The Modern Papacy, 1798-1995

Frank J. Coppa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317894889
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This ambitious survey launches a major new five-volume series. It explores the response of the papacy, one of the world's longest-enduring institutions, to the multiplying challenges of the modern age. It runs from the French Revolution to the fall of the Soviet Union, ending with the pontificate of John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope since 1522. Frank Coppa examines the impact of major events like the Napoleonic conquests, Italian unification, two World Wars and the Cold War; he explores the attitudes of the papacy to such issues as liberalism, nationalism, fascism, communism and the modern, secular age; he examines the growing concern of the popes for the Catholic world beyond its traditional European home; and he tackles, objectively and judiciously, contentious topics like the "silence" of Pius XII. Engrossingly readable, the book offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on international relations across the past two centuries, and on the political and ideological emergence of the modern world, as well as its specifically papal concerns.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: the papacy in an age of ideologies

The papacy, the supreme authority of the Catholic church, is an old, enduring, and unique institution. It flourished during the Middle Ages, was a participant in the Renaissance, the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the industrial age, witnessing the rise and fall of communism. During its long tenure, it invented the notion of ‘deniability’, while promoting its infallibility. Leopold von Ranke, in his History of the Popes, presented the papacy as a crucial historical phenomenon. Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his Essay on the Protestant historian’s study, stressed the popes’ centrality in the church, their impact on events, and their remarkable ability to appropriate new movements.¹ He echoed sentiments earlier expressed by Napoleon.

Bonaparte considered the papacy ‘one of the greatest offices of the world’, whose military equivalence he estimated as a ‘corps of 200,000 men’.² If there had been no pope, Napoleon mused, it would have been necessary to invent one. Nevertheless, Bonaparte charged that the papacy confused spiritual authority and political aims, and he insisted that priests refrain from meddling in politics.³ The papacy functions both as head of a global spiritual realm and as a political organization exchanging diplomatic representation, sending nuncios and internuncios to other states, and receiving ambassadors and ministers from other nations. From the middle of the eighth century until the Italian seizure of Rome in 1870, the papacy governed a state in central Italy, dividing the peninsula and blocking Italian unification. Many perceived the popes as fathers of princes as well as vicars of Christ.

The papal claim of primacy and universal jurisdiction, which commenced during the Roman empire, persists to the present. Interest in it has likewise prevailed. The communication revolution, which triumphed in Rome when Guglielmo Marconi established Vatican radio in 1931, made it possible for the papacy to remain in constant touch with the hierarchy and faithful worldwide, rendering its control all the more feasible and formidable. Long before then, some resented the expanding papal power. During the Reformation, Luther attacked the papacy as an unnecessary human contrivance.⁴ Later, too, there were those who decried papal primacy. The noted Catholic historian Lord Acton, though loyal to the church, proved critical of papal centralization. Returning from Rome, he warned that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In the 1930s, when Pierre Laval pleaded with Stalin to conciliate the pope, the Soviet dictator dismissively inquired about the number of divisions the pope directed. Possessing none, Rome nonetheless wielded tremendous moral influence and considerable diplomatic clout. Perhaps this is why the duce warned the Nazis to avoid the hostility of the pope, cautioning that the church warranted eternal surveillance.⁵

The papacy, the office and position of the bishop of Rome, exercising both spiritual and temporal authority, has long been a distinctive feature and cohesive factor in the existence of Catholicism. While the study of the papacy in isolation cannot explain the development of the church, its role has been crucial and its history often coterminous with that of Western civilization. As successor of Peter and vicar of Christ, bishop of Rome, patriarch of the west, and head of the universal church, the pope’s powers, according to the first Vatican council, are both ordinary and immediate, while his jurisdiction is universal. According to canon law, only the pope can convoke an ecumenical council and only he, or his delegate, can preside over it. In the diplomatic realm, he ranks as first of Christian princes, while his ambassadors enjoy precedence over other members of the diplomatic community.

Although a pope cannot impose his successor, he can make appointments to the college of cardinals⁶ which will select him, and from which all popes since Urban VI (1378–89) have come. Catholicism, conceded the historian and political figure Adolphe Thiers, could not exist without the pope.⁷ Paul VI (1963–78) agreed, asserting in his first encyclical, Ecclesiam suam, that without the papacy the Catholic church would not be Catholic, and its unity would vanish.⁸ The dogmatic constitution on the church, Lumen gentium, which emerged from the second Vatican council, reconfirmed the pope’s role as the visible head of the church.⁹

The word ‘pope’ derives from the Greek word pappas, meaning father, and applied to the bishop of Rome as pater patriarcharum or father of patriarchs – the bishops of the major cities of the empire. The title of supreme pontiff or Pontifex maximus emerged from pagan Rome. Thomas Hobbes depicted the papacy as the ghost of the deceased Roman empire, on whose grave it was crowned. ‘The papacy is a Latin institution’, wrote Gregorovius, who lived in Rome in the nineteenth century, ‘and will only cease to exist with the extinction of the Latin race.’¹⁰ Contemporary social scientists have concurred that church and papal structures aped those of the empire, observing that aspects of the cult of the emperor were simply transferred to the pope.¹¹ It is known that the Roman emperor, as the high priest of the pagan Roman religion, served as the virtual bridge between the present and the afterlife. Not surprisingly, some believe the triple tiara worn by the pontiffs symbolize their authority in heaven, on earth, and in the underworld.

The authority of the pope was to be challenged by the mania for modernization and the rush toward renovation during which politics as well as economics sought emancipation from religious supervision. The papal response required both the leadership of a ‘father’ and the reconciliation of a ‘bridge builder’, to move from the ancien régime to the revolutionary age. Increasingly, Providence was overshadowed by progress, while naturalism sought to ban the supernatural from the realm of thought. As early as 1775, Pius VI condemned the attacks on orthodoxy by the spirit of modernity and the Enlightenment’s critique of faith.¹² Dechristianization proceeded in the state, school and family, as human thought, tackling contemporary problems, shifted from religious and philosophic speculation to the political, social and economic problems of society. The fifteen popes from Pius VI (1775–99) to John Paul II (1978-) have had to confront momentous developments.

The outbreak of the American and French Revolutions, shadowed by the take-off of the industrial revolution in Great Britain, and the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776, contributed to the transformation of Europe and the world. Together they ushered in the modern age. As the discovery of the steam engine and the new puddling furnace created profound social and economic changes, the American, French and Napoleonic revolutions provoked extraordinary political upheavals in the Western world and the vast reaches of Asia and Africa upon which they impinged. The currents unleashed by these revolutions challenged the traditional political order and the prevailing religious establishment, leaving little time or inclination for things of the spirit. The emergence of liberalism, constitutionalism, nationalism, republicanism and laissez-faire economics, and later Darwinism, democracy, socialism and secularism, presented a potential threat to the Catholic community, and its temporal and spiritual leadership, the papacy.

In the twentieth century the crisis continued with the development of Americanism, modernism, racism, fascism, communism and totalitarianism. Feminism, the sexual revolution, the population explosion, the increasing intrusion of the scientific mindset into realms long under religious scrutiny, environmental hazards, and even the threat of a nuclear holocaust challenged the papacy. Rome had to adjust to the new world order where science challenged revealed religion and where orthodoxy was denounced as a repressive check upon progress. The papacy found itself challenged by both the claims of the radically autonomous individual and the social agnosticism of the national state.

In retrospect, the pre-revolutionary age was perceived as a golden one, in which faith appeared to be the cornerstone of social life, Catholicism shaped the lives of the population from cradle to grave, and the state bolstered the institutional church. This retrospective proved more nostalgic than historic. While the masses still adhered to the faith in Catholic countries during the course of the eighteenth century, the political and intellectual classes proved hostile to the papacy. The age of absolutism and the consolidation of national states combined to restrict the influence of Rome over the national churches.

In France, state intervention assumed the form of Gallicanism; in Germany, Febronianism; in Austria and Lombardy, Josephism; and in Tuscany, Jansenism.¹³ Clement XI’s condemnation of Pasquier Quesnel’s Jansenist works in the Unigenitus of 1713 did not end the hostility to papal power or the attacks on Roman ceremonies and wealth. Benedict XIV (1740–58) found it necessary to exhort the French bishops to obey the strictures of Unigenitus.¹⁴ The French faithful, in turn, were influenced by Richerism, after the thought of Edmond Richer, who called for decentralization in the church, championing the rights of the parish priests vis-à-vis the bishops and the pope.¹⁵ The papacy conceded some control of the church to the French by the concordat of 1516, and to the Spanish Bourbons by the concordat of 1753. Catholic governments inspired by absolutism were hostile to the exercise of papal authority within their territories, championing a regalism that sought control over ecclesiastical matters. Among other things, the Catholic powers insisted that Rome diminish the number of religious holidays, which the pope felt constrained to do for Spain in 1742, and for Austria, Naples and Tuscany in 1748.

The Catholic powers contested the very office of the papacy in 1740 when their rivalry delayed the papal election for half a year, the longest conclave of the century. A number of European monarchs exercised an unhealthy influence over the college of cardinals, with four of them – the Holy Roman Emperor, and the kings of France, Spain and Portugal – retaining the right to veto a potential pontiff. In 1758 the French vetoed the election of Cardinal Cavalchini in the last public use of the exclusion in the eighteenth century.

In Germany, the thought and work of Bishop Nikolaus von Hontheim (1701–90), who wrote under the pen name of Justinus Febronius, was influenced by the Gallican articles of 1682. Branding the authority of the papacy a usurpation, he claimed it provoked most of the problems plaguing the church. In place of papal centralization, he proposed episcopal decentralization, reducing the papacy to a centre of unity exercising only limited, delegated authority. The popes, in his view, had to renounce their claims to primacy either voluntarily or under collective episcopal coercion. In 1767 the republic of Venice favoured publication of an Italian edition of Hontheim’s work, while other editions were distributed in Spain, France, the Low Countries and Germany. Condemned by Pope Clement XIII (1758–69), and retracted by the author, Hontheim’s call for episcopal autonomy found resonance in the states of Europe, and support from the emperor and the metropolitans of Germany, who challenged papal power. Similar positions were assumed by the archbishop electors and the archbishop of Salzburg in the twenty-three articles of the Punctuation of Ems of 1786, which restricted the jurisdiction of papal nuncios, while judging papal briefs and resolutions invalid without episcopal endorsement.

Joseph II (1741–90), who succeeded Maria Theresa in 1780, and championed royalism, concurred with much of the Febronian programme limiting papal power, which he considered a rival authority within his state. Upon assuming power, Joseph ended direct communication between the bishops and the pope, and placed ecclesiastical decrees under secular control and censure, requiring that all papal pronouncements and documents receive his placet before publication in his dominions. Arguing that papal influence extended only to the spiritual life of the church, Joseph insisted that the training and organization of clericals was subject to state jurisdiction. Joseph interjected the state into the education of clerics, confiscating the property of the clergy, while reorganizing the dioceses and parishes of his lands without papal consultation.

Hoping to moderate this ‘reformist’ programme, Pius VI, the ‘holy traveller’ and one of the few popes to leave Rome since the sixteenth century, ventured to Vienna in 1782 to plead with the emperor for revocation of this legislation. Although Pius received a rapturous reception by the faithful en route, and was cordially entertained in Vienna, the emperor refused to abandon his programme. The failure of the Vienna visit exposed the impotence of the papacy, which reached its nadir. By the concordat of 1784, the pope was constrained to make additional concessions to Joseph, transferring to him as duke of Milan the authority to name candidates to the bishoprics as well as the leadership of the religious orders in the duchies of Milan and Mantua.

Spurred by the success of his older brother Joseph, Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany (1765–90) likewise took steps to oppose the historic doctrines of the church and restrict the influence of the papacy in his duchy. The grand duke abolished the right of asylum, suppressed convents, and subjected ecclesiastical lands to taxes. By 1782, Leopold abolished the inquisition and favoured Jansenist tendencies within the church. Supported by Scipione de Ricci, the bishop of Pistoia and Prato, who shared his determination to limit the influence of Rome, much of Josephist regalism was imposed on the Tuscan church. Under the patronage of the grand duke, the synod of Pistoia (1786) accepted the four Gallican articles of 1682, curtailing the papacy’s control over the Tuscan church.

In the succeeding decade hostile actions were initiated against the papacy in Venice and Naples, and other parts of the Italian peninsula. The republic of St Mark, without Rome’s approval, orchestrated the reform of the religious orders in its territories. The Venetian zeal in limiting ecclesiastical privileges and suppression of convents nearly led to a complete break with the papacy in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In Naples, Pietro Giannone’s History of Naples (1723) became the standard of the anti-papal party. The southern kingdom developed a school of jurists adverse to the ‘pretensions’ of the papacy, placing numerous impositions on papal prerogatives by the concordat of 1741. In 1788 Naples abolished all symbols of vassalage towards the Roman See. Throughout the peninsula, save for Savoy, there was an increased agitation against the Jesuits.

The Society of Jesus, fanatically devoted to the papacy, was criticized for its loyalty to Rome. Counting among its enemies the Jansenists, the rationalists, the apostles of absolutism, the doctors of the Sorbonne in Paris, and all those opposed to papal power, the campaign against the Order intensified in the mid-eighteenth century. The minister of King Joseph of Portugal, Sebastiao José de Carvalho, the marquis of Pombal, charging that the Jesuits were implicated in the assassination attempt on his monarch while resisting his reformism, expelled the Order in 1759. It led to a rupture of relations between Portugal and the Holy See in 1760. The Paris parlement followed suit in 1762 and suppressed the Order in France. Shortly thereafter, the Jesuits, opposed by the ministers Pedro Aranda and Manuel de Roda, were banished from Spain in 1767, and by Bernardo Tanucci from Naples, and from Parma and Piacenza the following year. The pontificate of Clement XIV (1769–74) was dominated by the pressure of the powers to dissolve the Jesuits, and in 1773 by the brief of 21 July, a reluctant pope complied.¹⁶ Only in Catherine’s Russia, beyond the pale of enlightened pressure, did the Society continue its corporate existence on the ‘outskirts of civilized Europe’. In the west, ardent apostles of the age of reason perceived the dissolution as the first step towards the ob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• Abbreviation used in notes
• 1 Introduction: the papacy in an age of ideologies
• 2 The chair of Peter confronts the French Revolution, 1789–1799
• 3 The papacy and Napoleonic France: from compromise to confrontation, 1800–1814
• 4 Rome: from restoration to revolution, 1815–1831
• 5 The Holy See and the first crisis of modernization, 1831–1846
• 6 The Holy See in a turbulent decade: 1846–1856
• 7 Papal intransigence and infallibility in an age of liberalism and nationalism
• 8 Rome’s attempt at accommodation with the modern world, 1878–1903
• 9 The Vatican’s condemnation of Americanism and modernism
• 10 Papal diplomacy and the quest for peace during and after the First World War
• 11 The Vatican between the democracies and the dictatorships in the interwar period
• 12 The diplomacy and ‘silence’ of Pope Pius XII during the Second World War
• 13 The Holy See and cold war in transition
• 14 Aggiornamento and the opening of Vatican II: reconciliation of the papacy with the modern world
• 15 The papacy in an age of transition: the pontificate of Paul VI
• 16 The year of three popes and beyond: the contemporary papacy
• 17 Conclusion: the modern papacy in historical perspective
• Notes on Vatican sources
• Select bibliography
• Maps
• Index