Chapter 29
Pius VII
14 March 1800 — 20 August 1823
The Papacy was extinct: not a vestige of its
existence remained and among all the Roman Catholic powers not a
finger was stirred in its defense. The Eternal City had no longer
prince or pontiff; its bishop was a dying captive in foreign lands,
and the decree was already announced that no successor would be
allowed in his place. (George Trevor, Rome: From the Fall of the
Western Empire, London: The Religious Tract Society, 1868, page
440)
The deadly wound had most certainly been inflicted
upon the Papacy. The last public execution for opposition to the Roman
Catholic faith ("heresy," as the church termed it), had taken place in
the Spanish city of Seville in 1776. It is little wonder that the Jesuit
historian Joseph Rickaby, concluded that—
half Europe thought . . . that [along] with the
Pope the Papacy was dead. (Joseph Rickaby, The Modern Papacy,
in Lectures on the History of Religions, Vol. 3, Lecture 24,
London: Catholic Truth Society, 1910, page 1)
Trevor’s claim that no Roman Catholic nation of
Europe lifted a finger in defense of the Pope was amply illustrated in
that the Prime Minister of Spain in 1798, Don Manuel de Godoy, in his
memoirs made no mention whatsoever of the plight of the Pope. (Manuel de
Godoy, Principe de La Paz—Memoirs of Don Manuel de Godoy, Prince of
the Peace, 2 vols., London: Richard Bentley, 1836)
Yet the prophetic utterance made 1700 years earlier
had declared with unquestionable authority that the deadly wound would
be healed (Revelation 13:3). God’s word is certain. It is sure, for One
whose omniscience sees the future with equal clarity to the past and
present is its Author.
Step by step through fourteen pontificates we will
trace that healing. A mere 197 days (there was no leap year in 1800)
were to pass after the death of Pius VI before the initial evidence of
this healing could be detected, at least under microscopic examination.
Despite the prohibition of the French Government
preventing the election of a successor to Pius VI, a new Pope, Pius VII
was elected on March 14, 1800. Even the will and the might of Napoleon
Bonaparte was of no avail in withstanding the divine prediction.
Reverses of the French army led Napoleon to
temporarily weaken his hold on Italy. Taking advantage of this respite
and the assurance of Austrian protection, the cardinals met in Venice to
elect a new Pontiff. Those who had "sneered that Pius VI would be Pius
the Last" (Joseph S. Brusher S.J., Popes Through the Ages, D. van
Nostrand Co., Inc, New Jersey, 1959, p. 502) were proven wrong.
Later historians clearly traced the violation of the
French demand that no further Popes be elected and that power would
slowly be restored to the Papacy. Arthur Pennington recorded,
Many of the men in those days [of 1798] imagined
that the dominion of the Pope had come to an end, and that the knell
of the temporal power was then sounding among the nations. This
supposition, however, proved to be erroneous. The French republicans
were very anxious that Rome should not have another Pope. But as the
reverses of the revolutionary armies had left Southern Italy to its
ancient masters, the cardinals were able to proceed to an election at
Venice. They elected, on March 14th, 1800, Barnabas Chiaromonti, who
assumed the name of Pius VII.
The first transaction of this Pope was a
negotiation with the government of France, of which Napoleon
Buonaparte, was the First Consul. . . .
He [Napoleon] felt that, as the large majority of
the inhabitants of France knew no other form of faith than Romanism,
it must become the established religion of the country. Accordingly we
find that he now began negotiations with the Pope, which issued in a
Concordat in July, 1801, whereby the Roman Catholic religion was once
more established in France. He also left Pius in possession of his
Italian principality. (Arthur Robert Pennington, Epochs of the
Papacy, George Bell and Sons, London, 1881, pp. 450—452)
A second historian, Thomas Babington Macaulay of
Rothley, included Ranke’s History of the Popes in his 1840
Critical and Historic Essays. It stated,
The tricoloured flag floated on the top of the
Castle of St. Angelo. The successor of St. Peter was carried away
captive by the unbelievers. He died a prisoner in their hands; and
even the honours of sepulture were long withheld from his remains.
It is not strange that, in the year 1799, even
sagacious observers should have thought that, at length the hour of
the Church of Rome was come. An infidel power ascendant, the Pope
dying in captivity, the most illustrious prelates of France living in
a foreign country on Protestant alms, the noblest edifices which the
munificence of former ages had consecrated to the worship of God
turned into temples of Victory, or into banqueting-houses for
political societies, or into Theophilanthropic chapels, such signs
might well be supposed to indicate the approaching end of that long
domination.
But the end was not yet. Again doomed to death, the
milk white hind was still fated not to die. Even before the funeral
rites had been performed over the ashes of Pius the Sixth, a great
reaction had commenced, which after the lapse of more than forty
years, appears to be still in progress [in 1840]. (Republished by
Longmans in 1865. In Volume 2, pages 147, 148.)
The members of the conclave wrestled long with the
appointment. Only a man of the highest quality could be trusted to lead
the church in this time of dire emergency. The choice eventually fell to
a man of noble birth, Cardinal Luigi Barnaba Chiaramonti. He was a
scholar who had studied theology in both Padua and Rome and was
appointed as Professor at Theology at Parma (1766—1775) and Rome
(1775—1781). Born in Cesena, August 14, 1740, he was 59 at the time of
his appointment.
In 1782 Pope Pius VI had transferred him from the
academic arena to church administration, appointing him Bishop of
Tivoli. In 1785 he had been created a cardinal and elevated to the See
of Inola.
When one is at the foot of a lofty and rugged
mountain the first steps are daunting. The Papacy was at its nadir.
Initially Pius VII took bold steps. Incredibly, in the second year of
his reign he sought to make a settlement with the Papacy’s erstwhile
enemy, France. His ploy was initially successful and in 1801 a concordat
was signed in which Catholicism was restored in atheistic France. The
first post-deadly wound concordat was to show the way to Pius’
successors in recovering lost prestige and influence and would lead in
the twentieth century to strong Papal control over Roman Catholic
adherents scattered through the various nations of the world, and
further achieved the aim of exerting Roman Catholic influence on the
policies of these territories.
The Papal States had been decimated by the threefold
occupation by France, Austria and Naples. Pius VII was successful in his
request that Austria and Naples evacuate the Papal territories they had
occupied. However his request to France to do likewise fell on deaf
ears.
Notwithstanding the concordat with France, Napoleon
in 1802 greatly restricted Papal intervention in church affairs in
France. Nevertheless he did invite Pius to attend his coronation as
emperor in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on December 2, 1804, in order
to perform the coronation. Pius would have done well to heed the
reservations of the members of the curia, but no doubt sensing that his
act of coronation may strengthen the Vatican’s prestige and influence in
a nation which had all but thrown off its Roman Catholic heritage, he
reluctantly agreed to acquiesce to Napoleon’s request.
Pius’ presence proved to be his humiliation, for as
he was about to crown the new Emperor, Napoleon rudely snatched the
emblem of sovereignty from the Pope’s hands and crowned himself. It was
not to be the last occasion upon which Napoleon poured humiliation upon
this pope. Perhaps as a sop to the pope, Napoleon deigned to send Pius a
gift of the two giant exquisite porcelain candlesticks which stood eight
feet tall beside the coronation throne during the ceremony. These
trophies may still be viewed in the Vatican Museum today.
In 1803 Pius had surprisingly concluded a concordat
with the Italian Republic which was, in all respects, a vassal state of
Napoleon and was centered on the city of Milan and extended through
northern Italy. The republic had been created in 1797 under the
designation of the Cisalpine Republic. This concordat shocked many
members of the curia as well as lay people. On May 26, 1805, Napoleon
came to Milan to receive the ancient iron crown of the Lombard kings.
The Lombards of northern Italy had vainly hoped that this coronation
would lead to greater self rule.
The concordats did involve Pius in making alarming
concessions to Napoleon. In France he had waived the right of the Roman
Catholic church to be declared the State church. Even more demeaning,
Pius accepted the secularization of ecclesiastical property already
undertaken by the revolutionary government and called on all surviving
bishops to resign their sees.
But unprincipled and detrimental to the Roman
Catholic Church as these concessions may strike us at first, we notice
there was a decided advantage for the Papacy in its steady and
determined efforts to heal its deadly wound. A paragraph from The
Encyclopaedia Britannica is worthy of our notice. Speaking of the
Vatican’s demand that all French Bishops resign from their sees the
paragraph provides a carefully analyzed insight:
This last concession was altogether without
canonical precedents; and by inducing Pius to agree to it Napoleon
struck a heavy blow at the Gallican [French] tradition [which
prohibited Vatican interference in French Catholic affairs], since the
pope, however well he may have been aware of the extent of his powers
over bishops, had never previously dared to assert them so drastically
in practice. Moreover, the fact that the concordat was signed was by
itself a victory for the papacy. Whereas in the 18th century it had
been either disregarded or treated as a foreign power against which
the national episcopate [bishops] could be brought into play, the
papacy now became an ally whose influence over the clergy of the
Catholic world was acknowledged by the several governments and whose
cooperation would be sought in settling the religious questions that
the state had formerly tried to settle by unilateral action. (1963
edition, volume 17, p. 222)
Perhaps in no period during the past two centuries
was the power of the Vatican to dictate the course of its prelates,
clergy and laity, more strongly used to allay proper Roman Catholic
fears and deep concerns, than during the twelve years of Nazi rule in
Germany (1933—1945).
Despite that the Concordat signed with France in 1801
seriously weakened Pius VII’s position, we must not in the least
understate its significance in respect to the initial stages of the
healing of the deadly wound. Hales presents a balanced evaluation:
It is important to remember how desperate was the
position from which the Concordat with Napoleon saved the Catholics;
it may be that it was one more ominous than any to which she had been
driven throughout the centuries of her history, since the time of the
persecutions under the Roman Empire. Harassed in the land of France,
traditionally her "eldest daughter," it was the same story in Belgium
(now [since 1793] annexed to France), in the Rhineland (also annexed),
in Italy, controlled by anticlericals dependent upon France, in
England and Ireland, where the movement for Catholic emancipation had
been rejected by King George III, in Poland, partitioned by
non-Catholic powers. Even in Austria, where "Josephism" survived, the
Church was far from free, while the governments in Portugal and Spain
were anti-clerical. The Concordat which Pius VII signed with Napoleon
followed as it was by another in Italy, and by provisional
arrangements in Germany . . . served the immediate and cited purpose
of enabling the life of the Church to be lived in relative security
over much of Europe.
However . . . in publishing the Concordat, in April
1802, the First Consul published alongside it, without any previous
consultation with Rome, what were called the "Organic Articles,"
designed to regulate the administration of the Church in France. His
excuse was that he was only publishing the police regulations which
the Concordat had allowed him to make for the maintenance of public
order, but a glance at the articles in question shows . . . that he
was, in fact, concerned to subject the Church, even in matters
evidently spiritual, to the control of the State. (E. E. Y. Hales,
The Catholic Church in the Modern World, Hanover House, New York,
1958, pp. 60, 61)
Subsequent events during Pius VII’s pontificate were
to erode seriously this power over national hierarchies, but the course
had been set and no doubt employed the thoughts of his successors.
In 1809 Pius commenced a five year-period of
incarceration. Napoleon was not averse to using his military power to
settle disputes. His demand that the Papal States join France’s blockade
of England was the reason for Napoleon’s actions. Determined to enforce
that which he could not obtain by cooperation, Napoleon sent his forces
to occupy Rome on February 2, 1808. On May 17, 1809, the Papal States
were annexed by Napoleon.
Pius evinced sufficient courage to excommunicate his
irreligious tormentor, but not enough to name him. Rather he
excommunicated all "robbers of Peter’s patrimony."
The emperor, although little concerned about the
spiritual consequences of the Pope’s action, nevertheless did not accept
kindly the intended slight. On July 5, 1809, Pius was arrested and
interned in Savona near Genoa. On May 12, 1812, his imprisonment was
transferred to Fontainbleau just southeast of Paris. Here, ill and
dispirited, Pius on January 25, 1813, signed the Concordat of
Fontainbleau in which he renounced control over the Papal States and
made further concessions.
With the pope imprisoned, the Papal States in effect
ceded to France, despite all Pius’ diligent efforts to rebuild from the
Papal ashes and his selection of Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, a man of
secular genius, as his Secretary of State, the Papacy had returned to
the apparent demise which had taken place during the reign of his
predecessor. The wound again was apparently fatal.
But relief from this calamitous situation was not far
away. This would have been so even if the remorseful pope had not
retracted his signature to the concordat, which he did on March 24,
1813. By January, 1814, Napoleon’s military reverses were so staggering
that he sent Pius back to Savona and released him on March 10, 1814.
Within a very short period Napoleon found himself confined to Elba. His
short-lived return to France ended in defeat at the hands of the
renowned British General, the Duke of Wellington on the Belgian
battlefield of Waterloo. Late in that encounter Field Marshall Gebhard
Leberecht von Blücher arrived with the Prussian Army in assistance, but
the die was cast before the Prussian intervention.
Cardinal Consalvi’s political and diplomatic skills
were richly rewarded by the return of the Papal States to Vatican
control, much to the disquiet of many of their citizens who had found
the secular French administration much to be preferred to that of the
Roman Catholic Church.
Perhaps former Jesuit Professor of Ethics at
Westminster Roman Catholic Seminary in England, Dr. Peter de Rosa,
summed up the reason for this antipathy to Papal rule in the nineteenth
century as well as any author when he stated,
By 1870 only tsarist Russia was more wickedly run
than the Papal States. In them there was no freedom of thought or
expression, and no elections. Books and papers were censored. Jews
were locked up in ghettos. Justice was a blind and hungry lion. It was
frankly a police state flying the papal flag, with spies, inquisitors,
reprisals, secret police, and executions for minor offences a
commonplace. A small, corrupt, lascivious, tight-knit clerical
oligarchy ruled, in his Holiness’s name, with a rod of iron.
The situation had only deteriorated since Lord
Macaulay visited Italy in 1838. He tried then to imagine what England
would be like if all Members of Parliament, ministers, judges,
ambassadors, commanders-in-chief and lords of the Admiralty were
bishops or priests. Worse than that, celibate bishops or
priests. In order to gain promotion, the most lascivious men were
obliged to become clerics and take a vow of celibacy. The result was,
according to Macaulay, in his Letters, "corruption infects all
the public offices. . . . The States of the Pope are, I suppose, the
worst governed in the civilized world; and the imbecility of the
police, the venality of public servants, the desolation of the
country, force themselves on the observation of the most heedless
traveller."
Thirty or so years later, the Papal States were
ripe for rebellion. (Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, Corgi
Books, England, 1989, p. 181)
The delegates to the Congress of Vienna which
convened in 1814 and 1815 to redistribute territories in Europe at the
conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, may have had their own reasons for
returning the Papal States to Rome. It has been suggested that—
numbers of European statesmen came to think that an
independent spiritual power vested in the person of the pope
constituted a valuable guarantee. (Encyclopaedia Britannica,
op.cit.)
If this was so, then a foundation for wound healing
was tentatively established. We say "tentatively" because fifty-five
years later the Papal States were wrested from Rome by the army of
Garibaldi.
Pius VII’s last nine years on the Papal throne, while
strongly lauded by most Roman Catholic historians, did not recommend the
Pope to perceptive Protestants. On August 7, 1814, he restored the
Jesuits throughout the world. Their impact was soon seen in the Oxford
Movement within the Anglican Church of the 1820s and 1830s. This
movement led to many Anglicans accepting the Roman Catholic view of
prophecy as set forth by the Spanish Jesuit, Francisco Ribera, in his
published work of 1590. Ribera, in denying the Papacy to be the
antichrist, proposed that he was an evil individual who would come in
the future. The wholesale acceptance of this unscriptural thesis was to
lead millions of Protestants in the late nineteenth century and in the
twentieth century to deny the plain Biblical identity of the antichrist
and thus pave the way for the final healing of the deadly wound.
Pius also reestablished the Sacred Congregation of
Propaganda in 1817, a congregation which was worthy of the final portion
of its title.
A common source of ecclesiastical ire in the first
pontificates after the revival of the Papacy was the spread of
Scriptures, especially by the British and Foreign Bible Society, founded
in 1804. Pius VII led the way by condemning Protestant Bible Societies
in 1816. Undoubtedly his concerns were justified, for nothing is so
inimical to Roman Catholic dogma as the Word of God. If Rome was to gain
the ascendancy once more, if its mortal wound was to be healed, it had
to find a means of defusing the explosive impact of Scripture so
detrimental to its aims, doctrines and practices. The Roman Catholic
Douay-Rheims version of the Bible, based upon the Latin Vulgate, was
rightly eschewed by Protestants.
But in the 1870s Rome was to find faithful allies in
the persons of two Anglican priests, Professor Hort and Bishop Westcott
who together deviated the British Bible from the accurate Textus
Receptus Greek to that of the Roman Catholic Codex Vaticanus and Codex
Sinaiticus. The great majority of modern translations such as the New
International Version, the Revised Standard Version and the New English
Bible are based on these corrupted Greek manuscripts (Russell and Colin
Standish, Modern Bible Translations Unmasked, Hartland
Publications, Rapidan, Virginia, 1993). Thus when Rome could no longer
ban the Bible it discovered a more subtle means of achieving its aim.
On balance, despite his midterm disasters, Pius VII
did achieve some success in presiding over the early healing of the
deadly wound. When he died in 1823 the source of the infliction of the
deadly wound had been eradicated from Europe, and Napoleon, although
twenty-seven years his junior, had predeceased him by two years. But the
spirit of atheism was growing in reaction to Papal dogma and injustices.
Pius however had engineered restored sovereignty over
the Papal States in Italy, although denied Avignon in France; he had
demonstrated, in a limited manner, the usefulness of concordats, which
he made even with non-Catholic states such as Prussia and Russia. This
played a limited role in pursuing Papal aims and had made a not
inconsiderable step in centralizing Vatican control over the world-wide
Roman Catholic Church. From the pit of Papal decline, and despite years
in prison, these were not inconsequential achievements.
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