I THE CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION

BY the 1780s, every Catholic state in Europe wanted to reduce the Pope to a ceremonial figurehead, and most had succeeded. Kings and princes appointed bishops and abbots, dictated which feast days would be observed and which ignored, policed or prevented appeals to Rome, vetted the publication of papal utterances.

This was a theological as well as a political phenomenon. Under the influence of Jansenism and a growing Catholic interest in the early Church many theologians emphasised the supremacy of the bishop in the local church. The Pope was primate, and the final resort in doctrinal disputes, but papal intervention in day-to-day affairs was considered usurpation, and the Christian prince fulfilled the role of Constantine in restricting it.

The powers and actions of papal nuncios focused some of these animosities. Everyone agreed that the Pope should have diplomatic representatives at the courts of Catholic kings. But the nuncios represented the spiritual as well as the temporal authority of the Pope, and had the powers of roving archbishops. They ordained, confirmed, dispensed, they heard appeals in the territories of the local bishops. These activities were resented.When Pope Pius VI (1775-99), at the invitation of the Elector of Bavaria, established a nuncio at Munich in 1785, the heads of the German hierarchy, the archbishops of Trier, Mainz, Cologne and Strasbourg, appealed to the Emperor to curtail the power of nuncios in Germany.

Throughout Catholic Europe in the eighteenth century devout men looked for a reform of religion which would free it from superstition and ignorance, which would make it more useful, moral, rational. [i.e. that would serve the interests of the state in upholding accepted morality]

Many Catholics blamed the popes for upholding "superstition." Men of the Enlightenment disliked relics and indulgences, and Rome was the main source of both. They disapproved of ‘superstitious’ devotions like the Sacred Heart, and the religious orders who propagated them, like the Jesuits; but the papacy was the friend of such devotion. They thought that the parish church and the parish clergy were useful, but that monasteries were a bad thing, refuges for men too lazy to work, or for girls who would be better off running homes and having babies. Yet the popes supported and privileged the monastic orders, and in the process undermined the authority of the local bishops and the parish clergy.

JOSEPH II of Austria, Holy Roman Emperor since 1765 and sole ruler of Austria from the death of his mother Maria Theresa in 1780, was a devout Catholic. He was fascinated by the smallest details of Church life, and he was painstaking and pious in discharging his role as the first Prince of Christendom. Frederick the Great of Prussia sneered at ‘my brother the sacristan’. Joseph was an autocrat, though a benevolent one, who completed the liberation of the serfs begun by his mother, granted freedom of religion within his domains, and filled his kingdom with schools, orphanages, hospitals. He had no imagination, and had trouble grasping the contrariness of human nature. He was genuinely surprised that his edict forbidding the use of coffins and ordering the use of canvas sacks instead (to save on wood and ^[p.196] nails) should produce so much resistance.

The Catholic Church was the special focus of Joseph’s attempts at rationalisation and modernity, and he issued over 6,000 edicts regulating the religious life of his people. He had no doubts about his rights in such matters. Fundamental questions of doctrine fell within the jurisdiction of the Pope. Everything else in the life of the Church was for the Emperor to regulate. He was encouraged in these views by his Chancellor, Prince Kaunitz, a man with no real religious beliefs of his own, who saw the Church as a troublesome but crucial department of state.

Certainly the Church in Austria needed somebody’s attention. In places it was dominated by immensely wealthy monasteries, where a handful of monks attended by liveried servants lived like princes on revenues originally designed to support hundreds.The parochial system was patchy and antiquated, with many communities far from the nearest parish church. Joseph established a central religious fund to provide new parishes, schools and seminaries, and raised the money he needed for these purposes by dissolving monasteries. In 1781 a decree dissolved religious houses devoted exclusively to contemplation and prayer, and preserved those that did ‘useful’ work like running schools or hospitals. More than 400 houses, a third of the total, disappeared. The Pope was not consulted.

Joseph thought that the provision of enlightened parish clergy was the job of the state, and he decreed that all clergy must train in one of six general seminaries established by him. There was more to this than a desire for better theological education. In the struggle to unite a scattered empire of many peoples, centralised training of key men for the localities would help make religion the cement of empire. The syllabus at the general seminaries included Jansenist works, and textbooks minimising papal authority.

Joseph’s Church legislation offered rational solutions to real problems. It also fussed about petty details better left alone, and struck at dearly held beliefs.

Special permission was needed for processions and pilgrimages,

people were forbidden to kiss holy images or relics,

a limit (fourteen) was put on the number of candles which could be burned about an altar,

and Joseph forbade the dressing of statues in precious fabrics.

All these measures were desperately unpopular.

Joseph’s brother Leopold was Grand Duke of Tuscany, and he too aspired to dominate the Church in his own territories. His theological adviser was Scipio de Ricci, whom he made bishop of Pistoia and Prato in 1780. Ricci was earnest and devout. He was the great-nephew of the Jesuit General unjustly imprisoned by Clement XIV, and so he did not love ^[p.197] the popes.Yet, though he had been educated by them, he also detested the Jesuits, for he was a Jansenist, in touch with excommunicated Jansenists in France and Holland, disapproving much that was most characteristic of Baroque Catholicism, determined to reform it. He was an extremist, a man with poor judgement and no antennae for popular religious feeling. His dining-room was decorated with a painting of the Emperor Joseph II ripping up a pious picture of the Sacred Heart. Ricci liked to talk of Rome as Babylon, the rule of Pope and Curia as outmoded tyranny.

In September 1786 Ricci held a DIOCESAN SYNOD at PISTOIA, to an agenda supplied by Leopold, and with many of its decrees drafted in advance by a radical Jansenist professor from the Imperial University at Pavia, Pietro Tamburini. The acts of the Synod denounced

the cult of the Sacred Heart,

the Stations of the Cross,

the abuse of indulgences

and excessive Marian devotion.

They recommended that statues be replaced in churches by paintings of biblical scenes,

and they ordered tighter control of the cult of relics.

Ricci wanted Mass in Italian, and many of the clergy agreed.The Synod thought this would be too far too fast, but ordered that the silent parts of the Mass, especially the central consecration prayer, the ‘canon’, should be recited in a loud clear voice, and that Italian translations of the missal should be provided for the laity to read. The people were to be encouraged to receive communion at every Mass.

Bible reading was to be encouraged for all,

feast days reduced,

a new breviary produced which was purged of legendary material and with more scripture.

All monasteries were placed under the direct jurisdiction of the local bishop, regardless of any papal privileges or exemptions,

and all the religious orders were to be merged into one.

Monasteries for men (maximum of one per town) should be outside the city, convents for women inside.

Permanent vows were to be abolished for men, who would instead take vows for only one year at a time.

Women might take permanent vows when past the age of childbearing.

The Synod adopted the anti-papal teaching of the Four Gallican Articles.

Ricci received strong support from the clergy at the Synod, but the laity were outraged at the attack on ancient pieties. Reformed service-books were torn up, crowds rallied defiantly in defence of banished images. When rumours spread in May 1787 that he was about to destroy the relic of the Girdle of the Blessed Virgin venerated in the cathedral at Prato, rioting broke out, the Bishop’s chair was dragged into the piazza and burned, and his palace looted. ‘Superstitious’ statues which he had removed were brought in triumph out of cellars, and crowds knelt all night in a blaze of candle-light before the condemned altar of the Girdle. Duke Leopold had to send in the troops.

The Prato riots shattered hopes for an anti-papal reform in Tuscany. News of the disturbances reached Leopold and Ricci during a national synod of the Tuscan bishops which they had hoped would adopt the Pistoia reforms for the whole region. Many of the bishops had been worried at the anti-papal tone of many of the measures, considered that radical changes in worship were outside the authority of individual bishops, and were unwilling to deny the Pope’s prerogatives or to recommend condemned Jansenist works to priests and people. The riots confirmed their fears and frightened even the few radicals into caution. When Leopold succeeded to the Austrian throne in 1790 and left Tuscany, the reform movement collapsed. The Pistoian reforms and their doctrinal basis were solemnly condemned by the Pope in the Constitution Auctorem Fidel in 1794.

The Tuscan reform movement was inspired by theology. Many of its objectives, however pugnaciously and divisively asserted, were pastorally desirable, and would be realised two centuries later at the Second Vatican Council.

Elsewhere in Italy anti-papalism took cruder forms. From the mid-1770s the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had

discontinued its traditional feudal payments to the papacy,

and the government in Naples began to close down contacts with Rome, and with the international heads of the religious orders.

The Inquisition was suppressed,

the bishops were forbidden to use the sanction of excommunication,

and from 1784 all direct contact with the Pope was forbidden on pain of banishment.

Papal communications were made subject to state approval,

and the crown asserted its right to appoint to all bishoprics.

Nobody could plausibly present these measures, which the bishops disliked but dared not resist, as being for the good of the Church. The Pope responded by refusing to institute any of the bishops nominated by the crown. By 1787 forty bishoprics were vacant, but the papacy was powerless in the face of government determination. In 1792, with almost half the sees in southern Italy vacant, the papacy caved in and instituted all the nominated bishops, leaving the Neapolitan crown triumphant.

PIUS VI

Any pope would have found these challenges hard to handle. It was the Church’s bad luck that the last Pope of the eighteenth century, Pius VI (1775-99), was a particularly poor specimen. Giovanni Angelo Braschi was an aristocrat who had worked his way with charm and efficiency through the papal civil service. He had been private secretary to Benedict XIV, and treasurer to Clement XIII, the latter a prestigious and profitable job which led to a cardinal’s hat. He was not a man of deep spirituality, and was a latecomer to the priesthood, having been engaged to be married before hesitantly opting for a career in the Curia (his fiancée entered a convent). He was wholly without pastoral experience. After a conclave which dragged on for four months he emerged as the candidate acceptable to the Catholic monarchs.

To secure his election he let it be known that he would rule in harmony with the monarchies and would not restore the Jesuits.

Braschi was tall, handsome and vain, proud of his elegant legs and noble mane of white hair. Despite the desperate state of papal finances he adopted a style reminiscent of Renaissance predecessors like Paul III, though he took the name Pius in honour of the austere St Pius V. He lavished money he did not have on raising Egyptian obelisks at key points in the city, on building an enormous new sacristy for St Peter’s, on the creation of the modern Vatican Museum, and on a sustained but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to drain the Pontine marshes. He was a nepotist in the great Renaissance tradition, enriching his own nephews at the expense of the Church. In the mid-1780s Pius scandalised Rome by his involvement in a bitterly contested lawsuit over a legacy which he wanted to pass on to a nephew A compromise solution was hammered out, and the nephew got his money, but the Pope appeared grasping, and the dignity and integrity of the papacy had been damaged.

For most of his pontificate, however, Pius rather specialised in dignity. Rome was now firmly established as the heart of the Grand Tour, and the age-old flood of pilgrims was ^[p.199] augmented by a stream of tourists intent on seeing the sights. Pius’ extension of the Vatican collections made the Vatican Museum an essential part of any tour, his patronage of artists like the sculptor Canova made Rome the model of taste. Almost as important, however, was the elaborate papal liturgy, over which he presided with a grave and reverent elegance which impressed Protestant onlookers, and did a good deal to soften their hostility to Catholicism.

NONE of this, however, could compensate for his growing powerlessness in the face of the determined anti-papalism of the Catholic states. Here Pius’ vanity may have concealed from him the full seriousness of the situation. As relations worsened with Joseph II over imperial government of the Church in Austria and Milan, Pius determined to go himself to Vienna, hoping that Joseph would succumb to his personal fascination. The visit did indeed reveal a huge and perhaps unexpected popular reverence for the person of the Pope. The Emperor received him with punctilious correctness and treated him with honour. Everywhere he went Pius was mobbed by yearning crowds, who queued for hours in the rain to catch a glimpse of him, to have their rosaries or scapulars blessed by him. But in hard terms he achieved nothing. Chancellor Kaunitz stunned him by shaking his hand instead of kissing it, and even while he was still in Vienna the relentless stream of government decrees for the reordering of the Austrian Church went on. When he left, Kaunitz gloated, ‘He has a black eye.’

Joseph went on pressing his authority in Italy too, and by 1783 he and the Pope were at odds over the Austrian claim to appoint to all bishops in Milanese territory, a clear invasion of traditional papal prerogatives. This time Joseph reversed Pius’ strategy, and arrived unannounced in the papal apartments in the Vatican by a back stair to talk the matter over. Pius conceded all his demands, saving face (and the theoretical rights of the papacy) by granting the nomination as a personal concession to Joseph as duke of Milan, and not a recognition of his rights as emperor. The papacy was dying the death of a thousand cuts.

 BACKGROUND to the FRENCH REVOLUTION

In 1789 France was in financial and political crisis. Confidence in the monarchy had long been eroded by royal fiscal demands. It now dissolved altogether in the face of national bankruptcy, and bourgeois resentment of the stranglehold of the aristocracy over every aspect of national life exposed a deep rift in the heart of the French political system. On 4 May 1789 the Estates General met to confront and resolve the national crisis.

It was not, at first, a crisis of religion. Catholicism was an integral part of the French constitution. State persecution of Protestants had only recently been halted. The last pastor to be martyred had died in gaol in 1771, the last Protestant galley-slaves released in 1775. France’s Prime Minister was the Cardinal Archbishop of Toulouse. But the nation was bankrupt and the Church was rich, and within the Church the gulf between aristocracy and commoners was writ large. Almost to a man the bishops were wealthy aristocrats, while a third of the parish clergy lived at or below subsistence level. In such circumstances resentments simmered, and it would not be long before the national crisis was replicated within the Church itself.

And, below the surface, Catholic Christianity in France had been eroded. The Cardinal of Toulouse was not in fact a Christian. Like many other fashionable clergy, he shared Voltaire’s sardonic rejection of revealed religion, and when it had been proposed to promote him to Paris, Louis XVI had refused, on the ground that the Archbishop of Paris ‘must at least believe in God’. Jansenist and Gallican views within the legal profession had created a widespread hostility to the papacy, while there was even wider dislike of the religious orders.

The key moment of the Revolution came in the last week of June, when after a period of agonising debate and uncertainty, the clergy, under mounting threats from the Paris mob, reluctantly threw in their lot with the commons of the Third Estate. The legal independence of the church of France was at an end. From August 1789 France was ruled by a single-chamber Constituent Assembly, which soon turned its attention to the reform of the Church.

On 11 August 1789 the Assembly ended the payment of tithes. On 2 November, at the suggestion of Monseigneur Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun and another unbelieving aristocrat, the entire property of the French church was put ‘at the disposal of the nation’, and a massive sell-off began. The bankruptcy of the nation would be solved by confiscating the entire wealth of the church. The resulting alienation of Church property marked a new phase in the secularisation of the French national psyche. Nothing would ever be quite the same again: the sacred receded, anti-clericalism grew.

The attack on the Church’s possessions inevitably spilled over into an attack on the most resented concentration of Church wealth, the religious orders. On 28 October 1789 the Assembly ended the taking of religious vows in France. Four months later, in February 1790, the suppression of the existing religious orders began. Before the Revolution, a monk or nun who abandoned the cloister thereby became an outlaw. Now, with the opportunity of liberty, there came a massive exodus, especially among men. Thirty-eight of the forty monks of Cluny walked away, and the greatest religious house of the Middle Ages came to an ignominious end. Within a few years the great abbey church would be no more, demolished and sold off as builders’ rubble.

With the dismantling of the old financial machinery, the need for a reformed structure for the church of France became imperative. In July 1790 the Assembly enacted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.1 It imposed on the Gallican church a mixture of early-Church antiquarianism and eighteenth-century rationalisation.

There was plenty to object to in all this, yet it was hard to maintain that the new arrangements were much worse than those which had produced unbelieving bishops like Talleyrand or the Cardinal of Toulouse, and the tide of revolutionary enthusiasm made clergy reluctant to resist the Civil Constitution.

Under the Constitution, the relations of the reordered church of France with Rome were to be more tenuous than ever. The Pope would no longer be asked for canonical institution of bishops. All that would be required would be that the new bishops should send the Pope a letter expressing unity of faith. In the previous year the Assembly had unilaterally abolished annates and other payments to Rome. The Pope had said nothing, and it was widely assumed that he would go along with the new arrangements, having little choice in the matter. All Europe knew of Joseph II’s unilateral reforms, and the Synod of Pistoia. The Civil Constitution seemed just another step along the same road. In mid June 1790 the inhabitants of the papal enclave of Avignon threw off papal rule and ask for incorporation into France. The leaders of the Assembly were confident this gave them a bargaining counter with Rome which would ensure Pius VI’s compliance.

The clergy of France were in an agonising dilemma. So far as anyone knew, the Pope had not spoken. Most clergy detested the new arrangements, but many were committed to the Revolution in broad terms, unwilling to destabilise it by rejecting its religious provisions.

Many took the oath rather than starve,

many took it out of a sense of duty to their people,

many took it because the Pope had not condemned it,

many took it with saving clauses ‘as far as the Catholic faith allows’.

When Pius VI finally did publish his condemnation in May 1792 there was a rush of conscience-stricken retractions. Only a third of the clergy in the Assembly took the oath. Of the clergy of France as a whole, about half of the parish priests and only seven of the bishops accepted the Constitution. Nevertheless, a schismatic Constitutional Church had come into existence, its newly elected bishops consecrated by the cynical Talleyrand, who then immediately resigned his own episcopal orders and returned to the lay state, eventually marrying an English Protestant divorcée.

In theory the ‘refractory’ clergy who had refused the oath should have been left unmolested, free to follow their own papalist form of Catholicism without hindrance, once the posts they had vacated had been filled up (often by ex-monks). [n.b. for a time many parishes openly had both juror and non-juror clergy]

In practice, as the Revolution became more radical, and fears mounted of an Austrian invasion to suppress it, refusal of the Constitutional Oath was equated with counter-revolutionary treason.

By May 1792, with France at war with Austria, refractory clergy denounced by twenty citizens were liable to be deported [n.b. often to their deaths, either en route or after arriving in tropical death-camp prisons]. The King’s refusal to sanction this decree hastened his own downfall. In July Prussia declared war on France; on 10 August the monarchy was abolished.

And now the persecutions began. Refractory clergy, however blameless, were forced into hiding, and massacres of the clergy imprisoned in Paris, Orleans and elsewhere took place. Over the course of the next year, 30,000 clergy, including most of the bishops, left France, to take refuge in the Papal States, in Switzerland, in Spain, in Germany, even in Protestant England, where Catholics had only recently been granted a modest amount of religious liberty, yet where 700 French priests and monks were maintained on the royal estate at Winchester alone.

The Revolution, having called the Constitutional Church into existence, now turned against it. The Assembly had introduced clerical marriage. In September it took responsibility for registering marriages away from the Constitutional Church and handed it over to the local mayors. This apparently minor administrative change was in fact of enormous significance, for the same decree recognised civil divorce. The secular state had been born, the legal authority of the new Church fatally undermined.

By now the Revolution had turned on Christianity itself. As the guillotines of the Terror dealt with the enemies of the Revolution throughout the autumn and winter of 1793, an attack on Christianity was launched in the name of the republican religion of mankind.

Busts of the tyrannicide ‘saint’ Brutus were solemnly dedicated in parish churches [n.b. Brutus had been depicted by Dante in the deepest circle of hell, gnawed perpetually in the jaws of Satan], sacred vessels and crucifixes tied to the tails of donkeys and dragged through the streets.

In the Dechristianisation which followed, 22,000 clergy are thought to have renounced or simply abandoned their priesthood. The remaining 5,000 were increasingly subjected to the same persecution which the Refractories had endured. State funding of the Constitutional Church had been withdrawn in 1794. Now Christianity was abandoned altogether in favour of ersatz religions of Humanity and the Supreme Being.

Pagan rituals of fertility and the fatherland were devised, the Christian calendar abandoned for a ten-day week and new months dedicated to a cycle of growth and renewal. ‘Apostles of Reason’, many of them ex-priests, were sent round the country to preach paganism.

The Rise and Policy of Napoleon

The destruction of the church of France was watched in helpless horror at Rome. As revolutionary France went to war with Europe of the ancien régime, there was no doubt where the sympathies of Pius VI lay. In June 1792, while the royal family were still alive, the Pope sent Cardinal Maury as his special legate to the Diet of Frankfurt, to stir the new Emperor Francis II to the defence of the Church. Maury was a disastrous choice. A courageous nonjuring French priest who had staged a dogged resistance to the Civil Constitution in the Assembly, he was a single-minded partisan against the Revolution, utterly lacking the political skills essential in a legate. At Frankfurt he threw caution to the winds in summoning the governments of Europe to war against France. The Pope, he declared, ‘has need of their swords to sharpen his pen’. From now on, the Pope could only be seen in France as the implacable enemy of the Revolution, in league with European reaction against it.

During the next three years, despite his utter rejection of the Revolution, Pius VI held aloof from the European Coalition against France, anxious both to avoid giving the French an excuse to invade the Papal States and to preserve the tradition of papal neutrality in wars between Catholic nations. In May 1796, however, the young revolutionary General Napoleon Bonaparte advanced into Lombardy, establishing a republic at Milan and announcing his intention to ‘free the Roman people from their long slavery’. Napoleon did not in fact advance on Rome, but he did annex the most prosperous part of the Papal States, the so-called ‘Legations’ (because ruled by papal legates) of Ravenna and Bologna.

After further papal attempts at armed resistance failed, in February 1797 these humiliating conditions were confirmed and extended by the Peace of Tollentino. The Pope accepted the permanent loss of Avignon and the Legations, and the ransom was more than doubled. There followed an uneasy period of French occupation of Italy, and the establishment under French patronage of a series of Italian republics beginning in the Legations and Lombardy, and ultimately extending to Naples in 1799.

This assault on Catholic values and institutions confirmed papal dread of the French.

But Napoleon was Corsican, not French, and though not a Christian he had a healthy sense of the power of religion. In Egypt he would toy with Islam, and he was to declare that if he ruled a nation of Jews he would restore the Temple of Solomon. He set about wooing the Italian clergy, emphasising his own respect for the Catholic religion. He prevented looting of the churches, protected clergy from Jacobin mobs, and told Cardinal Mattei, Papal Legate in Ferrara, that ‘my special care will be to prevent anyone altering the religion of our fathers’. He tried to harness the bishops as allies in keeping law and order, and encouraged them to preach the compatibility of democracy and Christianity.

Some clergy thought that an accommodation was indeed possible. The future Pope Pius VII, Cardinal Chiaramonte, Bishop of Imola in the Legations (now the Cisalpine Republic), preached a long sermon on Christmas Day 1797 saying that God favoured no particular form of government. Democracy was not contrary to the Gospel. On the contrary, it required of citizens human virtues only possible with the help of divine grace. Liberty and equality were ideals only realisable in Christ. Good Catholics will also be good democrats. This careful utterance delighted Napoleon: ‘The Citizen Cardinal of Imola preaches like a Jacobin.’ The Cardinal used headed notepaper with the inscription ‘Liberty, equality, and peace in our Lord Jesus Christ’.

Realists like Chiaramonte might look for an accommodation with democracy and republicanism, but to Pius VI matters seemed not so simple. Republicanism spelt the end of monarchy, and the Pope was a monarch. The Peace of Tollentino was a bitter pill to swallow, and many saw in it the beginning of the end for the temporal power of the popes, for the Legations which it had surrendered were in fact the only economically viable parts of the Papal States. The Pope was now an old and sick man. There were some even in Rome itself who hoped that he would have no successor.

In this fraught and expectant atmosphere a party of Roman republicans decided to plant a series of Liberty Trees round Rome. Tempers flared, rioting broke out, and in a skirmish on the morning of 28 December the young French General Duphot was killed. Joseph Bonaparte, the French Ambassador, at once left Rome, the papal Ambassador in Paris was arrested, and the order was given for the declaration of a Roman republic. French troops entered Rome on 15 February, the twenty-third anniversary of the Pope’s coronation. The cardinals were arrested, the Pope ordered to prepare himself to leave Rome within three days. When he asked to be allowed to die in Rome the French commander, General Berthier, replied contemptuously, ‘A man can die anywhere.’ On 20 February the terminally ill ‘Citizen Pope’ was bundled into a carriage and taken north to Tuscany.

Lodged first in a convent in Siena, and then in a Carthusian monastery outside Florence, he rallied a little, but the French feared his presence in Italy as a focus for counter-revolution, and would not leave him be. Plans were made to take him to Sardinia, but he was too ill for the journey.

In March 1799, despite his almost total paralysis he was once more pushed into a carriage and dragged through snow and ice across the Alps to France. He died in the citadel of Valence on 29 August 1799.The local Constitutional clergy refused his body Christian burial, and the town prefect registered the death of ‘Citizen Braschi, exercising the profession of Pontiff’.

Pius VI had not been a good pope. He was weak, vain, worldly. While he built sculpture galleries and raised obelisks and fountains, the monarchies of Europe had hijacked the Church, and pressed religion into the service of the absolute state. For this Pius was not to blame. He had no more control over that process than his predecessors. Against the mounting demands of the monarchies neither the courage of an Innocent XI nor the skill of a Benedict XIV had availed.

At the crisis of religion in France, however, Pius had hesitated when decisive action was needed. Certain of his own divinely ordained leadership in the Church, he had failed to rise to the challenge of leadership, had allowed the situation to drift. At the last, however, he had endured, and the ignominies and wretchedness of his final months did more for the papacy than the whole previous twenty-four years of his pontificate, the longest and one of the most disastrous since the papal office had begun. Martyrdom wipes all scores clean, and in the eyes of the world Pius VI died a martyr. It remained to be seen what his successor — if he were to have a successor — would make of that inheritance.

[6.] II FROM RECOVERY TO REACTION

IN the late summer of 1799, Italy was uneasily free of the French. The Roman Republic had collapsed and Neapolitan troops occupied Rome. All over the peninsula improvised armies of ‘Sanfedisti’ ( from ‘holy faith’) had arisen in defence of religion and against Jacobinism. Venice, the Legations and virtually the whole of the papal territories north of Rome were in the hands of the Austrians. Pius VI had favoured Venice as the most suitable location for a conclave, and many cardinals were already gathered there when he died. The Emperor Francis II, confident that the cause of the papacy and the interests of Austria were bound to be the same, offered to pay the Conclave expenses. The cardinals duly assembled in the Benedictine island monastery of San Giorgio there on 30 November 1799, the first Sunday in Advent. The newly appointed secretary of the Conclave, Ercole Consalvi, had announced the death of Pius VI to the monarchs of Europe in terms which underlined the links between throne and altar: ‘Too many crowned heads, alas, in our times have seen that the princely power falls when the dignity of the Church decays. Restore the Church of God to her ancient splendour: then the enemies of the Crown will shake in terror.’2 That assumed convergence of interests would dominate the election.

The Emperor, paying the bills, was clear in his requirements.The new Pope need not be a man of talent or ability — a pope, after all, was never short of advisers. But Austria needed a pope who would throw the moral weight of the papacy behind the forces of European counter-revolution, against revolutionary France. Though he did not say so, Austria in particular needed a pope who would surrender the Legations and the rest of Austrian-occupied papal territory, as Pius VI had surrendered them to France at the Peace of Tollentino. By contrast, Naples demanded a pope committed to the restoration of the Papal States, who for that reason would be willing to co-operate in driving Austria out of the peninsula.

With the whole of Europe in flux, the Conclave sat deadlocked for three months. Eventually, however, a compromise candidate emerged, and the cardinals unanimously elected the ‘Citizen Cardinal of Imola’, the sweet-natured monk, Barnaba Chiaramonte. From Austria’s point of view this was a disaster. Chiaramonte, who took the name Pius VII (1800-23), was, like Pius VI, a native of Cesena in the Legations, and was bishop of the neighbouring see of Imola. He would never agree to Austrian sovereignty over this traditional papal territory. Moreover, everybody remembered his notorious ‘Jacobin’ Christmas sermon of 1797, in which he had baptised democracy. Here, in this mild-mannered man, who preferred to make his own bed and mend his own cassock, was a pope of decidedly unsound political views. To signal their displeasure, the Austrians refused the use of San Marco for the coronation, and Pius had to be crowned in the cramped monastery church, while the lagoon seethed with boatloads of spectators craning for a glimpse.

This was spiteful, but more than spite. The coronation of the Pope was a symbol of his temporal sovereignty. To co-operate in the coronation would be to recognise the integrity of the Papal States, including the Legations. The Emperor at once invited the Pope to come ^[p.206] to Vienna. Pius, aware that once in Austria he would be pressured into conceding the Legations, politely but firmly declined, saying that his first duty must be to return to Rome. He was not permitted to travel overland, however, since this would certainly have provoked demonstrations of loyalty from the population of the Legations. Instead, he was taken to the Adriatic port of Malamocco, and put aboard the ancient tub La Bellone. There were no cooking facilities, and the journey south to the Papal States, which should have taken one day, stretched out to a nightmare twelve. It was just as well that Pius had refused to go to Vienna, however, for by the time he entered Rome in July 1800 the political situation had been transformed once more. Napoleon Bonaparte, having made himself First Consul of France, had defeated the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo, and was once more master of northern Italy.

There would be no re-run of the Jacobin attack on the Church, however. Napoleon had drawn his own conclusions from the religious chaos of revolutionary France, and he recognised that the claim to act in defence of religion against infidel France was one of the strongest cards in the hands of Austria and her allies. In December 1799 one of his earliest decrees as First Consul ordered funeral honours for the body of Pius VI, still lying unburied in a sealed coffin at Valence. Pius, Napoleon declared, was ‘a man who had occupied one of the greatest offices in the world’. The Pope, to Napoleon, was ‘a lever of opinion’, his moral authority equivalent ‘to a corps of 200,000 men’

On 5 June 1800 Napoleon made a startling speech to the clergy of Milan.

‘I am sure’, he declared, ‘that the Catholic religion is the only religion that can make a stable community happy, and establish the foundations of good government. I undertake to defend it always ... I intend that the Roman Catholic religion shall be practised openly and in all its fullness ... France has had her eyes opened through suffering, and has seen that the Catholic religion is the single anchor amid storm.’3

All of this was intended for the Pope’s ears. ‘Tell the Pope’, Napoleon declared, ‘that I want to make him a present of 30,000,000 Frenchmen.’ Bonaparte needed to pacify France, and the parts of Europe occupied by France. He recognised that an accommodation with the Catholic Church was a precondition for any such peace. The counter-revolution in the west of France, in theVendée, was a Catholic counterrevolution, its banners adorned with the emblem of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, its leader a peasant priest, the Abbé Bernier. Only a religious settlement could still such unrest, and only the Pope could deliver a religious settlement.

France had two competing hierarchies — the pre-revolutionary bishops appointed by the Bourbon kings, most of whom had fled abroad, and the bishops appointed under the Civil Constitution. Some of the Constitutional bishops had apostatised from the faith during the Terror and its aftermath, but the Constitutional Church itself had held together under the ^[p.207] leadership of the courageous Bishop Henri Grégoire, and it too had its martyrs. Napoleon was accustomed to speak scathingly about the Constitutional bishops — ‘a bunch of brigands’, he called them, at least when talking to Rome. He could hardly abandon them altogether, however, without appearing to repudiate the Revolution itself. Yet there was no reconciling these two groups of bishops.The only way out of this dilemma was to wipe the slate clean, and to start again with a new set of bishops (to include former bishops from both camps) appointed by Napoleon himself. To have any chance of being accepted, such an arrangement needed the backing of the Pope. In return, Napoleon promised that the clergy of France would be paid by the state (though there would be no question of the return of confiscated Church property), and he would do all in his power to restore the Papal States.

Negotiations for a settlement were to drag on for eight months, and to go through twenty-six different drafts. They were the focus of fierce hostility in both Rome and Paris. Many of Pius’ cardinals rejected the thought of any accommodation with the Revolution, which had persecuted the Church, murdered its priests, stolen its property, and deposed and kidnapped a pope. Gregoire, leader of the Constitutional bishops, feared a sell-out. Committed Jacobins were revolted by the thought of the return of state-subsidised superstition and priestcraft. The French Foreign Minister was the former bishop of Autun, Talleyrand, with his English Protestant wife. He was determined that married priests must be left unmolested and their marriages validated.

Roman caution over the implications of every line and comma of the Concordat maddened Napoleon, feverishly concerned for a speedy resolution of the religious problem. He threw spectacular tantrums in Paris, threatening to turn Calvinist and to take Europe with him or, more worryingly because more plausibly, to imitate HenryVlll and establish a schismatic national church. In May 1801 the French Ambassador in Rome was instructed to deliver an ultimatum and then retire to Florence, where troops were waiting to march on Rome. Only prompt collaborative action between the Ambassador and the Cardinal Secretary of State, Ercole Consalvi, who hurried to Paris, rescued the negotiations.

The Concordat was finally signed on 15 July 1801. It was to govern relations between France and the Holy See for a century and to provide a pattern for the papacy’s relations with the new international order of the nineteenth century.4

The Concordat recognised Catholicism as the religion of’the vast majority of French citizens’. This comparatively weak statement was strengthened by a reference to the benefits the Church received from ‘the establishment of Catholic worship in France’, and from the profession of Catholicism by the Consuls. Catholicism was to be freely practised, though its public worship was to be subject to ‘police regulations’. Predictably, this clause caused a good deal of worry in Rome, but in fact it represented a diplomatic triumph by Consalvi, for in reality it limited government interference to matters of public cult such as processions, leaving the Church’s internal affairs and contacts with Rome otherwise unregulated.

The Pope was to demand the co-operation of all existing bishops in reconstructing the French church, even if this involved ‘the utmost sacrifice’ of resignation. Within three months he was to institute new bishops to a streamlined diocesan system (ten archbishoprics and fifty bishoprics, in place of the pre-revolutionary 135).

The new bishops would be appointed by the First Consul along lines laid down for the crown in the Concordat of Bologna of 1516, the Pope granting canonical institution (authorisation to perform spiritual functions). The bishops would appoint parish priests, choosing only men acceptable to government. They could also establish cathedral chapters and seminaries. Confiscated Church property would be left in the hands of the present possessors, but churches and cathedrals needed for worship would be ‘put at the disposal’ of the bishops. The bishops and clergy would receive state salaries. There was no provision for any reconstruction of monastic life.

The Concordat bristled with difficulties for Rome. The Pope had failed to secure a declaration that Catholicism was the state religion of France. He had had to renounce for ever the plundered property of the wealthiest church in Christendom, and for the first time the clergy were to be salaried officials of the state. Consalvi and the Pope, determined to avoid charges of simony and anxious that the fate of the church of France should not appear to have been made a bargaining counter for the recovery of the Pope’s temporal power, had not even raised the question of the return of Avignon or the Legations.

Nevertheless, the Concordat transformed the relationship between the Pope and the church of France in ways which would have been unimaginable even ten years earlier. The heart of this transformation was the reorganisation of the episcopate. During the negotiations, Consalvi himself had declared such an act impossible: ‘To get rid of 100 bishops is something that just cannot happen.’Yet happen it did, by the sole exercise of papal authority. At his request, forty-eight bishops resigned. Thirty-seven others refused, on the grounds that they had been duly appointed by the crown, and to resign would be to recognise the Revolution. Pius declared their sees vacant, and most of them tacitly acquiesced in their own deposition. A few did not, and the resulting schismatic petite église would persist for the rest of the century. But this was the dying struggle of old Gallicanism, and it was largely an irrelevance. At a stroke, the entrenched resistance of the French church to papal authority was undone, the entire hierarchy reconstituted by an unprecedented exercise of papal power. Though few people grasped the full implications at the time, a new era in the history of the papacy, and the Church, had begun.

The new era, however, began stormily.As Napoleon pondered the terms which Consalvi had gained for the papacy, he became increasingly unhappy with the Concordat. Publication was delayed in France until February 1802, and when it came it was accompanied by seventy-seven ‘Organic Articles’, ostensibly spelling out the ‘police regulations’ mentioned in the Concordat, but in fact unilaterally imposing the very restrictions on the Church which Consalvi had struggled to fend off. No papal acts, briefs or bulls could be received or published in France without the placet of the state. No nuncio or legate could exercise jurisdiction without permission. No seminaries could be established without the express permission of the First Consul, and he was to approve their regulations. All seminary staff must sign the anti-papal Gallican Articles of 1682, which made a general council superior to the Pope. Civil marriage must precede any church ceremony.

The Organic Articles were deeply repugnant to the papacy, but, although he protested against them, Pius did not repudiate the Concordat. However hedged round with restrictions, it made possible the reconstruction of the devastated Church in France, and over the next few years Pius went out of his way to oblige Napoleon. At his request, the Pope sent a docile cardinal (Caprara) as Legate a Latere to France. In 1803 five Frenchmen, including Napoleon’s uncle and former quartermaster, Monsignor Fesch, were made cardinals. The Vatican even accepted the establishment of a feast of ‘St Napoleon’ on 15 August, though it displaced a major Marian feast, the Assumption, and no one could come up with a convincing account of just who ‘St Napoleon’ was.

In May 1804 the French Senate decreed that Napoleon was emperor of the French. For Napoleon this was a step on the way to world domination. He dreamed of becoming a new and more glorious Charlemagne.Yet he was in the end only a soldier of fortune; he lacked the aura of legitimacy. Pius was invited to Paris to anoint Napoleon emperor. This invitation posed an enormous dilemma for Pius VII and Consalvi.The monarchies of Europe had deplored the Concordat and the legitimation it had given revolutionary France. Already the Pope was being referred to contemptuously as Napoleon’s chaplain. The imperial coronation of this Corsican upstart would bring the Pope into disrepute from Moscow to London. In particular, the Austrian Emperor would be offended, and Austria had defended the Church from the Revolution.

Some of the cardinals thought that the Pope should refuse point-blank, most thought he should set stringent conditions before he agreed to go. Consalvi knew that any such conditions would be impossible to enforce. He was clear that the Pope must go to Paris, to secure whatever advantage to the Church could be won from the Emperor. It was a thousand years since a pope had gone to crown a king in France. The only precedent in living memory, Pius VI’s fruitless visit to Vienna, was not encouraging. Nevertheless, Pius set out for Paris in the autumn of 1804.

The slow journey through northern Italy and France was a triumph, and a revelation. Wherever the Pope went, he was mobbed by emotional crowds. His carriage drove between ^[p.209] lines of kneeling devotees, men pressed forward to have their rosaries blessed, women married by civil rites under the Revolution to have their wedding-rings touched by the Pope. It was clear to everyone that the papal office had gained more mystique than it had lost in the flux and turmoil of Revolution. Napoleon was not pleased. Throughout the Pope’s stay in France Napoleon inflicted on him a series of petty humiliations, which Pius had to swallow as best he could.

The coronation itself took place in Notre Dame in Paris on 2 December. There were hitches. Napoleon refused to receive communion, being unwilling to go to confession first, and he did not allow the Pope to place the crown on his head. Pius anointed the Emperor and Empress, and blessed the crowns, which Napoleon then took from the altar with his own hands. The Pope had however won a minor victory the day before. A tearful Josephine had come to him to reveal that she and the Emperor had never been through a rite of Christian marriage. The Pope refused to proceed with the coronation till this was rectified. In utter secrecy, and without witnesses, Napoleon’s uncle Cardinal Fesch performed the ceremony in the Tuileries the day before the coronation.

There was little else tangible to show for the visit. Even the jewelled tiara presented to the Pope by Napoleon as a wedding-gift turned out to be a veiled insult, for it was decorated with stones looted from the Vatican in 1798. Napoleon was politely evasive about the question of sovereignty in the Legations, the Organic Articles remained in force, the religious orders were not restored. Yet Napoleon’s bad grace and offensive behaviour only served to underline the fact that, however much he disliked it, he had needed the Pope to be there. The papacy’s authority and holiness were still hard currency in the world of power politics. Indeed, the coronation, intended to underpin the authority of Napoleon, ultimately benefited the papacy more. Napoleon himself would bitterly complain of this.

‘Nobody thought of the Pope when he was in Rome. Nobody bothered what he did. My coronation and his appearance in Paris made him important.’5

When Pius entered Notre Dame for the coronation, a choir of 500 voices had sung ‘Tu es Petrus’, ‘Thou art Peter’. The kneeling crowds along his route back to Italy in April 1805 demonstrated that those words had not lost their power over the hearts and consciences of French men and women. It was perhaps symbolic that, as Pius passed through Florence in May 1805, the former bishop of Pistoia, Scipio Ricci, came to make his submission to the Pope, whose rule he had once denounced as Babylonian tyranny. The Synod of Pistoia and the Jansenist episcopalism it represented were now only a memory in Italy. The papacy had outlived its enemies.

In 1805 Napoleon was offered and accepted the crown of Italy, the northern Republic having been transformed into a kingdom. Italy, he declared, was a mistress he would share with no man. He began to style himself Rex Totius Italiae, King of All Italy, and he set about transforming that claim into reality. To secure the papal port of Ancona against British and Austrian forces, Napoleon annexed it in October 1805, a move which the Pope bitterly resented — he wrote to Napoleon calling for a French withdrawal, and speaking of his ‘disillusionment’ with Napoleon’s behaviour since the coronation: ‘We have not found in your Majesty that return of our goodwill which we had the right to expect: It was a turning point — to Napoleon the Pope had begun to speak in the tones of Gregory VII.

In February 1806, using Ancona as a base, Napoleon annexed the kingdom of Naples and placed his brother Joseph on the throne. This was yet another insult to the Pope, for Naples was a papal fief, and the Pope had a right to be consulted about any transfer of rule. Finally, Napoleon wrote to the Pope demanding that he close all papal ports to the allies.

He would not interfere with the freedom of the Papal States, he claimed, but

Here Napoleon had reached the Pope’s sticking-point. To close the ports to the allies, Pius insisted, would be an act of war:

‘We are the Vicar of a God of peace, which means peace towards all, without distinction between Catholics and Heretics!

He dismissed ‘with apostolic freedom’ Napoleon’s demand for deference in the temporal sphere. The Pope ‘has been such over so great a number of centuries that no reigning prince can compare with him in sovereignty’. Napoleon had no rights over the Papal States. From this point onwards relations between Napoleon and the Pope deteriorated. Napoleon blamed Consalvi, whom he disliked, for Pius’ stand: to keep lines of communication with France open, Consalvi resigned as secretary of state. This was a victory for Napoleon, but a self-defeating one, for the Pope now had to rely on the advice of extremist Italians, like the new Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacca, far less diplomatic and far more hostile to France than Consalvi had ever allowed himself to be. Napoleon increasingly referred to the Pope as ‘a foreign prince’, and refused to allow French Catholics to travel to Rome to see him. The Pope must renounce all temporal power, and rely only on his spiritual authority. [N.B. this anticipates the important transition in the role of pope achievable only in the late nineteenth century with the loss of the Papal States - but at this point it was merely a ploy of Napoleon to render the pope an empty figurehead]

In January 1808 French forces occupied Rome, and the Pope became effectively a prisoner within the Quirinal Palace, with eight French cannon trained on his windows. The Allies offered to rescue Pius in a British frigate, but the Pope feared that a flight under British protection would give Napoleon an excuse to renew a French schism, and he refused to leave Rome.

On ^[p.212] 6 July a French general presented himself before the Pope and demanded his abdication as sovereign of the Papal States. On his refusal, he was bundled into a carriage, still in his ceremonial robes and without so much as a change of linen, and taken north, on the route Pius VI had followed eleven years earlier. The Pope and his Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacca, padlocked into the coach in the summer heat, turned out their pockets. They had less than twenty sous between them, not enough for a single meal. Their laughter annoyed their gaoler.

Pius was taken to the episcopal palace at Savona, on the Italian Riviera, and isolated from his advisers, where it was hoped that, left to his own devices, he would give way. It was a shrewd judgement, for the Pope was prone to self-doubt and indecision. Pius retaliated in the only way open to him. He reverted to being the ‘poor monk Chiaramonte’, saying his breviary, reading, washing and mending his clothes. Above all, he refused to institute any bishops nominated by Napoleon. This was a serious matter. Many of the bishops appointed in 1801 had been elderly men, and they were now dying in droves. By the summer of 1810, there were twenty-seven sees without bishops.

In the meantime Napoleon had annexed Rome, declaring it the second city of the empire. French law and customs were introduced into the Papal States, and all the cardinals were removed to Paris.

This move prepared the way for another confrontation. Napoleon wanted an heir for the empire, and Josephine had not provided one. He decided to marry the daughter of the Austrian Emperor, and so he needed a divorce. There was no chance of Pius granting a divorce, but the fact that the marriage celebrated the day before the coronation had been at the Pope’s insistence, and without witnesses, provided an ideal pretext for annulment. It was duly granted by the obedient Church courts in Paris.

In April 1810 Napoleon remarried. He invited the cardinals to attend, and more than half did. But thirteen absented themselves, including Consalvi. The ‘invitation’ had in fact been a command, and Napoleon stripped the absentees of their regalia and their stipends, and sent them into exile. These ‘black cardinals’ became a symbol for him of Roman intransigence, and his treatment of the Pope became more hostile. Napoleon appointed Cardinal Maury as archbishop of Paris. The Pope smuggled out a stinging rebuke, depriving Maury of all jurisdiction. Napoleon had the Pope’s writing materials and books confiscated, and Pius’ isolation increased. ^[p.213]

The Paris divorce, however, had convinced Napoleon that the Pope could be circumvented. If Pius would not institute Napoleon’s nominees to the vacant bishoprics (now mounting up all over French-occupied Europe), then the metropolitan archbishops could make good the Pope’s neglect, granting institution after an interval of six months. He summoned a national council of the imperial bishops to Paris in June 1811 to approve this solution, but to his fury the Council, although led by his own uncle Cardinal Fesch, refused. Even Fesch resisted the anti-papal rhetoric of the Emperor’s agenda, which the bishops thought was too redolent of the Synod of Pistoia and the Civil Constitution. They would not act in defiance of the Pope, who must approve any decision of the Council, and even its agenda, before it could be acted upon.

Fuming, Napoleon dissolved the Council, imprisoned some of its ringleaders, and instead put pressure on the bishops individually. Deprived of the moral backbone provided by mutual support, eighty-five of them eventually agreed that institution by the Metropolitan was acceptable. Napoleon reconvened the Council, which now accepted the proposal, subject to the Pope’s approval.

Armed with this vote, Napoleon despatched a deputation of bishops to Savona. They emphasised the Council’s deference to his authority, the Emperor’s concern for souls in the vacant dioceses, and the weight of episcopal opinion in favour of the proposal. The Pope, always ready to doubt his own opinion, reassured by the Council’s protestations of loyalty and cut off from any advisers other than the Emperor’s stooges, at last agreed. He insisted, however, on rewriting the Council’s decree as his own, and he excluded the bishoprics of the Papal States from the arrangement.

Napoleon was furious. The exclusion of the Papal States touched a raw nerve, and the Emperor foolishly insisted the Pope must surrender on these bishoprics too. Saved from his own mistaken concession by Napoleon’s truculence, Pius now refused to budge at all. The stalemate continued, but Napoleon announced that the Concordat was abrogated, and the powers of the papacy suspended.

[Napoleon] determined to deal with the Pope himself, and ordered that he be brought to Fontainebleau. This time, however, there would be no kneeling crowds, no demonstrations of loyalty. Dressed as an ordinary priest, his white satin slippers blackened with ink, the Pope was whisked away from Savona under cover of night on 9 June 1812. The twelve-day journey became a nightmare to rival the worst sufferings of Pius VI. En route the Pope developed a chronic urinary infection. Crossing the Alps the carriage had to stop every ten minutes to allow him to relieve himself. His doctor feared the worst, and the Pope was given the last sacraments.

He reached Fontainebleau more dead than alive, only to find that the Emperor had already set out for Russia. As summer turned to autumn the Pope convalesced, relentlessly badgered by the ‘red’ cardinals and court bishops, allowed no news of the outside world, no contact with any adviser. When the Emperor finally came to Fontainebleau on 19 January 1813, he came as a defeated man, his army dead in the snows of Russia. But Pius knew nothing of this, and on his own he was no match for Napoleon.

 For six days the Emperor alternately wheedled and stormed at the Pope — he is said, somewhat improbably, to have smashed crockery, to have shaken Pius by the buttons of his cassock. And eventually the Pope gave in, and signed a draft agreement on a scrap of paper for a concordat which totally surrendered the temporal power. The Pope would be sovereign of Rome no longer, and the seat of the papacy remained to be decided, for Napoleon planned to move the papacy to France. Bishops henceforth would be granted investiture by the metropolitans within six months of nomination if the Pope declined to act, the Papal States alone excepted. In return, the Pope would receive financial compensation for the surrender of the patrimony, and the ‘black’ cardinals would be restored to favour.

Pius immediately regretted this surrender, but Napoleon, ignoring the fact that it was a only a draft, had it proclaimed as an achieved concordat, and ordered the singing of the ‘Te Deum’ all over the empire. Pacca and Consalvi, released at last, rushed to Fontainebleau, unable to believe the appalling news. They found the Pope a broken man, haggard and guilt-ridden, lamenting that he had been ‘defiled’, bitter against the red cardinals who had ‘dragged him to the table and made him sign’. With Consalvi restored as secretary of state, and Pacca adding stiffening to his spine, Pius rallied. He defied the advice of the majority of cardinals, and wrote to Napoleon in his own hand, repudiating the so-called ‘Concordat of Fontainebleau’, declaring that his conscience now revolted against it. He had signed out of ‘human frailty, being only dust and ashes’.

Napoleon suppressed the Pope’s letter, but the writing was now on the wall for him and his dreams of empire. In January 1814 he offered the Pope full restoration to Rome and a peace treaty. It was clear, however, that Napoleon was no longer in a position to deliver any such thing. The Pope moved to Savona, and then to Rome, the journey increasingly taking on the character of a triumph as he went.

On 12 April, Napoleon abdicated. On 24 May the Pope’s carriage reached the gates of Rome. He was welcomed by King Carlos IV of Spain: the horses were removed from the shafts, and thirty young men from the best families of Rome drew him in triumph to St Peter’s.

The reconstruction of Europe which was finalised at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 restored to the papacy almost all the lands it had lost. The sufferings of two successive popes at the hands of the Revolution, and Pius VII’s dignified resistance to Napoleon, now stood the institution he represented in good stead. The papal negotiator at the Congress was Cardinal Consalvi, a consummate statesman, and, though he failed to recover Avignon, he persuaded the powers that it was to their advantage to return the Legations and the Marches of Ancona to the Pope, along with the territory immediately around Rome. The policy of papal neutrality so rigorously maintained by PiusVII and Consalvi now paid off, and Britain and France welcomed a strong papal presence in central and northern Italy, to prevent Austrian monopoly in the peninsula.

This restoration of the Papal States is the single most important fact about the nineteenth-century papacy. For more than a thousand years, since the time of Pepin, the security of the papal office had been linked to the defence of the Patrimony of Peter. In the nineteenth century, however, that link took on a new and all-devouring importance. As pressure built up for the unification of Italy, the Papal States, dividing the peninsula and enclosing its natural capital, became more and more of an anomaly. The papacy became the largest single obstacle in the way of the national aspiration of the Italian people. In the light of the Napoleonic era, however, it was entirely natural that the popes should identify the defence of the Papal States with the free exercise of the papal ministry. On the lips of Napoleon the call for the Pope to lay down his temporal sovereignty and to rely solely on spiritual authority had been blatant code for the enslavement of the papacy to French imperial ambitions. Without his temporal power, Pius VII had been reduced to saying his prayers and mending his linen, and he had come within a whisker of signing away even his spiritual authority. If the Pope did not remain a temporal king, then it seemed he could no longer be the Church’s chief bishop. That perception coloured the response of all the nineteenth-century popes to the modern world.

There was an immense work of reconstruction to be done. All over Europe the structure of the Church of the ancien régime lay in ruins. Napoleon’s conquests in Germany had redrawn the map. The great prince—bishoprics on the left bank of the Rhine — the electors of Cologne, Trier and Mainz, the prince-bishops of Speyer and Worms — had been swept away or reduced to powerlessness, and in 1806 the Holy Roman empire itself ceased to be the ancient elective office which had begun with Charlemagne, and was wound up. Henceforth, the Emperor was merely the hereditary ruler of Austria. As a result of all this, there was a massive transfer of German lands and political influence from Catholic to Protestant hands.

And everywhere the religious orders had been decimated, dioceses lay empty, seminaries closed, priestly vocations dried up, Church property confiscated, communications with Rome destroyed.

Wherever French rule had prevailed,

civil marriage,

divorce, a religiously free press

and religious toleration

remained as abiding — and to the papacy obnoxious — reminders of the apostasy of the state.

Pius’ determination to set this to rights was signalled by his restoration of the Society of Jesus on 7 August 1814.

If the churches of Europe were to be revived, however, the Pope would need more than the Jesuits to help him. He had to have the support of the rulers of post-Napoleonic Europe. Deals would have to be struck. The nineteenth century was to be the age of concordats, as the popes bargained with the monarchies of Europe and beyond to secure ^[p.215] freedom for the Church’s work: with Bavaria and Sardinia in 1817, with Prussia and with the Upper Rhine Provinces in 1821, with Hanover in 1824, with Belgium in 1827, with Switzerland in 1828 and again in 1845, with the Two Sicilies in 1834, and so on into the rest of the century, more than two dozen such agreements.

These concordats sometimes secured more for the Church than anyone expected. In Bavaria, the Pope got guarantees of free contact with the bishops, security for surviving Church endowments, the reopening of monasteries and the establishment of seminaries, Church censorship of books and educational rights in schools. But the consistent feature of most of these concordats was the growing control of secular rulers over the appointments of bishops.

Secular rulers in Bavaria had never appointed the bishops, but after 1817 they did. The Revolution had taught the rulers of Europe that they could not rule without the help of the Church: bishops and priests were needed to preach obedience and contentment. Bishops and priests cost money, however, and, because the Church had lost its endowments in the Revolution, it needed state funding to pay its ministers. The state valued the clergy, but demanded the right to appoint the men it paid, and Rome had no choice but to agree, even when the governments were Protestant (as in Prussia).

This massive transfer of episcopal appointments to the state had of course been well under way before the Revolution, but the Revolution altered the terms on which it was taking place. In the high Middle Ages the reform papacy had struggled to destroy the system of ‘proprietary churches’, by which laymen had appointed bishops, and since the Second Lateran Council (1139) the ‘normal’ method of episcopal appointment had been election by the cathedral chapter. For financial reasons, the later medieval papacy, especially at Avignon, had slowly eroded this situation by the use of ‘provisions’, to capture more and more episcopal nominations for itself. Theoretically, however, capitular election remained normative, and from 1814 until the 1860s, wherever the popes were free to do so, they preferred capitular election to other methods of appointment. But many cathedral chapters had been swept away in the storm after 1789, and, where they were restored, the concordats often ignored or removed their electoral powers. In effect, the concordats, and state payment of bishops, were recreating the proprietary system.

The papacy did not mindlessly endorse these trends. The conservative Pope Leo XII (1823-9), for example, outraged Spain by circumventing the crown and appointing ‘vicars apostolic’ (missionary bishops) for areas of Latin America like Colombia and Mexico which were in revolt, befriending in the process rebel leaders like Simon Bolivar. Leo was acting on the advice of Cardinal Consalvi, who took the view that if legitimate monarchs could exert their authority in such areas within a reasonable time (he allowed fifteen years) well and good. But the Church could not leave bishoprics vacant for ever, for in the meantime the country might be ‘filled with Methodists, Presbyterians and new Sun-worshippers’. Pastoral necessity came before political alliances.7

Yet there were ideological as well as pragmatic forces at work to impel the papacy into alliance with the conservative monarchy. Catholicism in the age of Enlightenment had no place in its heart for the papacy.

 The Revolution changed this. State control of the Church might look rational and benign in Joseph II’s Austria or Leopold’s Tuscany. It looked altogether different after the Terror, the government-induced schism of the Constitutional Church, and the attempts of Napoleon to turn Church and Pope into instruments of empire.

Reforms based on reason now began to look like the disastrous blundering of a sorcerer’s apprentice, unleashing forces which could not be controlled. All over Europe, thinkers reflecting on the solvent and destructive power of naked reason began to rediscover the value of ancient institutions, established authorities, tradition.

In 1819, the Sardinian Ambassador to St Petersburg, Count Joseph de Maistre, published his treatise Du Pape. Born out of an almost paranoid reflection on the horror of the Revolution, De Maistre’s book argues for the absolute necessity of the papal office as the paradigm of all monarchic power. Historically, he claimed, the papacy had created the empire and the monarchies; it was the source from which all other authorities flowed. Since the sixteenth century, however, human society has been undermined by a rebellious questioning of legitimate authority. The symbolic focus of that challenge was first the Reformation, and now the Revolution. Once start to question, and there is no stopping: the stability of human society demanded the underpinning of an absolute authority. Catholicism provided just such an underpinning, and Catholicism needed an infallible pope:

De Maistre exalted the papacy to provide a basis for conservative political society. He deplored Gallicanism and Josephism, not because he wanted to minimise royal authority, but because attempts to limit papal authority unwittingly subverted royal authority too.Yet, despite the political motivation of De Maistre’s theory, his teaching had immense religious impact. As the century unfolded, the exaltation of the papacy as the heart of Catholicism, ‘Ultramontanism’ as it was called, would increasingly dominate Catholic thinking.

And here, once again, the Revolution helped. All over Europe, the Revolution destroyed the independent institutions of the clergy, and subjected them to the control of the state. Stripped of the local privileges, customs and rights which had given them autonomy, the clergy increasingly looked to Rome for protection. The Revolution had also swept away the great prince—bishoprics of Germany, the strongholds of episcopal resistance to papal power. Europe had now only one prince—bishop, the Pope, and he stood increasingly high as the visible centre of a Church which felt less local, more universal.

As ruler of the Papal States, however, king as well as bishop, the Pope himself embodied the combination of throne and altar. The government of the Papal States earned the popes the reputation of being the most reactionary prince in Europe. Consalvi had achieved the return of the most prosperous part of the patrimony, across the Apennines on the Adriatic, the Legations and the Marches, which included Ferrara, Bologna and Ravenna and the port of Ancona, in return for promises of a modernisation of papal government there. The promise was necessary. For twenty years the Legations had been out of papal control, and had experienced the modernising force of French government. Antiquated legal systems had been replaced by the Napoleonic Code, the civil service had been opened for the first time to laymen, local communities had been allowed representative government. This experience permanently altered the political consciousness of the people of the Legations. The areas round Rome, by contrast, were still archaic, ruled by priests, with no provision for elected lay involvement. To attempt to return the Legations to this mode of government would be folly, and Consalvi had undertaken to let the French innovations stand insofar as they were compatible with canon law.

In 1816 he introduced a modified French system of administration for the whole of the ^[p.217] Papal States. They were divided into seventeen delegations, ruled by clerical delegates (cardinals in the case of the Legations) but assisted by nominated committees of lay people. All but the highest levels of the civil service were open to laymen, but they wore cassocks at work. This system pleased nobody. It was too brutally centralised and not clerical enough for the ultras in Rome, it put a ceiling on lay promotion within the system, and it made no provision for elected local bodies. In the Legations, in particular, it was a constant source of friction. Hostility to clerical government, and to the papacy which required it, grew.

Pope Leo XII

Things might not have been so bad if that clerical government had not also been inefficient and reactionary. Consalvi’s modest reforms were frustrated at every turn by vested interests, and the realism and moderation which he brought to all he did was swept away after the election ofAnnibale della Genga as Pope Leo XII (1823-9). Della Genga, a sickly sixty-three year old crippled by chronic haemorrhoids, disapproved of Pius VII’s and Consalvi’s policies, and wanted a stronger, more religious and more conservative regime in papal territory. He had been elected by the zelanti, the ‘religious’ cardinals, who were tired of seeing papal policy dictated by political prudence, and who wanted strong spiritual leadership. In 1814 Della Genga had been humiliatingly sacked by Consalvi from the papal diplomatic service, after a spectacular row over his incompetence in negotiations over the return ofAvignon. He now had his revenge, and Consalvi was dismissed as secretary of state. Leo came to appreciate Consalvi’s brilliance before the Cardinal’s death, but the reconciliation came too late for the Pope to derive much benefit from his political savvy.

Leo was a contrast with Consalvi in every way. Pious, puritanical (though he shocked the cardinals by his passion for shooting birds in the Vatican gardens) and confrontational, he lacked political realism. Naples had long owed the papacy the feudal tribute of a palfrey (saddle-horse). The feudal dependency of Naples on the Pope was a sore point, and the palfrey had not been presented for decades. Consalvi had wisely commuted it for a cash payment raised by a tax on clerical salaries. Leo demanded the palfrey.

The same lack of realism displayed itself in the internal government of the Papal States. Gaol sentences were introduced for people caught playing games on Sundays and feast days, tight-fitting dresses were forbidden for women. Encores and ovations in theatres were forbidden, since Leo and his advisers thought they provided the occasion for displays of seditious political feeling. For the same reason actors ad-libbing lines on current affairs were liable to imprisonment. The Roman bars were forbidden to serve alcohol, which instead had to be bought at grills fitted in the street, a disastrous and deeply unpopular measure which led to a huge increase in public drunkenness.

The Jews, liberated by the Revolution, became a particular target of the reaction. They were ordered back into ghettos, which were enlarged for the purpose and fitted with walls and lockable gates, and they were forbidden to own real estate. Three hundred Roman Jews were required to attend special Christian sermons every week, and the hiring of Christian proxies was forbidden. Business transactions between Jews and Christians were forbidden. The subsequent exodus of wealthy Jews from the Papal States worsened the Pope’s already chronic economic problems.

A pope is no better than his advisers, and Leo’s assistants within the Curia left a good deal to be desired. Cardinal Ravorolla, sent as legate to Ravenna, created a tyranny so extreme that he became a grim figure of fun. He closed inns, banned gambling, required anyone out at night after dark to carry a lantern before them, clamped down on freedom of speech, introduced imprisonment without trial, and installed a great iron-bound chest outside his residence into which people could put anonymous denunciations of their neighbours. In the south, Cardinal Palotta introduced martial law to deal with the huge numbers of brigands, abolished courts on the grounds that the judges might be intimidated, imposed huge fines on villages where bandits were discovered, and in 1824 introduced a decree permitting the summary execution of brigands within twenty-four hours of arrest. His policies were so hated that he was forced to resign within a month, and the local brigands paid for Masses of thanksgiving to be sung.

Pope Gregory XVI

The extent to which the papacy had become locked into the alliance of throne and altar became clear with the election of the austere Camaldolese monk, Dom Mauro Cappellari, as Pope Gregory XVI (1831-46). Cappellari, former Abbot of Gregory the Great’s monastery on the Coelian Hill, had emerged as a compromise pope after a long and deadlocked conclave, in which the Spanish crown’s veto had been exercised against one of the favoured candidates. He was in many ways a promising choice. A learned theologian, he was also an experienced administrator with a broad view of the Church and its needs. For the previous six years he had served as Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda, with immediate responsibility for the affairs of the Church in Great Britain, Ireland, the Low Countries, Prussia, Scandinavia, Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. His choice of papal name was a gesture of homage both to Gregory XV, who had founded Propaganda, and to Gregory the Great, the first and greatest of missionary popes. He had been born in Venetia, in Austrian territory, and was known for his conservative views. Predictably, his election was greeted with delight by the Austrian Chancellor, Metternich, though there is no reason to think Austria pulled any strings to have him elected.

Gregory’s view of the papal office was both exalted and strictly monarchical. In 1799, the year of Pius VI’s death in prison at Valence, he had published a work defiantly entitled Il Triorfo della Sante Sede (‘The Triumph of the Holy See’). This was a vigorous attack on Josephism and Jansenist Episcopalism, arguing that the Church was a monarchy, independent of the civil power, and that the Pope is infallible when discharging his teaching office as chief pastor. The book made no great stir when it was first published, but it was rapidly reissued in a number of languages after his election, and it signalled to anyone who cared to read it a stern and uncompromisingly authoritarian cast of mind, and a view of the papacy which would brook no challenges.

Gregory’s election came at a moment of grave political crisis. Radical discontent had been growing throughout Italy over the previous fifteen years, focused on a widespread secret organisation known as the Carbonari (Charcoal Burners). These societies were allied to Freemasonry, and were dedicated to the pursuit of political liberty and the unification of Italy. There was a strong strain of anti-clericalism in them, though many clergy and devout Catholic laymen were also involved. The Carbonari had emerged as a formidable force in Naples in the wake of the Spanish Revolution of 1820, and had spread also to Piedmontese territory: they were ruthlessly suppressed by Austria.

The Revolution of 1830 in France, which overthrew the reactionary Bourbon regime of Charles X and replaced it with the ‘bourgeois monarchy’ of Louis Philippe, reactivated ^[p.219] radical forces in many parts of Europe. The new regime issued a statement that it would not tolerate intervention in Italian affairs by other powers — a clear signal that it would hamper Austrian repression of any risings. By the summer of 1831 much of central Italy was in revolt, seeking the ejection of foreign powers and the creation of a unified Italian state. Out of these ferments, Giuseppe Mazzini’s ‘Young Italy’ movement, and the national independence movement known as the Risorgimento, would emerge. More immediately, and within three weeks of Gregory’s election, many of the cities of the Papal States had been occupied by rebel forces.

Gregory acted decisively. Ignoring the French non-intervention decree, he called for the help of Austrian troops to suppress the revolts. It was a fateful moment for the papacy, in which it threw its lot in with the big battalions, against a growing Italian desire for liberty and self-determination. The aftermath in the Papal States was disastrous. The papal prisons filled up, and liberal exiles schooled Europe in anti-papalism. The Secretary of State, Cardinal Benetti, raised a volunteer police force, in effect arming one element of the population against another, and the papal revenues were devoured by the machinery of repression. Gregory XVI was forced to negotiate a loan from the Rothschilds (which had at least the incidental benefit of easing conditions somewhat for the Jews). By his death the public debt was more than 60,000,000 scudi.

These experiences determined the course of Gregory’s pontificate, and his government became a by-word for obscurantist repression. Suspicious of all innovation, he would have nothing to do even with the railways (‘infernal machines’), and the clergy and clerical concerns continued to dominate the secular administration of the Papal States. But the impact went far beyond the government of the Papal States. All over Europe, there were Catholics who had come to reject the alliance of throne and altar as a formula for tyranny.

In France, the priest Felicité de Lamennais had moved from an Ultramontanism derived from the teaching of De Maistre and a hatred of Enlightenment rationalism to a radical critique of the France of Charles X. To Lamennais the royalist church of France in the 1820s, staffed by state-appointed poodle bishops (‘tonsured lackeys’) was no better than the impotent state churches of eighteenth-century Europe, or even revolutionary France. For all its lip-service to Catholicism, the state, with its control of the episcopate, its restrictions on contact with the papacy and its monopoly of religious education, was manipulating religion for its own purposes, failing to allow it the freedom of expression and action which was fundamental to the Gospel. In the persisting Gallicanism of France, Lamennais saw not an ally of the Church but its opposite. The kings had had their day. To be itself, the Church must embrace the liberty which the Revolution had proclaimed, demand control of its own officers and its own affairs: The Church is being suffocated beneath the weight of the fetters which the temporal power has put upon it; and liberty which has been called for in the name of atheism must now be demanded in the name of God.’9 The Church, led by an infallible pope, must baptise the Revolution, and side with the people against the forces of reaction and revolution. Lamennais and his supporters launched a newspaper, L’Avenir (‘The Future’), which had the slogan ‘God and freedom’ as its masthead, and which campaigned for the separation of throne and altar, a ‘Free Church in a Free State’.

Lamennais was to a large extent inspired by events in Belgium, Poland and Ireland. In all these countries, Catholic populations lived under non-Catholic regimes: Poland partitioned between Orthodox Russia and Protestant Prussia; Belgium ruled by the Protestant King William I in the interests of Holland; Ireland ruled from Westminster. In such circumstances, ‘throne and altar’ politics were a recipe for oppression, and Catholics allied themselves with liberals in a common struggle. In Rome, such alliances appeared ‘monstrous’, as Cardinal Albani described the co-operation between Belgian Catholics and liberals. Freedom of religion meant freedom for irreligion: nothing good could come from slogans coined in the hell-hole of revolution. That perception led to the disastrous alienation of the papacy from Catholic aspiration in much of Europe, and the papacy had difficulty coming to terms with the successful Belgian Revolution of 1831, where Catholics accepted the separation of Church and state.

The great papal failure was in Poland. Since 1825, Tsar Nicholas I had been systematically undermining Catholicism in Poland, attempting to force Eastern-rite Catholics (Uniates’) into union with the Russian Orthodox Church, hindering contacts between Rome and the Latin-rite bishops, and deposing the Primate of Poland in favour of an elderly government stooge. Rome had protested, but bad communications and the Pope’s overriding commitment to the support of monarchy meant that its protests were halfhearted and ineffective. In November 1830 Poland rose against Russia and briefly established a provisional government. By the autumn of 1831, however, the rebellion had been crushed, and Russia began a brutal campaign of reprisal without parallel anywhere else in Europe. In June 1832, while Poland was groaning under this savagery, Gregory issued the brief Superiori Anno, condemning the revolt, denouncing those who ‘under cover of religion have set themselves against the legitimate power of princes’, and warning the bishops to do their utmost ‘against impostors and propagators of new ideas’.10

Gregory’s heartless response to the agony of Poland was conditioned by the rebellion of the Carbonari on his own doorstep. To appear to condone rebellion against Russian misrule would be to legitimate rebellion in Italy. His rejection of liberal values received more considered expression in August 1832, in the encyclical letter Mirari Vos, directed against Lamennais and the L’Avenir group. Lamennais’ pugnacious attacks on the conservative alliance of throne and altar in France had been heightened by the July Revolution of 1830. He called on the Church to abandon nostalgia for the Bourbons and to join with the people in creating a new and freer world. These sentiments outraged the French bishops, and episcopal opposition to L’Avenir grew. Unwisely, Lamennais decided to suspend publication and to appeal to Rome for support and vindication.They would go ‘to consult the Lord at Shiloh’, to prostrate themselves at the feet of the Vicar of Christ: ‘O Father, condescend to look down upon some of the least of your children, who are accused of being rebels against your infallible and mild authority ... if even a single one of their thoughts deviates from yours, they disavow it, they abjure it.You are the rule of what they teach; never, no never, have they known any other.’11

Lamennais’ extravagantly pro-papal writings had made him a popular figure at Rome under Leo XII: there had even been rumours of a cardinal’s hat. But Lamennais had long since moved away from the papalist version of throne-and-altar legitimism which had first caught Roman attention. The decision to appeal to the papacy at this point was suicidal, given Gregory XVI’s track-record and known opinions, and it would ultimately lead to Lamennais’ condemnation and his eventual abandonment of Catholicism. He arrived in Rome at the beginning of 1832 against a background of frantic lobbying by the bishops and the French government, urging the Pope to give no comfort to such rebellious spirits. Gregory received Lamennais and his colleagues cordially, but studiously avoided any discussion of religious matters with them. He established a theological commission to report on their teaching, a report which formed the basis for the encyclical Mirari Vos.

The encyclical, when it finally came, was an out-and-out condemnation of everything the L’Avenir group stood for. Gregory repudiated ‘the poisonous spring of indifferentism that has flowed from that absurd and erroneous doctrine or rather delirium, that freedom of conscience is to be claimed and defended for all men’. He denounced the ‘detestable and insolent malice’ of those who ‘agitate against and upset the rights of rulers’ and who seek ‘to enslave the nations under the mask of liberty’. The Pope was particularly exercised by Lamennais’ suggestion that the Church was in need of restoration and regeneration to meet the challenges of a new age. The Church, he insisted, ‘has been instructed by Jesus Christ and his Apostles and taught by the Holy Spirit ... It would therefore be completely absurd and supremely insulting to suggest that the Church stands in need of restoration and regeneration ... as though she could be exposed to exhaustion, degradation or other defects of this kind.’12

Mirari Vos is a landmark document. Though its violent tone and resolute opposition to any hint of liberalism were not entirely new — Pius VIII had condemned Freemasonry in much the same tone — Gregory’s encyclical set the register and to some extent the agenda for the key utterances of his successor, Pius IX. The papacy from now on was locked into an attitude of suspicious repudiation of modern political developments, and the current of ideas which underlay them. Gregory’s hostility to the campaign for a ‘Free Church in Free  ^[p.221] State’ which underlay most liberal Catholic work on behalf of the Church coloured the rest of his pontificate. He was therefore less than supportive to liberal Catholics like Lamennais’ former colleague Count Charles Montalambert and the French bishops who agitated for greater freedom of education in France in the 1840s, and he put up with the government’s expulsion of the Jesuits from France in 1845, despite its disastrous impact on Catholic schools.

Elsewhere, the advent of liberal regimes more or less hostile to the Church moved the Pope willy-nilly towards the sort of independent action advocated by liberal Catholics. Throughout the 1830s and early 1840s Gregory was confronted by governmental action in Europe and beyond which threatened the liberties of the Church. His response was characterised at least as much by confrontation as co-operation. The most significant of these confrontations was the Cologne church struggle of 1837.

Prussian custom dictated that in marriages between Catholics and Protestants the sons took the religion of the father, the daughters the religion of the mother. The Catholic Church wanted all children brought up as Catholics. It would not permit Catholic priests to preside at marriages unless they got a guarantee to this effect. This made life impossible for Catholic women. As prefect of propaganda Gregory had been instrumental in the evolution of a compromise, promulgated by Pius VIII in 1830, which forbade priests to bless such weddings, but allowed them to attend as observers.

In practice, the German bishops co-operated with the Protestant government in stretching this papal directive, and they allowed priests to take an active part in the ceremonies. Rome was not informed. In 1837, however, the new Archbishop of Cologne, Clemens August Droste zu Vischering, announced that henceforth the papal directive would be followed to the letter. This was a red rag to an already anti-Catholic government, and in November 1837 the Archbishop was arrested and imprisoned without trial. Gregory issued a vehement protest, the conflict spread, and other bishops were suspended and arrested. The breakdown of relations between Church and government was healed only by the accession of a new king in Prussia, the romantically inclined Frederick William IV, whose fondness for the Middle Ages made him kindlier disposed to the Catholic Church. Gregory agreed to a compromise which involved the effective retirement of Clemens August. The conflict, however, served to raise Catholic consciousness all over Germany, hardened Catholics’ sense of confessional identity, and led to a vast expansion of the Catholic press and the mobilisation of Catholic opinion. It also struck a death-blow at the remaining vestiges of Josephinism. A handful of anti-papal Catholics broke away to form a patriotic ‘German Catholic Church’ as a result of the Cologne struggle, but this served only to highlight the fact that a new and less docile Catholic identity had formed around loyalty to papal directives. Ultramontanism was no longer a theory, but was taking flesh in the life of the Church. Outside Europe, too, the needs of the Church and the wishes of the monarchies came into conflict.

Gregory cared passionately about Catholic missionary activity, and was not prepared to allow deference to governments to hamper the work of evangelisation. In 1831 he offended Spain by publishing the bull Sollicitudo Ecclesiarum, in which he formalised the policy of working with de facto rebel governments in Latin America and elsewhere. Between 1831 and 1840, in co-operation with revolutionary republican governments, whose principles he deplored, he filled all the vacant sees in Spanish America.

Gregory had a low opinion of the effects of state patronage in the Americas and the Far East. He condemned slavery and the slave trade in 1839, and backed Propaganda’s campaign for the ordination of native clergy, in the face of Portuguese racism. His disapproval of the Portuguese misuse of the padroado (crown control of the Church) went further. In 1834 he subverted the padroado in India by establishing a series of apostolic vicariates, whose bishops were directly answerable to Rome, not to Portugal. In 1838 he suspended four padroado bishoprics in India and absorbed them into the new vicariates, and he correspondingly reduced the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Goa. All this added to the growing focus of Church life on Rome. In the course of his pontificate Gregory created more than seventy new dioceses and vicariates (including ten for the USA and four for Canada) and appointed 195 missionary bishops. More and more extra-European churches owed their organisation and leadership to the papacy rather than to a colonial power. The world stature of the papacy grew.

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