subjects was the greatest figure of the age, and who to all the rest of
the world, if not the greatest, was certainly the most conspicuous. The
history of the last thirty years—that larger history that takes within
its scope the whole human family rather than this or that nationality
or people—will in after-times centre around him. It will be seen that
he has had a hand in shaping it, though to-day it may seem that that
hand was brushed rudely aside or lifted only in impotent menace against
the irresistible movements and the natural aspirations of the age. Time
is a great healer and revealer of truth; and time will deal gently and
justly with the memory of Pius IX. When the smoke of the long battle
that has been raging in Europe, and more or less over all the world,
during the last half-century, shall have finally cleared away, and
men’s eyes be better prepared to regard all things honestly, truth, now
obscured and hidden, will come to light, and the persistent action,
misnamed reaction, of Pius IX. will appear to have been the truest
wisdom and the soundest policy.
The field, of which this wonderful life is the central figure, is so
vast, its lights and shadows so changing, its surface so diversified,
and the events with which it is crowded are so many and so great, that
one shrinks from attempting to picture it even faintly. Yet we cannot,
even with the brief time allowed us, permit the Holy Father to go to
his grave without a tribute of admiration and respect for his memory,
however inadequate that tribute may be. Into the minute details of his
life we do not purpose here to enter. These are already sufficiently
well known, and there are ample sources of information from which to
gather them. We purpose rather passing a rapid glance over the most
prominent events that mark the career of the Pope, that give it its
significance and make of it one of the most remarkable in history.
Whoever attempts to deal with Pius IX., with a view to what the man
was, what he achieved, what he failed to achieve, the meaning, the
purport, and the influence of his life, must necessarily regard him in
a twofold aspect: first, as a temporal prince, a man occupied with
human and secular affairs; secondly, as the supreme head of the
Catholic Church, the vicar of Christ on earth, and the father of the
faithful. As the one his life was a failure, outwardly at least. He has
gone to his grave shorn of all his earthly possessions and dignities;
and his successor will enter into office much as the first pontiff
entered, with no authority save that bequeathed him by his divine
Master. As the second—as supreme pastor of the church—Pius IX. yields
to none of his illustrious predecessors in point of moral and real
dignity and grandeur. This is the strange and significant contrast in
the man’s life: the decadence and utter loss of the temporal power and
principality of the church under his reign, with a contrary deepening
and strengthening of the bonds that bind him to the faithful as their
spiritual father and guide. In both these aspects we shall look at him:
as a prince who failed in much that he attempted, and as a spiritual
ruler who grew stronger by his very losses; under whom the church has
marvellously, almost miraculously, developed; and who leaves it to-day
in a spiritually stronger condition than perhaps it has ever been in.
As a temporal sovereign there may have been greater popes than he; as a
spiritual, few, if any, have surpassed him. And much, very much of the
growth of the church within the period of his troubled reign is
undoubtedly to be attributed to the personal influence of the pontiff,
to his own high example of virtue and burning zeal, and to the keen eye
he had for the church’s truest interests and welfare.
He was ushered into a revolutionary epoch, in a time when disaster was
heaped upon the church and on civil society. Lacordaire says of
himself: “I was born on the wild and stormy morning of this nineteenth
century.” The same is true of him who became Pius IX. He was born at
Sinigaglia, May 13, 1792, while Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette were
prisoners and waiting for the scaffold to release them from their woes.
Napoleon I. had not yet arisen. The United States had not much more
than come into being. Joseph II. ruled and reigned in Austria. France
was in the hands of the progeny of Voltaire. Sardinia did not exist.
Catholic Ireland did not exist politically. Australia was almost an
unknown land. It was a period of moral earthquakes. The progeny of
Voltaire were very active in the propagation of their doctrines; and
Italy, which for centuries had been the battle-ground of kings and the
theatre of petty rival factions, offered an inviting soil for the evil
seed. In 1793 the heads were struck off from Louis and his queen; the
Goddess of Reason was enthroned in Notre Dame; and the reign of
“liberty, fraternity, equality” began and ended with—“death.”
Then came that grim child of the Revolution, Napoleon, and changed
everything. He had an eye to religion, and he wanted a sort of tame
pope whom he might use as a puppet. Italy felt his iron heel, and
things went from bad to worse there. It saw the pope, with others of
its treasures, carried off by this rough-and-ready conqueror. In 1805
this same conqueror had himself crowned “King of Italy”—king of a
kingdom which did not exist, save as a pillage-ground for whoever chose
to enter. In 1808 the Papal States were “irrevocably” incorporated with
the French Empire. So decreed the omnipotent conqueror. Where is his
empire now? Where was it and where was he a few years afterwards? He
was eating his heart out at St. Helena; his empire had vanished; and
the pope whom he had captured and imprisoned was back in Rome.
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ROME PREPARED FOR REVOLUTION.
All this time the young Giovanni Mastaï-Ferretti was pursuing his
studies as conveniently as he could under such circumstances. We do not
recall these events in the earlier life of the boy idly, but with a
very distinct purpose: to show that when in 1846 Pius IX. was elevated
to the Papacy, and to the guardianship of the church’s temporalities,
he stepped into no bed of roses. He stepped, on the contrary, into a
very hot-bed of revolution—a revolution that, with less or more of
secrecy, had overspread Europe, and that found its most convenient as
well as its most necessary centre of attack in Rome and in the Papal
States. Italy had long been the prey of Europe. The people had suffered
terribly from foreign invasions. They suffered almost equally from home
intrigues and jealousies. With all this the popes had nothing to do. It
was simply a repetition of the history of the Italian peninsula from
the disruption of the Roman Empire down. The outer barbarians were
always knocking at her gates and trampling on her soil, invited there
by native quarrels.
It is necessary to bear these things well in mind, in order to judge
rightly of the difficulties against which Pius IX. had to contend. He
was elected to an impoverished and disturbed principality, to a centre
of revolution in an era of revolution. All Italy groaned with trouble.
The people were ripe for any mad-cap scheme which should profess to
better their condition. There was revolution in the air, all around
them, all over the world. There were burning ideas afloat of people’s
rights, and people’s wrongs, and people’s futures. Schemes of
regeneration for the human race were abundant as the schemers; and some
of these were very keen, far-sighted, and resolute men. Mazzini was one
of them. His policy was simple enough, and it is the policy of all his
followers to-day: For the people to rule you must first destroy the
rulers—kings; before destroying the kings, who (in Europe at least) are
the representatives of authority, you must destroy the priests who
preach submission to lawful authority. Death to the priests! death to
the kings! and then, long live the people!
That, we believe, is a fair presentation of the Mazzini programme for
the regeneration of Italy and of the rest of the world. It has its
fascinations for empty minds and empty stomachs, and the masses of the
people, particularly of the Italians, just about the time of which we
write had both empty minds and empty stomachs. The people of the Papal
States, in common with the people of all the other Italian States, and,
indeed, of states generally, were not in the happiest condition
possible. Wars and foreign invasions and constant turmoil from day to
day are not the best agents of good government. So Pius IX. came to an
uneasy throne.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PIUS IX. AS A POLITICAL REFORMER.
The cry of the Roman people, of the whole Italian people, as of all
people just then, was for reform. They wanted a share in the
government; and there was no harm in that. The new pontiff began his
reign by at once setting about practical reform. His scheme was
excellent. The details of it must be found elsewhere. Practically it
amounted to letting the people have a just and rational share in the
government. It was not universal suffrage. But the Papal States were
not the United States; and there are intelligent and patriotic men in
the United States even who begin to doubt about the actual efficacy of
universal suffrage as a panacea for all political or social evils. It
is not long since Mr. Disraeli laid down the daring doctrine in the
English House of Commons that universal suffrage was not a natural
right of man, to which doctrine nobody seemed to object. The Pope,
then, set earnestly and practically to work at every kind of reform. He
set on foot a scheme of government which should admit the laity to
their lawful place in civic functions. He looked to the laws of
commerce, which were in a very bad state. He struck at vicious
monopolies, in return for which the monopolists struck viciously at
him. He was very careful about the finances, his treasury being low
indeed, or rather non-existent. He advised the people, who, under the
impulse of a steady conspiracy, seized every opportunity at the
beginning of his reign of getting up festivals in his honor, to spend
their money at home, or hoard it for an evil hour, or devote it to some
charitable or educational purpose. He was clement to political
offences. He was kind and charitable to the oppressed Jews of Rome, and
removed their civil disabilities before England thought of doing so.
All this is matter of fact, beyond question or dispute. It was
recognized by the outer world. All the crowned heads of Europe, with
the exception of Austria and the Italian principalities, who found
themselves in a position of painful contrast, sent their hearty
congratulations to the Pope; and the voice of New York—non-Catholic New
York—joined in with them. The Pope was, for the time being at least,
the most popular man in the world as well as in Italy. And he deserved
his popularity, for he was real and resolute in what he attempted.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
WHY HE FAILED AS A REFORMER.
How, then, came the sad sequel? Why did all this fail? Pius IX. looked
even beyond the Papal States in his political schemes. He wished for a
united Italy. He was a true Italian. He proposed a confederation of the
Italian States, which, without infringing on any people’s rights,
should constitute one Italy, show a united front to the foreigner, and
remove all excuse for foreign interference. Why was this, too, a
failure?
Because it was intended that it should be a failure. Because the men
who used the clamor for reform as an agitating force among the people
wanted nothing so little as actual reform, least of all in the prince
of the church. Good government was what most they feared; for good
government makes, as far as government can make, people happy and well
off and reconciled to order. But order and contentment among the people
were precisely what Mazzini least desired.
Pius IX. was in heart and soul and act a reformer of reformers. As a
temporal ruler he desired nothing in this world so much as the welfare
and happiness of his people, and he took all honest means to bring
about that happiness and welfare. But he was met at the outset by a
strong and wide-spread conspiracy—a conspiracy that had existed long
before his time, that had laid its plans and arranged its mode of
action, and that was ready to do any diabolical deed in order to carry
its purpose through. The very willingness of the Pope to concede
reforms helped it. It took him up and petted and played with him. The
clubs that roamed the streets and shouted themselves hoarse with _Viva
Pio Nono!_ and _Viva Pio Nono solo!_ were instruments of the
conspirators. The offices which the Pope threw open to the laity were
seized upon by conspirators. His guards and soldiers were corrupted and
led by corrupt officers and generals. Some of the clergy even felt the
contamination. Ministry after ministry was tried and changed, and only
succeeded in exasperating the minds of the people, as it was intended
they should. The Pope had faith in human nature, and could not believe
but that the honest measures which he devised for the benefit of his
subjects would be honestly accepted by them. Although he knew of the
conspiracy against his throne and against society, perhaps he scarcely
realized its depth and intensity. The horrible assassination of De
Rossi undeceived him, and the reformer and gentle prince had to fly for
his life and in disguise from his own subjects.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRIUMPH OF THE REVOLUTION.
Not two years of his reign have passed, and the Pope is already an
exile at Gaeta. Pandemonium reigned in Rome. It was not the secret
societies alone who brought all this about. They were aided by some, at
least, of the crowned heads of Europe; and Palmerston, as infamous a
politician as ever conspired against the right, was hand and glove with
them, ably seconded by Gladstone, whose recent attack on the Pope
cannot have surprised those who remembered his political career.
Meanwhile Piedmont was creeping to the front in Italy, and though at
first Mazzini was as thoroughly opposed to Charles Albert as to the
Pope and the priests, the conviction grew upon the conspirators that
kings might sometimes be utilized as well as killed, and that Italy
might, for the time being at least, be united under the Sardinian. This
conviction only came slowly, and there was a man at the head of affairs
in Piedmont who was keen in reading the signs of the times, and who
never missed a chance. Cavour utilized the secret societies, and the
secret societies utilized Cavour. In like manner Louis Napoleon, then
coming to the front in France, utilized, and was in turn utilized by,
them. Palmerston, Cavour, Louis Napoleon, a dangerous and powerful
triad, were with the conspirators, while Austria blundered on with
characteristic stupidity, actually courting the fate which has since
overtaken it.
It may be said that we concede too much power to the secret societies.
Who and what are they after all? A handful of men working in the dark,
led by crack-brained enthusiasts who write inflammatory letters and
publish silly pamphlets at safe distances from the scene of action.
They are more than this, however. They are well organized, and they
trade on real wrongs and disaffection too well grounded. Certainly, in
the earlier period of the Pope’s reign men were far from being, as a
whole, well governed in Europe. They were not at rest; they had not
been at rest from the beginning of the century. Reforms from their
rulers came very slowly and grudgingly. The conspirators possessed all
the daring of adventurers, and spread out a political _El Dorado_
glittering before the hungry eyes of bitter and disappointed men. In
such a state of affairs the wildest chimeras seem possible to the
common mind, and in this lies the real strength of secret societies,
which find their growth cramped only where men are freest and best off,
as among ourselves.
A fair idea of what the reign of “the people” meant may be gathered
from the state of Rome while the pontiff was in exile at Gaeta. It was
cousin-german to the reign of the _Commune_ in Paris in more recent
days. And for this the Pope was driven from his own city. These were
the reformers who could not be satisfied with the Holy Father’s
rational measures of real reform. These were the “heroes” honored by
England, by the United States, by all the enlightened and advanced men
of all lands. It was for opposing and condemning these that Pius IX. is
regarded by enlightened non-Catholics as a reactionist of the worst
type, a foe to progress, an enemy to popular liberties. A government of
assassins was preferred by the world, or at least by a very large
portion of it, to the mild and beneficent sway of Pius IX. For
condemning cut-throats he is against the spirit of the age; and for
refusing to honor men like Mazzini and Garibaldi—men who openly
professed and caused to be practised murder as a necessary political
instrument—he is condemned as one who refused to recognize the
progressive spirit of the times in which we live.
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THE POPE AND LOUIS NAPOLEON.
While the Pope was at Gaeta, and while Rome was in the hands of what,
without fear of contradiction, may be described as the vilest of vile
rabbles, the baleful star of Louis Napoleon was rising over France. He
was false from the very beginning to the Pope, and the Pope understood
him. But he was tricky and adroit. He had the born conspirator’s liking
for mystery and secrecy and intrigue. He seemed by nature incapacitated
to speak and act openly. He never was a friend to the Pope. By means
that are already known and stamped in history he came to the lead of
what, in spite of all vicissitudes and awful changes, remained at heart
a Catholic nation. The trickster realized his position and trimmed his
sails accordingly. He cared nothing for the Pope or for Catholicity;
but the French people did. Moreover, the protection of the Pope and
French predominance in Italy was a part of the Napoleonic legend, and
likely to advance his own cause. French cannon, then, and French
bayonets cleared the way for the return of the Pope to Rome. Not
France, Catholic France alone, but all the world, had been shocked at
the awful excesses perpetrated by the revolutionists in Rome, as was
the case earlier still at the outbreak of the first French Revolution.
France only anticipated Europe in its action by staying the reign of
blood.
Louis Napoleon thenceforth assumed the character of protector of the
interests of the Holy See. He was the persistent enemy of those
interests. He was altogether opposed to ecclesiastical rule in an
ecclesiastical state. This friend and protector of the Pope labored all
his political life, and used the great influence of a Catholic nation,
to bring about what has since been consummated: the robbery of the
States of the Church, the invasion of the Holy See, the Piedmontese
ascendency in Italy, and the reducing of the head of the Catholic
Church to a political cipher in his own states. Yet intelligent men are
surprised at the ingratitude displayed by Pius IX. towards Louis
Napoleon! Pius IX. loved France; he despised the dishonest trickster to
whose hands the fate of so noble a nation was for a time committed. He
despised him, for he knew him with that instinctive knowledge by which
all honest and open natures detect duplicity and fraud, under whatever
smiling guise they may appear. Some good qualities the man may have
had. Open honesty was not one of them. Some regard for the Catholic
religion he may have had. He never allowed it to interfere with his
schemes or with the schemes of those of whom after all he was a tool,
never a master. Louis Napoleon knew perfectly well that the Pope
understood him and his schemes.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE POPE AGAIN AS A REFORMER.
Pius IX. returned to Rome in 1850. He immediately set to work to repair
the losses which his subjects had sustained during his absence. He
proceeded in his work of reform. Within seven years he succeeded in
clearing off the enormous debt with which the country had been saddled.
The French commission, of which M. Thiers was a member, appointed to
examine and report on the political wisdom and practical value of the
institutions granted to his states by Pius IX., reported to the
Republican Government (1849):
“By a large majority your commission declares that it sees in
the _motu proprio_ (the Pope’s decree reorganizing the
government of the Pontifical States) a first boon of such real
value that nothing but unjust pretensions could overlook its
importance.... We say that it grants all desirable provincial
and municipal liberties. As to political liberties, consisting
in the power of deciding on the public business of a country in
one of the two assemblies and in union with the executive—as in
England, for instance—it is very true that the _motu proprio_
does not grant this sort of political liberty, or only grants
it in the rudimentary form of a council without deliberative
voice.
“... That on this point he (the Pope) should have chosen to be
prudent, that after his recent experience he should have
preferred not to reopen a career of agitation among a people
who have shown themselves so unprepared for parliamentary
liberty, we do not know that we have either the right or the
cause to deem blameworthy.”
And Palmerston, whose testimony is surely as unbiassed as that of
Thiers, said of the same act in 1856:
“We all know that, on his restoration to his states in 1849,
the Pope published an ordinance called _motu proprio_, by which
he declared his intentions to bestow institutions, not indeed
on the large proportions of a constitutional government, but
based, nevertheless, on popular election, and which, if they
had only been carried out, must have given his subjects such
satisfaction as to render unnecessary the intervention of a
foreign army.”
We have gone into this matter of reform and home government in the
Papal States at some length, because it is precisely on this ground of
all others that the temporal power of the popes is attacked. Priests
are unfit to rule, it is said; their business is with the souls of men,
to tend to spiritual wants. They should have no concern with the things
of this world. This may be all very well, and is a very convenient way
of disposing of rights and properties which do not belong to us. If the
invasion of the Papal States and their occupation by a hostile power is
justified on the ground that the Pope was a priest, and, _because_ a
priest, unfit to rule his subjects, that at least is intelligible. We
have seen, however, that Pius IX. was in heart and in act a wise and
just ruler, who aimed at doing nothing but good, and who did nothing
but good, to his people, but who was steadily prevented from doing all
the good he wished and attempted to do by conspiracy at home and
abroad. Had he been left alone to work out the constitution he framed,
to carry through the reforms he proposed and entered upon, it is beyond
question that the States of the Church would have been more happily
governed and more peacefully ordered than any states in the world. But
he was prevented from ruling as he wished as well by the opposition of
governments, such as those of Palmerston, Cavour, and Louis Napoleon,
as by the organized conspiracy within his own domains—a conspiracy that
sprang from causes with which he had had nothing to do, which assailed
him because by his very position he was the symbol and type and
fountain-head of all earthly order, and which would not be reconciled
to good. He trod on volcanic ground from the beginning. All that a good
man could do to dissipate the evil elements he did. But the conspiracy
abroad and the conspiracy at home were too much for him. Indeed, the
existence of the Papacy as a temporal power always depended on the
sense of right and the good-will of men. There have been a few fighting
popes in other days; but as a matter of fact the Papacy has always been
a power built essentially on peace; and if powerful enemies insisted on
invading it, it was always open to them. The pope, like the Master
whose vicar he is, is “the prince of peace.”