The strength of the unarmed pope

A review of Gérard Pelletier’s book on the theology and the politics of the Holy See towards the French Revolution. The papacy came out of the furore at the end of the eighteenth century humiliated, hurt, but substantially reinvigorated. Those years were to be influential for the great themes of 20th century Catholicism such as relations with authoritarian regimes and revolutions, freedom of worship and the role of the episcopate

by Andrea Riccardi

The Bulls of the XVIIIth century, anonymous engraving, Carnavalet Museum, Paris. France, strong in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, returned pontifical bulls to their sender. With the French Revolution, caricature abandoned the old image of the pope-antichrist and highlighted the pontiff’s impotence in the face of the nations

Before speaking about this book by Gérard Pelletier, I must thank the French Ambassador, who, out of the friendship that binds us, has made it almost a duty for me to introduce it. A duty, because I was conscious of the fact that the period dealt with was not one of those I have studied with less clumsiness in my life. I therefore had no entitlement to concern myself with such a monumental piece of research. But, after reading the book, I realized that the study of the attitude of Rome over the ten years of the French Revolution, from 1789 to 1799, contains all “my own” preoccupations: those I have come across in dealing with the 19th century, those raised by Monsignor Maret (cited at the end of Pelletier’s volume on the problem of the relations between faith and freedom); those faced by Vatican I on the primacy and the episcopy; the large questions of Catholicism in the 20th century, its relations with authoritarian regimes, communism and revolutions; coming finally to the themes of Vatican II, such as freedom of worship and the role of the episcopacy. Some of these problems date from well before the crisis at the end of the 18th century (think of Gallicanism), but all of them come together around the revolutionary events that made the State take on a new attitude towards the Church, towards its citizens, towards their freedom and their obedience. In this book one hears the echo of the great weakness of Catholicism and of the papacy at the end of the eighteenth century. That of a Rome that had lost the great universalist network of the Society of Jesus; because the popes - at least those of the second millennium - needed not only a relation with the episcopates, but also wholesale connection with the entire Catholic world.
The first important gain of Gérard Pelletier’s book hinges precisely on the relationship between history and theology. The two sciences have an ancient history of connection, marked by the debate on which of the two should have the primacy: a theological history, handmaid to theology, or a history that considers the Church and Christianity aside from their theological aspect? With great composure Pelletier writes Church history, but shows how that cannot be portrayed without awareness of the theological aspect of ecclesial decisions. The study of the composition of the College of cardinals, as it was in Rome during the revolutionary years, shows that their debates were not purely pragmatic but had facets and orientation that were theological in character. Part of the volume is devoted to the theological origins of the split: that is, the affirmation of the Roman primacy against jurisdictionalist currents. One by one the makers and doers are presented: from Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino and Edmond Richer, by way of Pietro Tamburini, the Abbé Nicolas Sylvestre Bergier, Durand de Maillane, down to Ermanno Domenico Cristianopulo, Francesco Maria Zaccaria, Gianvincenzo Bolgeni, the Giornale Ecclesiastico di Roma (a real instrument of theological and ecclesiastical propaganda in that period, as were, after Vatican II, Concilium or Renovatio, the magazine of Siri), and Nicola Spedalieri, theologian of human rights based on Thomism, of the sort that would please Blandine Kriegel. And one could go on mentioning the gallery of thinkers who appear in these pages, to come to the triumph - not wanted by many, but induced by history - of the Camaldolesian (coming not from among the hermits of Tuscany, dedicated to a hard ascetic life on the Apennines, but from the coenobites, very open to culture and lodged in the fine cloister of San Gregorio al Celio in Rome) Mauro Cappellari, destined to become Gregory XVI. His triumph was not his election (it is rare over recent centuries for a pope with such decided ecclesiological thinking to be elected) but, rather, his great work, which Pelletier analyzes with delicate precision: The triumph of the Holy See and of the Church against the assaults of innovators fought and repulsed with their own weapons. It is a fundamental text for an understanding of the evolution not only of ecclesiological thinking but of the attitude of the Church to the nineteenth-century world: that is of that intransigence that is its substantial characteristic (I believe one shouldn’t be afraid to use a term that depicts the basic attitude of the Church toward the political modernity of the 19th century). In the first place, an intransigence towards liberal powers and regimes, that caused the Church to draw in on itself, a retreat into grandiose solitude and into its missionary commitment, that of a Church-movement (as wanted by Robert de Lamennais, who was condemned for that matter by Pope Cappellari). It should be made clear that the pontificate of Gregory XVI marked a missionary renewal and it should also be remembered that it was with Pius IX that the foundations of the intransigence were laid.

Below, Napoleon imposes the Treaty of Tolentino on Pius VI (19 February 1797) that sanctioned the definitive loss of Avignon and the Contado Venassino

But we are chronologically outside the ten years our author deals with. Nevertheless I am convicted that in the course of that decade old and ever present problems were debated, such as that of the “primacy-episcopate”, and also new problems such as those of the relations between the lay power and the Church, even in the totalitarian aspects of such power, or those of the life of the Church outside of Christendom. As for that, the men of the last two decades of the 18th century were struck by the fact that something new was happening: «Not only in the ecclesiastical sphere, but also in the political sphere we are threatened by a certain strange revolution», wrote Zaccaria in 1789. One could say that the book sketches in the features of that process, represented by an awareness of the phenomenon of the French Revolution, which underlies an awareness of the more general phenomenon of revolution in contemporaneous history. Here the realization grew, later expressed with acuity by the popes of the 20th century, but already also by those of the 19th, that the world and the Church can expect nothing good from wars and revolutions. Here lie the roots of the messages of peace of the 20th century popes, but also of the anti-revolutionary thinking of 19th century Catholicism that led, especially in recent times, to theorizing peaceful resolution (of which the Polish one of 1989 and the Chilean one after Pinochet are models) of revolutionary processes.
Should Pius VI bless the Italian League resisting the French? Which attitude to take towards the Christian revolt in the Vendée? We have here a problem that the Christianity of the previous centuries had resolved in another way, sometimes blessing the soldiers. Should the Church also defend itself by force of arms? And then, in the 20th century, what to say of the Mexican cristeros? And how to answer the proposal Hitler made the Holy See that the war against Soviet Russia be considered a crusade in defense of Christian civilization against the enemy of Catholicism, i.e. the communism condemned more than once by popes? Even the observations to be found in the Giornale Ecclesiastico di Roma regarding the French Revolution began to deepen awareness in the Roman Church that revolutions leave the world worse than they found it. The Olivetan Agostino wrote that «every civil war is more dangerous than any unjust government» and concluded by quoting a phrase of François Pey’s: «Revolt always begins with the cry of freedom and ends with servitude». Something similar can also be found in Paul VI and in John Paul II. To that can be added the idea of the plot against the Church, in which entities having no link between them participate, that remained a model to which in the 19th century the communists were also accommodated: the plot of Bourg-Fontaine.

Pius VI departs for Siena, painting in the Vatican Museums. On 15 February 1798 French soldiers entered Rome and proclaimed the Roman Republic. The Pope was forced to escape, first to Siena then to the charterhouse of San Casciano, near Florence, and finally to Valence where he was to die on 29 August 1799

This book is also the history of a pontificate, the longest up till then, that of Pius VI, from Cesena in Romagna, who is studied through a careful scrutiny of his curia. Pages are added to that ideal - never written - history of the Roman Curia that Giuseppe De Luca already considered one of the gaps in the history of the Church of his time, and that such has remained (even if it should be said that the École Française of Rome, with the collaboration of Jean-Dominique Durand and of myself, has contributed to it with research on the Secretariat of State at the end of the temporal power of the popes). Among the numerous things that should be said about the new information on Pius VI that emerges from Pelletier’s book, I’d like to mention just one: the relations between the Pope and the people. The papacy came out with shrunken temporal power from the revolutionary period (already because of the loss of Avignon), but at the same time it gained the halo of martyrdom. The popes, with their histories of suffering, are no longer anonymous successors in a long chain, but men with their own history of pain.
Pius VI begins to travel outside his State: he visited Vienna, where he astonished people and showed that the preconception, according to which the pope is no more than a bishop like any other, was still not ingrained in the feeling of the people. And then, humiliated by prison, he suffered treatment that took him, old and sickly, to die in Valence. Pius VII underwent a hard fate with Napoleon, but it was the death of Pius VI that brought about a shift for the papacy. The Catholic world did not remain indifferent to the Pope and his sufferings. No European power, not even that of Hitler (who feared the consequences not only on Allied public opinion but also on that of German Catholics), would dare treat the pope as did the new rulers of revolutionary France.

The signing of the Concordat between France and the Holy See, sketch by Jean-Baptiste Wicar, Museum of Versailles. After the fall of the Roman Republic, on 29 September 1799, caused by the advance of the Russian and Austrian armies, Pius VII returned to Rome and on 15 July1801 signed the Concordat establishing peace between the Church and France

The wayfaring and the suffering of Pius VI was not barren of consequences for the policies of the popes. In fact our author rightly concludes: «After the Pope’s journey to Vienna, Rome became aware that the support of the people could be more relied on in affirming pontifical authority than the policies of sovereigns». Certainly it was not yet a fully formed awareness, it came and went. Nevertheless, it represented the insight that the Abbé de Lamennais forcefully maintained: «God and the people», or, if you prefer: «God and freedom». Here were the two new pillars of the Church in the face of monarchies that did not pursue Christian interests, and in the face of the new lay and liberal powers. Here lies the Church-movement’s intuition of new times.
But one has to be careful that new ideas do not induce us to abandon the old and that the new strategies co-habit with old means, in this great apparatus of politics and thought that is the Holy See, in which novelties imposed themselves alongside an obvious continuity. Because in Rome, even in the Rome of Pius VI and under the impact of the revolutionary events battering at the door, problems, ideas, theology and politics were debated. The decisions of the Pope needed theological justification because Rome is not a dictatorship. Even if the question remained open – as shown in the pages of this book – of what the regime of the Catholic Church actually is: a monarchy, a monarchy tempered by an aristocracy, a republic of the Venetian kind, a communion, a democracy, et cetera. Since the times of True and false reform of the Church, Father Yves Congar warned, and Pelletier reminds us, that the Church isn’t very good at defining itself and at realizing what it carries within itself. Often for understanding and characterizing itself, the Church needed to measure itself against the rest of the world and that confrontation - the decade under investigation confirms it – is sometimes very dramatic.

Above, the crowning of Napoleon in the presence of Pope Pius VII, painting of Jacques-Louis David, Museum of the Louvre, Paris. Elected emperor of France by plebiscite, Napoleon invited Pius VII to the coronation. The ceremony took place in Notre-Dame on 2 December 1804; the Pope stands by at the self-crowning of Napoleon

Many other promptings have come from reading this volume, along with some comparisons with the history of the 20th century. On the one hand it seems to me worth stressing the link between those who want to affirm the strong power of the State over society with the retrieval of Gallican theories, a nostalgia for the early Church. But is the use of the Bible – one could say of the New Testament - that of an eternal constitution of the Church or, on the contrary – and this is something a great deal bigger – does it represent that word of God that speaks and expands (as the Roman pope Gregory the Great said) in the hearts of the faithful of the Church? There, then, the eternal use of the New Testament and of the Acts of the Apostles as a polemical or reformatory instrument in the life of the Church. There is also, however, a development in the self-awareness of the Church, connected with history.
I would like to add that, observing the clandestine state of the French Church “non assermentée” (i.e. that did not bend to the civic powers) of that period, the experience of Catholics in anti-Catholic Great Britain comes to mind (to the extent that Propaganda Fide treated revolutionary France as a missionary country). There were the unresolved problems of a clandestine Catholicism and contrasting views on the State and its institutions. It was not an accident that the severe prelate Jacques André Emery, a Sulpician and a point of reference for a large part of the French clergy, took a very moderate stance and counted for more than the bishops.
There are also problems that we find again in the Catholicism of Soviet Russia and in the countries of Eastern Europe, in the clandestine Church in Czechoslovakia and in Catholic life in Ukrainian Galicia of the 20th century, and questions of the same kind - since there is a split, as in France, between the constitutional Church and the underground Church – still now being experienced in China between so-called patriotic Catholicism and the clandestine sort (I speak in the awareness that is not a matter of two worlds but of several worlds). Rome was with the French clergy that did not bend to the impositions of the State, not only in terms of oaths but also of rules for the operation of the Church and the ordination of bishops. Rome was perhaps more rigid with neighboring France of the 18th century than it will be with the distant China of the 20th, at least in recent years. Certainly one really must ponder deeply when one thinks that the new French Church, that of Pius VII and of the Concordat, the mother of the great French Catholicism of the 19th century, was to be heir to all that suffering. It was, however, to constitute a third situation compared to the clandestine and constitutional forms. A situation marked by the primacy of Rome and by its creative and diplomatic action, because, among other things, the Revolution put an end to Gallicanism.

The opening of Vatican Council I on 7 December 1869. On 8 December 1864 Pius IX promulgated the Syllabus, a list of eighty philosophical and ethico-political errors

I share the conclusion of Gérard Pelletier, whom I permit myself to quote in closing: «Dying, abandoned by the powers that still tried, like Charles IV, to take advantage of the situation, Pius VI pointed out the enemy and opened a new space for freedom of which contemporaries were almost unaware, except of course, for a man such as Consalvi, who understood that by then there had to be negotiation with everybody and that the situation had to cleverly manipulated so as to set one country against another or, again, such as Chiaramonti who, as soon as elected, refused to go to Vienna under the personal protection of the emperor. Why submit to those who did not defend his predecessor? A free space for papal primacy, founded and defined theologically, gradually accepted by the believers who crowded Vienna in 1782, Valence in 1799, Paris in 1804. They had not read Joseph-Valentin Eybel, nor Tamburini, nor Auctorem fidei, even less Cappellari. But they were looking for blessing from an authority, in whom they set their faith».
There it is the long history of the Church that is measured by the absolutism of States and politics (whose oath imposed on the clergy is only the first step): but there is also this rootedness, with its rules and identity processes, of Catholicism in contemporary history, with a free space that has an alternative consistence to civil society. Events different from those in the Anglican world (with which Pius VI re-opened contact) or from those in the Orthodox world (from which, in the person of the Tsarina, Pope Braschi asked support in his struggle against the Revolution). It is no accident that the Revolution burst out precisely in Paris, in that Catholic France, eldest daughter of the Church, in which had been forged the Gallican and royal weapons of the struggle against Rome, but which was in the meantime close to the heart of Catholic Rome. From the French furore at the end of the eighteenth century the papacy emerged humiliated, hurt, stricken, but substantially reinvigorated: it came out stronger than ever. Pelletier has thus given us a very important book that should be read not just by those who are getting down to the study of the French Revolution, but also by those who want to analyze the Christianity of the 19th and 20th centuries.