"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.22
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.23
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.24
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.25 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?26
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."27
3. The Last Days of Papal Rome
ON 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."1
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.3
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.4
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. 5
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!"6
On August 3, an Italian military attaché brought Napoleon a secret plan, offering Italian support in exchange for permitting the Italians to take Rome. But the French emperor rebuffed the proposal, fearing that it would enrage his Catholic supporters, who were about the only supporters he had left. The French Catholic right would, he said, rather see "the Prussians in Paris than the Italians in Rome."7
Amazingly, despite the first catastrophic French defeats and Napoleon's rejection of the Italians' proposal, Victor Emmanuel persisted in pressing for Italian military intervention on behalf of the French. He apparently went so far as to tell Napoleon that he would dismiss his prime minister and the entire cabinet if they refused to go along with him. Fortunately for the Italians, the king's ministers—and most notably his prime minister, Giovanni Lanza—were finally able to persuade him that siding with the French would be disastrous and likely to lead to a republican insurrection in Italy. 8
In Rome, the pope and Church leaders watched developments with mounting alarm. Antonelli was certainly under no illusions: should the French be defeated, he knew there would be nothing to stop the Italians from seizing the Holy City.
In Antonelli's mind, the hopelessness of their position could be attributed in no small part to his own defeats in internal Church politics, including the vote for papal infallibility. What most angered him was the prospect that he would be held responsible for what was to come. "They want to have me take the blame for things that I not only didn't do, but that I opposed with all my might," said Antonelli on the day of the final infallibility vote. "You will see," he told one confidant, "that they will say that it is I who will have wrecked the papacy."9
With many convinced that the loss of Rome was only days or weeks away, the Holy City was filled with rumors of the pope's imminent departure. As Count Kulczycki reported, "The Jesuits and the other prelates of their party are pressing Pius IX to leave immediately ... They are advising him to ask the English for protection and move to Malta."
At the same time, others in the Vatican were pleading with the pope to find a way to come to terms with Italy and perhaps save Rome from occupation. Among them was Cardinal Antonelli himself. He had no luck.10
Meanwhile, the Holy See was trying to calm the people of Rome, who found themselves locked inside the city gates. L'Osservatore Romano, closely identified with the pope, ran a series of articles offering French assurances that—appearances notwithstanding—the Convention of September remained fully in effect.11
The pressure on the king and his prime minister to seize Rome could no longer be stopped. On August 13, while attempting to pass himself off as an Englishman named John Brown, Giuseppe Mazzini was recognized on a ship in Palermo, where he had gone to promote a republican uprising against the Italian king. Seized by the Italian police, he was taken to Gaeta, the same fourteenth-century castle north of Naples where the pope had himself taken refuge from the Roman revolution of 1848. The government needed the prophet of Italian nationalism out of the way. On September 8, Lanza sent a telegram to the prefeet who oversaw Gaeta: "Recommend maximum vigilance custody Mazzini. His escape at this moment would create serious embarrassment for the government." 12
The same day Lanza sent a similar telegram to the prefect of Sassari, in Sardinia, where Garibaldi was being kept under government surveillance in Caprera, with the order to arrest him should he attempt any move to the mainland.13 The irony could scarcely have been greater: the two heroes of the Risorgimento, its theorist, Mazzini, and its general, Garibaldi, were both under Italian police control as Rome was about to be taken.14
The pope, however, remained convinced that the Italians would never conquer the Holy City. For one thing, he was not yet persuaded that the French—whose Convention of September offered him a guarantee against Italian invasion—were going to lose. By August 20, when the Swiss general Hermann Kanzler, head of the papal army, went to see Pius, news of the massing of Italian troops on the border of the Roman territories had already reached them, yet the pope told him to remain calm. "The Holy Father, whom I saw this morning," Kanzler reported, "does not believe all the rumors about an imminent violation of his territory by Italian troops. He believes such an attack is only possible by revolutionary bands."15
The pope explained this confidence in an article that, it appears, he ordered to be written for L'Osservatore Romano in mid-August. It stressed the promises received from both Bismarck and the king of Prussia that the pope's territory would remain intact and also told of the assurances given by the Italians to the French diplomats that they had no intention of taking Rome by force. In another story in the newspaper, on August 16, datelined Florence, the correspondent could not have been more confident: "I repeat, this government has no intention of occupying any part of the Pontifical State."16
Not all shared this optimism, and Pius was growing irritated by the ever more insistent pleas he was getting from his military officers, asking what to do should the Italian troops cross into papal territory. When, on Wednesday, August 17, Monsignor Randi, the pope's police commissioner, came to see him and asked for such instructions, the pope jumped out of his seat angrily and shouted: "Can't you understand that I have formal assurances that the Italians will not set foot in Rome? How many times must I keep repeating myself?"17
On August 20, Italy's House of Deputies passed a motion of confidence in the government on the condition that it commit itself "to resolve the Roman question in a manner in keeping with national aspirations."18 Alarmed by the lightly veiled threat, Cardinal Manning, the archbishop of Westminster and the leader of the Catholic Church in England, met with William Gladstone to call for British assistance in defending the pope. Within days, a British envoy informed Antonelli that the British warship Defence had arrived at Civitavecchia with instructions to take the pope aboard should he wish to flee.19
The pope can perhaps be forgiven for his misreading of the situation in these days, for he was getting very mixed signals from his diplomatic corps. On the afternoon of August 23, for example, he received a telegram from a high Church sou
rce in Vienna telling him that the Austrian emperor had just offered assurances that Italian troops would not enter papal territory.20 Pius had also read a dispatch from the Florence correspondent of L'Osservatore Romano the previous day, saying that it was "impossible that the government could now be thinking of violating its treaties." The paper reprinted a story from a Florence newspaper close to the Italian government which had branded the idea of taking advantage of France's misfortunes by marching on Rome as "neither honest, nor loyal ... a policy unworthy of a great nation."21
But, at the same time, the pope received a long report from his nuncio in Vienna that painted a very different picture. Prussia, he wrote, was secretly urging the Italian government to occupy all of the pontifical state, including Rome. Under the Prussian plan, an honorific position would be reserved for the pope and perhaps also a small patch of land, the Leonine city in Rome being one possibility. The Austrians, for their part, had no difficulty with this plan, the nuncio wrote, although Count Beust, the Austrian foreign minister, thought that the arrival of Italian troops in Rome might well lead the pope to abandon the city. "Should the Holy Father seek asylum," the nuncio learned, "Austria will offer him an Italian city within the Empire, either Trent, Gorizia, or Zara, or another city of Dalmatia."22
Although the situation looked bleak, it was not yet hopeless. Italy's ambassador to France had again assured the French foreign minister that there was to be no attack on Rome, news that the papal nuncio in Paris hastened to pass on to the Holy See. In a second long note on the same day, the nuncio described the chaotic situation in France, which, he thought, also offered some hope. The military disasters, he wrote, were sparking a widespread return to the Church. "Not only the good people but also the [religiously] indifferent have been struck by the coincidence of its being the very day that the troops were withdrawn from Rome that the French army's catastrophe on the Rhine began, and the conviction is spreading and deepening that the French government's sins toward the Holy See have provoked God's wrath on France." 23
Prisoner of the Vatican Page 5