“The most deadly foes of the Catholic religion have always waged a fierce war, but without success, against this Chair; they are by no means ignorant of the fact that religion itself can never totter and fall while this Chair remains intact, the Chair which rests on the rock which the proud gates of hell cannot overthrow.” —Pope Pius IX.
It was the amnesty that took the world by storm. Placarded on the walls of Rome, on the hot summer evening of July 17, 1846, it spelt release for more than a thousand captives and return from exile for hundreds more.
Pio Nono had worked on it with a committee of six cardinals, Lambruschini and Bernetti (the ex-Secretaries of State), Macchi and Mattei (two more conservatives), and Amat and Gizzi, who were two liberal friends. But his right-hand man was the secretary, the very liberal Corboli-Bussi; and outside the committee he was encouraged by his sometime tutor in theology, the Abate Graziosi.
There was opposition to the project—and not without reason. It was bound to lead, as Metternich foresaw, to the return of incorrigible revolutionaries who would foment trouble; the promise of good behaviour required from them was of small value—Mazzini’s agents, men like Galletti, who was soon to lead the revolution, returned now, with promises and tears of gratitude that were very soon forgotten. Mostly they were Romagnuols, or from Umbria or the Marches. Very few were Romans; the Romans, even under Gregory XVI, had remained, for the most part, enthusiastically loyal; almost all the later revolutionary leaders inside the city came from elsewhere, though some, like Ciceruacchio, belonged to the Trastevere slum across the Tiber.
If the Pope must make a gesture, thought Metternich, let him grant a pardon. An amnesty of this sort, liberating, or bringing home from exile hundreds of revolutionaries seemed to suggest a change of outlook, almost an acceptance of pernicious principles. “God never grants amnesties,” Metternich observed, “God pardons.” As usual, Metternich was right; the world did not take the amnesty as a sign of mercy, it took it as a sign of political change of heart. That was why it made so great an impression in Europe, and why it started off the whole movement of reforms in the states of Italy which led to the constitutions of 1848, and to revolution.
The amnesty was no flash in the pan. Pio Nono, appointing the liberal Gizzi as his Secretary of State, went straight ahead in the path of reform, maintaining the lead in Italy until the spring of 1848.
The range of these reforms was wide. The first, which followed closely upon the amnesty, was the commission on railways. Pius had never been sympathetic with Gregory’s mistrust of railways. He set up a commission as early as August 22, and received its report on November 7. Four lines were projected, one from Rome to the Neapolitan frontier, one to Anzio, one up to Civita Vecchia, and one right across the Apennines into Umbria. A gold medal was offered as a prize to the person who could find the best route for this last line across the mountains. The work was to be undertaken by private companies. Unfortunately the revolution had occurred before it was seriously started.
While these plans were being laid, others were being prepared to provide gas lighting in the streets. There was to be established a distillery for gas outside the town, to contribute “not only to the beauty and splendour of the streets but also to the safety of the citizens.” To some this was to symbolise, rather literally, the break with the obscurantism of the Gregorian régime.
Then there was to be an Agricultural Institute. Agricultural Institutes were all the rage at that time in Italy, stimulated by the visit of Cobden to Florence, and the enlightenment of the Georgofils society in that city. The Institute was not merely to study practical problems, like cattle breeding, in the light of new scientific knowledge, but to give advice to agriculturists, of the kind county agricultural committees have given more recently in England. It was also to educate the rural unemployed and even to start rural infant schools. It was to be a private affair, with the chance of earning a government grant later on. Pius was very keen about it, as he was about the holding of scientific congresses in the Papal States—another new enthusiasm, particularly in Piedmont. He was genuinely interested in his reforms, especially those that concerned education; he was always dropping in to inspect the convent schools and he was liable even to visit a night school.
It would be superfluous to list all his reforms of this kind. At the end of 1846 he introduced a measure of tariff reform, mainly to tidy up the complicated customs dues; he eased the lot of the Jews, excusing them from the tiresome obligation of listening to a Christian sermon once a week and inviting them to share in the Papal charities. He simplified the complicated system of criminal courts, and even undertook a general reform of the criminal code. He ordered the regular inspection of prisons (which he visited himself) and endeavoured to establish a general system of habeas corpus. In all this he was playing the part of the benevolent despot, but playing it à la nineteenth-century. More was necessary if he was going to be an up-to-date liberal monarch, and he knew it. Some measure of freedom would have to be conceded. His first step in this direction was his press law of March 15, 1847, which established a free press, subject to a council of five censors, four of whom were to be laymen. From this new freedom arose the plethora of newspapers, estimated at the beginning of 1848 at nearly a hundred in Rome alone, and destined in the new circumstances of that year to become, with the newly formed clubs, the chief agency in bringing about the Pope’s own downfall.
But the big issue was a reform of the government. The main complaint was that it was exclusively in the hands of ecclesiastics. It is, perhaps, not altogether surprising that it should have been since “clerks” (a high proportion of the so-called clergy were only in minor orders) formed the larger part of the educated population. All the same, critics like d’Azeglio or Farini, who were educated men of advanced but constructive opinions, were always urging the introduction of the lay element into the government and it was a point which the French liked to make in the advice on governmental matters that they were never slow to proffer. The Roman populace had been taught to think that their grievances would be remedied if the government were no longer ecclesiastical; so that when the first of Pius’ major governmental reforms, that by which he formed a Council of Ministers in June 1847, made no provision for lay Ministers of State, there was a chilly silence on the part of the Romans, deliberately staged to contrast with the habitual demonstrations of enthusiasm. It need hardly be said that the idea of laymen in the government was not one which it was likely that the College of Cardinals or the Curia would welcome with much enthusiasm, and it is very natural that Pius decided to tackle first problems of administrative and economic reform of which the object was to do something practical and to do it as soon as might be.
A start was, however, made towards introducing laymen into the government as early as April 1847, when the Pope invited lay representatives from the provinces to confer with him on the form which some sort of Consultative Assembly at Rome might take (this produced, on April 22, the popular demonstration of thanks which Ozanam witnessed). By October 14 his plans were ready, and, with the warmest demonstrations of enthusiasm yet witnessed, Rome greeted the news that there was to be a Consulta to assist in the work of government. It was to consist of twenty-four councillors, elected by indirect vote from the state as a whole, beginning in the communes. No member had to be a cleric, but the president was to be a Cardinal nominated by the Pope. There was a property qualification for members. As its name implies, it was only consultative. But it had the right to discuss all matters of state before they went to the Council of Ministers, and to make suggestions. When coupled with the new freedom of the press this right meant that the people had been put into the picture in the matter of government, even though they might have little legal power. And two other governmental changes, carried out at about the same time, should be considered with the Consulta. One was a municipal government for the city of Rome, with a deliberative council of one hundred members; these members were nominated in the first instance by the Pope, but recruitment was to be by co-option and only four were to be clerics. To this body a very large part of what had hitherto been done by the Papal government was transferred. And the other was a reorganisation of the Council of Ministers, so that by motu proprio of December 29, 1847, it became a committee of the nine heads of departments. The most important minister, the Secretary of State, who was responsible for foreign affairs, was to be a cardinal. Otherwise the ministers might be laymen.
Such were the constitutional reforms of the new liberal Pope. They represent what Pio Nono was prepared to concede as being reasonable, and even desirable, in order to bring his state into harmony with enlightened and moderate liberal opinion in his day, while at the same time ensuring that the last word rested with him and that he could not be pushed, against his will, into doing what he did not approve. The peculiar importance of this last point, in the case of the Papal State, arose from the dual role of the Pope as a temporal Prince and as Head of the Church. In theory these two functions might be distinguished, but in practice the distinction never proved to be possible. Later on, in 1848, when Pius had been driven by popular pressure and by the revolutionary hurricane in Europe into sanctioning a number of steps which gave him the greatest misgiving, an attempt was to be made by various men, notably Terenzio Mamiani, to separate the spiritual and the temporal power—to set up, for instance, two distinct ministries of foreign affairs, one for the temporal power and one for the spiritual power. But so long as the Pope remained in ultimate possession of both powers such a distinction could not work. He could not, for instance, bless his spiritual children in Catholic Austria, and at the same time declare war upon them as ruler of the Papal State. He could not denounce the civil marriage laws or the dissolution of the monasteries, in Piedmont or in Switzerland, and yet be obliged, at the instance of a lay minister or assembly, to agree to such measures in his own state. His dual role made it impossible for the Pope to become a constitutional monarch in the sense of possessing a limited sovereignty, a power which was subject to the will of an elective assembly. That was the position into which he was going later to be forced by the constitution which was imposed upon him in March 1848. It proved to be an untenable position. He could, indeed, veto what he refused to approve, but that only brought government to a standstill and an angry crowd into the streets.
But we are here concerned with what was happening in 1847, not with the upheavals of 1848. Pio Nono knew that with the granting of his Consulta, in October 1847, he had gone as far as he could rightly go, and he made his position abundantly clear. When the new body met for the first time, on November 15, under the presidency of Cardinal Antonelli (there was only one other cleric on it) he took the opportunity, in thanking them for their address of loyalty, to reiterate that their functions were purely consultative: “Greatly deceived is anyone who thinks that his duties are different from these; greatly deceived is anyone who sees in the Consulta thus set up some Utopia of his own, and the seeds of an institution incompatible with the pontifical supremacy.”
This, then, was Pio Nono’s limit. It is worth noting that it seems to have been a further limit than any of the cardinals had contemplated. Even Gizzi, regarded as the liberal candidate for the Papacy in 1846, and now Secretary of State, resigned his office rather than go on supporting such changes. But before he did this, he issued, on June 22, 1847, a formal Notificazione—of course approved, and possibly written by Pius—in which he warned the people that the reforms must not be misunderstood, and in particular must not be interpreted as meaning that the Pope was hostile to Austria.
His Holiness has not been able to see without serious distress of mind that some restless spirits would take advantage of the present conditions to set forth and cause to prevail doctrines and thoughts entirely contrary to his maxims; and to push on or set up claims entirely opposed to the calm and peaceful disposition and the sublime character of one who is Vicar of Jesus Christ, Minister of the God of Peace, and Father of all Catholics alike—whatever be the part of the world to which they belong; or, similarly, to excite in the populations, by writing and by speech, desires and hopes of reform beyond the limits above stated.
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This essay is taken from Pio Nono: A Study in Politics and Religion.
Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.
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The featured image is a portrait of Pope Pius IX (1871), by George Peter Alexander Healy, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
