Revolution and Papacy

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Pope Gregory XVI believed that, even if it were true that immediate spiritual advantages might be gained by revolt, or by the introduction of liberal measures, the shock to the monarchical system involved by such changes would be disastrous to the Church and Society.

Revolution and Papacy: 1769–1846, by E. E. Y. Hales (Cluny Media, 312 pages)

That the Popes, after 1815, should have proved themselves unable to exercise temporal rule successfully over the restored Papal States is not really surprising since analogous problems proved beyond the powers of many contemporary rulers, large as well as small. But like all political failures it had its tragic consequences for the governed and, in the special case of the Popes, the repression was not confuted to the ruler’s political subjects. For the position of the Pope as Head of the Universal Church meant that the political influence of the papacy extended much more widely than did that of most rulers; and because of the opposition in the Papal States this influence was used everywhere against movements which appeared to the Popes to be analogous to those from which they suffered at home.

Ever since it had debouched into Italy from France the Revolution had spelled nothing but disaster for the Popes. And since that disaster had been spiritual as well as secular—a tossing aside of canon law as well as of clerical privilege—it was not difficult for many at Rome—though not quite all—to convince themselves, with de Maistre, that the ideas of 1789 were intrinsically diabolical. The tragedy consisted in the failure of the restoration papacy to comprehend the need of movement in social and political organization; in its “canonization” of the notion of legitimacy, which led it to give its support to legitimate monarchs even when they oppressed the Church. The Catholic Poles were told that they must remain quietly obedient to their autocratic and foreign sovereign, the Tsar, although he was denying the necessary liberties of their faith. The Catholic Belgians were told to obey the Calvinist King of Holland, although he was doing the same. The Catholic Irish were told that they must not mind having their episcopal nominations vetoed by a Protestant King in London. The French liberal Catholics were silenced, and told to obey their Most Christian King, who in fact was an agnostic. Everywhere the first principle was legitimacy, and this generally meant absolutism because the monarchs of the time, for the most part, were absolute.

Yet in fact this policy of the restored papacy was not altogether in accord with papal tradition. Some of the Jesuits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Suárez, had recognized a right as pertaining, in the last resort, to any people to withhold obedience from a legitimate sovereign if he denied them the practice of their religion. And even in the days of their weakness, in the eighteenth century, the Popes had been prepared, on occasions, as we saw, to withstand the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs to their face when their enlightenment endangered the foundations of the Church. Little of this spirit of resistance to the Powers was apparent in the post-1815 period except—paradoxically enough—when Metternich tried to lure the Papal States into a collective security system. Then Consalvi bristled with indignation.

Of course revolution—except in the special circumstances which interested the seventeenth-century Jesuits—had always been regarded by the Church as a very evil thing. Even in the pre-Constantinian Roman Empire Christians had been reminded of Saint Paul’s counsel that they “obey the powers that be.” But revolution is always an indefinite term, and it was a particularly ill-defined bogey after 1815 because the violence and drama attaching to the French Revolution and Napoleon had tended so to preoccupy men’s attention as to make them think of all political movements as being “for” or “against” the Revolution. Intermediate terms between revolution and legitimacy hardly existed in the minds of governments in Germany or Italy; there were only two political ideologies. By the 1830s those who favored the Revolution had come to be called liberals, but that did not make them seem any more desirable. It was a label which would later become respectable, but it certainly did not seem so to Gregory XVI or to his monarchical contemporaries outside Paris and London.

Yet in fact, by the 1830s, liberal theory existed over an enormously wide field of ideas, some of them more revolutionary, some of them less, but not necessarily all of them deserving to be branded as evil because they had been practiced in the great French Revolution, or in the Roman Republic of 1798, or in the Cisalpine, or because those regimes had been largely hostile to the claims of the Church. The cardinals sometimes realized this; but when they looked into the philosophy of the matter they always found the disquieting fact that sovereignty was held by the liberals to belong, in one way or another, with the people. And that struck them as absurd because they were quite sure it belonged with God, and that under Him it rested with the Church, in matters spiritual, and with the legitimate rulers in matters temporal. The latter might make concessions, even very considerable concessions—representative assemblies and the like—such as existed in England and France; but they were concessions. They could not exist of right, because the people had no sovereign rights against their rulers, unless their rulers denied them their religion, and even then it was wrong to insist on those rights if doing so meant unseating a legitimate ruler; and they thought it more absolutely wrong to do that than Suárez had supposed.

Restoration Rome had two inducements to reject the theory of the Sovereign People. One was her experience of that People in action, which was calculated to encourage her theologians to return to their Bossuet because they had found that the People not only lusted after the Church’s property but tended to try to control religion even more closely than had the enlightened despots. The other was that the theory of popular sovereignty was inapplicable to the Papal States. No Pope—not even Pius IX in 1848—ever seriously supposed that he could be permanently subjected to the control of an elective lay assembly. In theory it was perhaps not wholly inconceivable that the temporal and spiritual should become so separated that the Pope could be a constitutional monarch in one capacity while remaining an absolute sovereign in the other (as Lord Minto and Lord Palmerston later advised Pius IX to become), but it is very certain that such a possibility was never envisaged by anybody of any consequence at Rome and that in fact the spiritual and temporal aspects of the Roman government never sufficiently unraveled themselves to permit of it. And, since nobody orthodox had doubted, from the days of the Council of Trent, that the spiritual government of the Church was autocratic, both by necessity and by apostolic tradition, it followed that the government of the Papal States could not be democratic. Gregory XVI had not only the inducement of bitter experience, in his own states, at the time of his accession, to lead him to condemn the liberals; he had also the inducement that the liberal theory, by presupposing some form of popular sovereignty, appeared to him to be a false theory of government, and as such he was prepared to condemn it elsewhere—for instance in France, in the form in which Lamennais taught it.

Yet was it false, from a Catholic standpoint?

There was no necessary reason, resting on dogma or tradition, for regarding the alliance between throne and altar as sacrosanct, or for seeing thrones as a necessary part of the furniture of government. Suárez had never been condemned for saying that God gave political sovereignty to the people. Cardinal Chiaramonti had found difficulties, but not insuperable ones, in working in a revolutionary republic. England might, in Consalvi’s words, be ce pays tout-à-fait exceptionnel, from which it was dangerous to draw political analogies, but he admired her, and he foresaw a future for the Church within her borders. America, it is true, was still regarded as a semi-barbaric outpost, but it could not altogether escape attention at Rome that the Church was maintaining her life there, as she was in the new South American republics. Evidently Gregory’s condemnation of liberal principles was not intended to imply that they were unacceptable where they were established; only that they were not to be invoked elsewhere—especially by priests.

Gregory allowed his horror of what the liberals had sometimes done, and his correct appreciation of the insuperable difficulty about democracy in his own state to blind him to the facts that some of the liberties which Lamennais was advocating for France were valuable, and might help the Church to breathe there more freely; that the Church in Poland (as well as the Poles) would be likely to benefit by a successful Polish revolt against the Tsar; and that a successful Belgian revolt against Holland would probably do the same for the Belgians. Gregory, Bernetti, and Lambruschini, like Consalvi before them, believed that, even if it were true that immediate spiritual advantages might be gained by revolt, or by the introduction of liberal measures, the shock to the monarchical system involved by such changes would be disastrous to the Church and Society. Yet in Gregory’s time the monarchical system meant an anti-Catholic Tsar, an anti-Catholic King of Prussia, an anti-Catholic King of England, a free-thinking King of France, and a Josephist Emperor of Austria. Just why these bulwarks should have been held to be indispensable to the support of the Catholic Church is difficult to understand. No doubt Rome was prompted by fear of chaos and by fear of the over-weening pretensions of popular sovereignty as well as by fear for her own temporal position. But her policy was one of despair.

Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.

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