other spheres. The doctrine of Papal infallibility provided, if nothing else, a seemingly impregnable bulwark against the advances and trespasses of science. For the faithful at least, Papal infallibility preempted and precluded all argument. While the Church could not defeat its adversary, it was spared defeat itself by being prevented from even entering the arena. For devout Catholics, Papal infallibility constituted a new ‘rock’ against which the tide of infernally driven science could only break in vain.
Against science, the Church could therefore engage in a species of sustained holding action. Against its other chief opponent in the world of ideas – against, that is, the researches of historical, archaeological and biblical scholarship – it believed it could move on to the offensive. This conviction was to lead to the mortifying embarrassment of the Catholic Modernist Movement.
The Modernist Movement arose out of the specific desire to counter the depredations being wrought on scripture by commentators like Renan, and by Germanic biblical scholarship. Through Modernism, a new Church Militant – a Church Militant in the sphere of the mind – attempted to launch its counter-offensive. The Modernists were originally intended to employ the rigour, the discipline and precision of Germanic methodology not to challenge scripture, but to defend and support it. A generation of Catholic scholars was painstakingly trained and groomed to provide the Papacy with the equivalent of an academic strike force, a cadre purposefully formed to fortify the literal truth of scripture with all the heavy ordnance of the most up-to-date critical techniques and procedures. Like the Dominicans of the thirteenth century, like the Jesuits of the sixteenth, the Modernists were mobilised to launch a crusade that reclaimed lost territory.
To Rome's discomfiture and humiliation, however, the campaign backfired. The more the Church endeavoured to equip younger clerics with the tools necessary for combat in the modern polemical arena, the more those same clerics proceeded to desert the cause for which they had been recruited. Meticulous scrutiny of the Bible revealed a plethora of discrepancies, inconsistencies and repercussions that were alarmingly inimical to official dogma – and cast the doctrine of Papal infallibility in an ever more dubious light. Before anyone quite realised what was happening, the Modernists themselves had begun with their doubts and questions to erode and subvert the very positions they were supposed to be defending. They had also begun to challenge the Church's centralisation of authority.
Thus, for example, Alfred Loisy, one of the most distinguished and respected Modernists, asked publicly how certain of Rome's doctrines could possibly still be sustained in the wake of contemporary biblical and archaeological research. ‘Jesus proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom,’ Loisy stated, echoing Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, ‘but what came was the Church.’1 Loisy demonstrated that many points of dogma had crystallised as historically determined reactions to specific events, at specific places and times. They were not, therefore, to be perceived as fixed and immutable truths, but at best as symbols. According to Loisy, such basic premises of Christian teaching as the Virgin Birth and Jesus's divinity were no longer tenable as literal.
In 1893, Loisy was dismissed from his teaching position, but that did little to salvage the situation because he remained vociferous and prolific. In relation to Loisy and his Modernist colleagues, the Church was in the dilemma of an arsonist trapped in the building he has himself set alight. Modernism was no longer merely embarrassing. It was displaying a capacity for becoming genuinely disruptive and destructive.
In 1902, nine months before his death, Pope Leo XIII created the Pontifical Biblical Commission to supervise and monitor the work of Catholic scriptural scholars. Officially the Commission's task was ‘to strive… with all possible care that God's words… will be shielded not only from every breath of error but even from every rash of opinion’.2 It was to ensure that scholars ‘endeavour to safeguard the authority of the scriptures and to promote their right interpretation’.3
Leo XIII died in July 1903, to be succeeded by Pius X. The new Pope promptly established his position by making two appointments that were to have a prominent influence in determining the character of the twentieth-century Church. One of these was Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val (1865–1930), a cold and sinister personality, born in London to an English-woman and an aristocratic Spanish diplomat. He had worked in the Vatican's diplomatic service, and in 1898 had become a consultant to the department entrusted with maintaining the Index of prohibited books. Merry del Val had played a key role in orchestrating the election of Pius X as pontiff and exercised an enormous influence over the new Pope, who raised him to cardinal and appointed him Vatican Secretary of State – a position he continued to hold until Pius's death in 1914. His personal and doctrinal rigidity shaped the entire tenor of Pius's reign. He was vehemently hostile to Modernism and devoted himself to destroying it, even helping to establish a network of informers to denounce clerics and teachers who displayed Modernist tendencies. When Pius died, Merry del Val became Prefect of the Holy Office, or Grand Inquisitor, a post he retained until his own death in 1930.
Pius's second important appointee was Cardinal Mariano Rampolla del Tindaro (1843–1913), a scion of the Sicilian nobility. In 1887, he had been made a cardinal and Merry del Val's predecessor as Vatican Secretary of State. Under Pius X, he became Secretary of the Holy Inquisition. He was also made a member, then President, of the Pontifical Biblical Commission – which was thus brought under the Inquisition's authority. Between them, Rampolla del Tindaro and Merry del Val transformed the Commission into what one commentator has described as ‘a militant mouthpiece for their own interests'.4 In 1905, it officially declared that biblical texts were to be regarded as absolutely and literally ‘true’ history. It also published formal decrees on ‘the right way to teach… scripture’5 – decrees which, in 1907, Pope Pius X made obligatory throughout the Church.
On his election as pontiff in 1903, Pius X, supported by Rampolla del Tindaro and Merry del Val, had immediatel
y placed the Modernist works of Alfred Loisy on the Index of forbidden books. In 1904, the new Pope issued two encyclicals opposing any scholarship that presumed to explore the origins and early history of Christianity. Seminaries and theological schools began to receive visits of inspection from the Vatican's minions. All Catholic teachers suspected of Modernist tendencies were summarily suspended or dismissed from their posts.
The Modernists, the best-educated, most erudite and articulate enclave in the Church, had few compunctions about fighting back. They received eloquent support from secular quarters – from prominent thinkers, from acclaimed cultural and literary figures, such as Antonio Fogazzaro in Italy and Roger Martin du Gard, subsequent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in France. In 1896, Fogazzaro had become a senator. He was also revered as ‘the leading Catholic layman of his day’ and, by his contemporaries at least, as the greatest novelist Italy had produced since Manzoni. In The Saint, published in 1905, Fogazzaro wrote:
The Catholic Church, calling herself the fountain of truth, today opposes the search after truth when her foundations, the sacred books, the formulae of her dogmas, her alleged infallibility, become objects of research. To us, this signifies that she no longer has faith in herself.6
Fogazzaro's work, needless to say, was itself promptly placed on the Index. And the Church's campaign against the movement it had fostered and nurtured was intensified. In 1907, the Pope issued an encyclical that formally condemned Modernism. In the same year, the Inquisition published a decree that castigated Modernist presumption in questioning Church doctrine, Papal authority and the historical veracity of biblical texts. In September 1907, Modernism was declared a heresy and the entire Modernist movement was officially banned. The quantity of books on the Index suddenly increased dramatically. A new, much more stringent censorship was introduced. Ecclesiastical commissars monitored teaching with a doctrinaire inflexibility unknown since the Counter-Reformation. At last, in 1910, a decree was issued compelling all Catholics involved in preaching or teaching to swear an oath repudiating ‘all the errors of Modernism’ – an oath that was not to be abolished until 1967. A number of Modernist writers were excommunicated. Students at seminaries and theological colleges were even prohibited from reading newspapers.
In originally endorsing and sponsoring the Modernist movement, the Church had attempted to enter the modern world, availing itself of the modern world's intellectual resources and scholarly methodology. Given the result of the experiment, one might well be justified in concluding the Church and the modern world to be incompatible. That, certainly, seemed to be the Church's conclusion. Rome withdrew into a bunker of its own and remained there until the 1960s.
Its public image scarred by the battle with Modernism, the Inquisition was in urgent need of a facelift. In 1908, the word ‘Inquisition’ was officially dropped from its title and it became the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office.
Monsignor Benigni's Intelligence Network
The influence of Cardinal Merry del Val, Prefect of the Holy Office or Grand Inquisitor, continued to radiate as the twentieth century unfolded. When he died in 1930, the eleven cardinals who comprised the ruling council of the Holy Office were all his protégés. One of them, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, eventually became Pope Pius XII in 1939. Another, Cardinal Donato Sbarretti, became the new Prefect and presided in that capacity throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. Among the consultants to the Holy Office under Merry del Val were the two figures who succeeded Sbarretti and presided as Prefect from the early 1940s until 1982. One of the consultants under Sbarretti was Giovanni Battista Montini – who became Pope Paul VI in 1963. Thus did Merry del Val's shadow brood over the Holy Office and the Papacy throughout most of the twentieth century. As we will see shortly, it has still not been exorcised.
Not surprisingly, the cardinal and his disciples also endeavoured to extend their influence, insofar as possible, into politics. In the political arena, one of Merry del Val's most sinister protégés was Monsignor Umberto Benigni (1862–1934), described by a contemporary as a ‘strange character and without scruples’.7 A native of Perugia, Benigni was ordained in 1884 and became a teacher of ecclesiastical history at a local seminary. He then took up journalism of sorts, founding a popular Catholic publication. In 1901, he moved to Rome to continue teaching there, but soon abandoned that in order to work in the Curia, becoming a secretary at the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. Then, in 1906, he joined the press office of the Vatican's Secretary of State, Merry del Val. For the next five years, Benigni worked under the auspices of the future Grand Inquisitor. At last, in 1911, he left, and, with Merry del Val's blessing, devoted himself entirely to the administration of the secret society he had founded two years earlier, Sodalitium pianum (‘Pius Society’).
Its original objectives were to help implement and enforce Pope Pius X's strictures against Modernism. In 1907, Pius had ‘urged bishops to supervise closely seminary teaching and writing by priests and to establish in each diocese vigilance committees’.8 In accordance with this injunction, Benigni had created his secret society as an international network of informers to spy, collect and collate information on suspected Modernist sympathisers, who would then be publicly exposed and condemned. Acting as a species of ad hoc and self-appointed Inquisition, Sodalitium pianum employed codes, pseudonyms and all the other devices associated with an intelligence agency. Many of its activities remain unknown to this day, as do the undercover links it forged with a spectrum of religious and political institutions. All papers pertaining to Sodalitium pianum are locked away in the Vatican's archives and have never been released.
In parallel to his clandestine network, Benigni produced a regular publication, Corrispondenza di Roma which, to reflect its orientation and primary audience, subsequently adopted the French version of its name, Correspondance de Rome. Like Sodalitium pianum, Correspondance devoted itself to exposing Modernism and Modernist sympathisers, to denouncing teachers, scholars and clerics who had allegedly deviated from doctrinal orthodoxy. Both Benigni's enterprises were openly endorsed by Pope Pius X, as well as by Merry del Val. With Pius's death, however, some wider support began to wane. In 1913, Correspondance was closed down. Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, German troops in Belgium captured an archive of documents belonging to Sodalitium pianum. The documents contained compromising evidence, and pressure was brought to bear on the Vatican to curb Benigni's activities. Eventually, Sodalitium pianum was suppressed by Pope Benedict XV, in 1921.
In Merry del Val, however, Benigni possessed a powerful protector, under whose auspices he proceeded to engage in other dubious undertakings. For centuries, the Church had dreamed of establishing a foothold in Russia and gradually displacing or subsuming Russian Orthodoxy. Were anything of that sort to occur, the Greek Orthodox Church would be increasingly marginalised, and Rome would be strategically positioned to repair the schism with Byzantium that had split Christendom a millennium and a half earlier. Accordingly, Pius X had created an ‘exarchate’ of the Russian Rite in 1907 and appointed a Uniate Archbishop of Lvov in what is now Poland. Immediately thereafter, Benigni had begun to meddle in Russian affairs. By 1910, he was on intimate terms with pan-Slavic – that is, hardline right-wing – Russian diplomats and politicians.
Whatever schemes he may have been hatching were shelved by the outbreak of the First World War, then definitively thwarted by the Revolution and the bloody civil conflict that followed. As the Bolsheviks emerged triumphant, it must have been apparent to him that Russia was a lost cause, for his lifetime at least. He accordingly turned his attention elsewhere.
In 1920, still under the protection of Merry del Val, Benigni began to produce a bulletin in French called Antisémite. Despite this title, the cardinal insisted that he was not really anti-Semitic. He was merely opposed to the alleged international Judaic conspiracy that dominated banking, Freemasonry and Bolshevism. If pressed, he would no doubt have pleaded that some of his best
friends were Jews. Or perhaps not, since he referred to the Jewish people as the ‘Elect of the Antichrist’.9
In 1923, two years after the suppression of Benigni's Sodalitium pianum, a new organisation appeared in France under the name of ERDS – Entente romaine de défense sociale. Some commentators have suggested that ERDS was in fact a resurrection of Sodalitium pianum under a new appellation. To join the ranks of ERDS, one had to be Christian, belong to an ‘aryan or aryanised nation’ and embrace the motto ‘Religion, Family, Homeland’,10 a motto revived and being promulgated by a certain Catholic organisation today. One of the primary spokesmen for ERDS was a certain Abbé Boulin, who wrote belligerently of the ‘assault’ on Europe by international Jewish banking.11 In 1924, Boulin co-hosted, in Paris, a meeting of a self-styled ‘Anti-Jewish International’. A second such meeting was convened a year later in Austria, and Benigni attended it.12
From what is known of it, E RD S would appear to have had much in common with Action française, the hardline right-wing nationalist movement whose cult of ‘blood and soil’ was similar to that of National Socialism in Germany. Benigni was a vigorous supporter of Action française, whose membership is believed to have included certain of the French leaders of the old Sodalitium pianum.13 Unfortunately for the cardinal, relations with Action française tended to be uneasy. In 1926, a rift opened between them that was never subsequently repaired.
On 11 February 1929, the Lateran Treaty was signed between the Vatican and Benito Mussolini, Italian Prime Minister since 1922, establishing the Vatican City as an independent and sovereign state, a self-contained enclave that was not part of Italian soil. The Church was indemnified for the loss of the old Papal States and Catholicism was adopted as Italy's official religion. In return, the Papacy deigned to recognise Italy as a kingdom and Rome as its capital. For the first time since 1870, the Pope ventured to set foot in the Eternal City.
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