Pope Pius IX, to the ‘liberal’ mind, is the archetypal Catholic reactionary. When the present Pope beatified him, it was seen by his own critics inside the Church (a dwindling but, as John Cornwell’s latest anti-papal offensive demonstrates, increasingly ill-tempered band) as the final proof of their now largely discredited claim that the underlying purpose of John Paul’s pontif-icate has been to reverse the reforms of the second Vatican Council and to ‘restore’ the Church to what the first Vatican Council, the Council of Pio Nono, had made it.
The fretful tone of such attacks is conveyed faithfully enough in Cornwell’s The Pope in Winter, which is subtitled ‘The Dark Face of John Paul’s Papacy’ (though he makes it plain enough that he doesn’t think there is much of a light face). Predictably, Pio Nono is one article of indictment:
An early item of poor judgment and the presumptuous influence of reactionary aides,’ he charges, ‘was the announcement made by the pope …. that Pius IX, Pio Nono, was to be beatified in the autumn of the jubilee year …. He was chiefly famous for calling the First Vatican Council, which declared the dogma of papal infallibility and papal primacy, although he was known for his infamous Syllabus of Errors which denounced democracy, pluralism, workers’ unions and newspapers. A fine exemplar for the 21st century to be sure!’
Such writing (a typical enough specimen of the general level of Cornwell’s analysis throughout) is so crass, and at so many levels, that it is difficult to know where to begin. We are told that Vatican I ‘declared the dogma of papal infallibility and papal primacy’, as though they were the same thing. But papal primacy, from the earliest centuries, had been taken for granted: it was no purpose of the Council to ‘declare’ it. As for papal infallibility, that too was widely believed; Vatican I simply defined it formally. The controversy was whether its definition at the time was ‘opportune’: the implication that the reactionary Pio Nono somehow invented this doctrine ex nihilo and then imposed it, and that this indictment, by extension, applies also to John Paul II, is simply laughable. As for the Syllabus of Errors, not one article of it mentions democracy, workers’ unions or newspapers, and if it rejects ‘pluralism’ (not a concept anyone at the time was familiar with) it is mostly in the sense that any religion which claims to be true rather than a matter of opinion rejects it. Pio Nono was certainly intolerant of other religions, but with few exceptions so, at the time, was nearly everyone else.
Cornwell’s book is an unashamed (though clumsy) hatchet job; Roberto de Mattei’s Blessed Pius IX is unambiguously hagiographical. This has its obvious dis- advantages: a bias in favour of one’s subject ought in theory to cast doubts on the reliability of one’s analysis as much as, say, Cornwell’s obsessive loathing for John Paul II certainly discredits his. Roberto de Mattei, however, is a scholar who declares his sources (Cornwell rarely gives sources — there are no notes — and seems to rely mainly on Vatican tittle-tattle, particularly on a single informant he cutely names ‘Monsignor Sotto Voce’).
Pio Nono emerges from Professor de Mattei’s study (ably translated by a regular Spectator contributor, John Laughland) as a more complex and attractive figure than the received caricature of him as the obscurantist and obdurately pigheaded ‘prisoner of the Vatican’. Not only his opposition to the unification of Italy, but his insistence that the Pope’s temporal powers were necessary to the free exercise of his spiritual authority become not merely defensible but (however mistaken with the benefit of hindsight) perfectly rational when the historical context which formed so many of his attitudes is given its proper weight. The ‘black legend’, according to which he was ‘the enemy of Italy’, in stark contrast to the great heroes of the Risorgimento — Vittorio Emmanuele, Cavour, Garibaldi, Mazzini — becomes entirely comprehensible if we remember the extreme and vindictive secularism of these progressives and ‘liberals’. In 1872 Vittorio Emmanuele signed a law which provided for the expulsion of all religious from their monasteries and convents; 476 houses were confiscated, and 12,669 religious were dispersed. In 1873, the faculties of theology were suppressed in all universities, and seminaries placed under government control; the following year, all priests in Rome were forced into military service.
Under the circumstances, the famous article 80 of the Syllabus — which condemns as an error the proposition (with which, presumably, Cornwell would enthusiastically agree) that ‘the Roman Pontiff may and ought to reconcile himself to, and to agree with, progress, liberalism and modern civilisation’ — seems reasonable enough; it might be added that it is also entirely relevant to our own times: as the present Pope has often said, Christians today are called on to be ‘Signs of Contradiction’. Article 80, in fact, sums up succinctly the real point at issue between the Church and the modern world. Here is the basis, not only of Pio Nono’s kulturkampf with Bismarck and the Risorgimento, but of so many cultural battles down the years — of Chesterton’s struggle against eugenics or Lech Walesa’s against the Polish state, for example, or in our own time of Rocco Buttiglione’s rejection by the European parliament, or the American Catholic bishops’ disapproval of Senator Kerry.
Historically, the problem of the Catholic Church in the 19th century was to protect its own independence from the power of the state, not only in Italy but throughout Europe. The ultimate aim of ultra- montanism, with which Pio Nono is so closely (and mostly polemically) identified today, was to free the Church from national secular control by binding it more closely to a supranational papacy. In this, the movement was largely successful; it can also be argued that it left the Church in a more fit condition for its 20th-century resistance to totalitarianisms of both Left and Right. Pio Nono’s resistance to the Risorgimento was a useful preparatory exercise for John Paul’s more massive achievement in his epic confrontation with communism. Without a strong and supranational papacy could the Soviet bloc have been brought down as soon as it was? Discuss.
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