Pio Nono Versus The Liberals, Part I

Most of us, if we are asked to name a great man, think immediately of great conquerors and revolutionaries—Alexander the Great and his father King Philip, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, or Abraham Lincoln.  Each of these men employed lies, treachery, and tremendous violence either to restructure or to overthrow the existing social and political order and make themselves supreme rulers.  But opposed to each one of these great conquerors and revolutionaries were great "conservatives" (for want of a more accurate and less insulting name)  who did their best to preserve the old order and to resist the revolutionary regime imposed by the great reformers, conquerors and dictators.  

Of course it depends on your point of view, who were the heroes and who were the villains.  Was Demosthenes a hero when he tried to save the freedom of the Greek city-states from the Macedonian Empire or was he just a stupid reactionary who could not read the writing on the wall?  Were Cicero and Cato republican heroes when they resisted the dictatorship of Julius Caesar, or just obstacles to progress?  Were Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis heroes in fighting to preserve the constitutional liberties of their states or simply reactionary bigots who defended slavery?  

To stick only to the history of the past few centuries, we might say that there are two kinds of great men, at least in the political world: Those who built empires while working for revolutionary change in the social, religious, and political order, and those who resisted the concentration of power and the progress of revolution.  The first type are commonly lauded as Time magazine's man or creature of the year; the latter more typically are condemned or despised. Which kind of hero we choose to admire is largely a reflection of our own political sympathies.  I am not asking you to take sides, but I do want you to look at a side of history that is almost never presented in textbooks and popular histories.  

I have already named a few important heroes of the Resistance, to which we might add Edmund Burke, the English statesman whose critique of the French Revolution prevented the revolution from spreading to Britain, Sir Walter Scott, whose poems and novels caused his British and European readers to develop respect and affection for local traditions and for the Christian Middle Ages, and Senator John C. Calhoun, a defender of America’s constitution and the rights of the states and the most original political thinker produced by the United States.

Burke, Scott, and Calhoun are famous and respected figures, and not only in American and British conservative  circles: Their ideas are often treated with respect even by liberals and leftists.  Less well-known, I think it is safe to say, and less respected is an Italian defender of tradition: Count Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti, who at the age of 57 was elected pope and took the name of Pius IX.  This Pius IX, known affectionately as Pio Nono, is one of the greatest popes and one of the staunchest defenders of the Catholic Church.  He is also one of the most important leaders of the 19^th century, an age rich in great and powerful men.  I first heard of him, many years ago, from a Protestant friend who revered his memory.  So this talk is aimed not only at Catholics or even at conservatives but at everyone who admires courage in defense of principle.

Many people have credited Pius IX with single-handedly rescuing the Church from the enemies who had vowed its destruction.  That is too extreme, but his importance—and not just for Catholics--cannot be overestimated.  When he was elected pope in 1846, the smart money around the world was betting that he would be the last Pope to rule a doomed an dying Church.  When he died over three decades later in 1878, Pope Pius IX left behind a vigorous Church that was stronger and more sure of itself than it had been for several centuries.  

Few people in his hometown of Senigallia would have imagined such a career for the young Giovanni Maria Battista Pietro Pellegrino Isidoro Mastai-Ferretti.  He was an intelligent boy, studious without being especially brilliant, and he was pious but not in the holier-than-thou sense that too many young people adopt.  He took part in the ordinary pleasures of youth and like many young men, he was unsure of what profession he wanted to pursue. 

Throughout his youth and early manhood, Mastai-Ferretti was attracted at various times both to the priesthood and to a military career.  His aristocratic family background would have made either choice possible were it not for one fact:  He suffered from epilepsy.  No one wants a military officer who might fall unconscious, and serious epileptics could not normally be ordained to the priesthood for fear of what might happen during a celebration of the mass.  He was still trying to enter the Papal Guards in Rome when a cardinal, riding in his carriage, almost rolled over the young man’s unconscious body in the street.  

This public incident put an end to his military aspirations, and he began studying for a possible career in the priesthood.  Fortunately, the attacks began to subside, though they did not entirely disappear for many years.  As a serious young nobleman with excellent connections in the church, it was not surprising that Giovanni Maria’s star rose quickly.  He was sent on a difficult and dangerous diplomatic mission to the new Latin America states that were already turning anti-Catholic.  On his return, he was chosen archbishop of Spoleto (1827) and later bishop of Ímola (1832), and elevated to the rank of cardinal—as one of the princes of the church who advise the Pope and choose his successors.  

These were dangerous years for the Church.  A revolution had broken out in 1830, and Italy became—as it had been so many times for centuries--a battleground.  One aspect of the struggle was the unification of Italy at the expense of traditional regimes, including the Papal state that ruled much of central Italy.  The young bishop of Imola proved himself to be courageous and yet diplomatic, saving the lives of misguided Italian revolutionaries, whose revolutionary goals he most certainly disapproved of.  Because of his moderation and his interest in reforming the government and administration of the church that Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti began to gain a reputation for being a liberal.  This was a mistake, but the mistake meant that he was not entirely trusted by some of the hardcore conservatives in the Vatican.  He was, however, completely trusted by Pope Gregory XVI  

The popular version of Pius IX’s career is that he began his career as a liberal who sympathized with the goals of the French Revolution and wanted to modernize the Church and make it more democratic and more like Protestant churches.  There is very little truth in this popular myth.  The young bishop was a kind and compassionate man, who always recommended leniency and mercy in the punishment of convicted revolutionaries; he also knew that the Church, like any ancient institution, was in constant need of reform, but he was deeply conservative both in his general outlook and in his approach to reforming the institutions of the Church.  

The central problem was the fact that the Pope was not only spiritual ruler of the Catholic Church all over the world but also the temporal ruler of Rome and much of central Italy—the so-called estates of the Church or Papal States.  This power went back to the Fall of the Roman Empire in the 5^th century AD, which left the Church as the only representative of civilization in Italy and the de facto representative of the old Empire.  

This is a long story—1300 years old by the time Cardinal Mastai was elected Pope—and there is no time now even to sketch it out, but it includes Justinian's Pragmatic Sanction, given the church governmental authority in areas not directly under the control of imperial officials, and the donations made by both Pippin the Short and Charlemagne.  It goes without saying that the so-called Donation of Constantine is a pious forgery, but one whose basic misrepresentation is only chronological.

The Pope’s royal authority over the Papal States was on a collision course with two revolutionary movements: The first was the liberal movement partly inspired by the French Revolution.  One goal of many liberals was to overthrow all monarchies and to destroy the Church, replacing them with the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The second were the nationalist movements to unify and liberate the nations divided and subject to traditional monarchies and empires.  

These revolutionary movements were not limited to Italy or even to Europe.  The period stretching from the late 18^th century down to about 1920 is often called the Age of Revolution. The French Revolution broke out in 1789, and it was followed by Napoleon’s wars to conquer Europe, and the after-shock revolutions in 1830 and 1848.  In the middle of the century, France, Germany, Italy, the United States, and Mexico—to name only a few countries-- all engaged in political and military conflicts from which they emerged as strong centralized states, and in 1917 a revolution in Russia broke out that would divide the world between communists and anti-communists for the rest of the 20^th century.

What was all this conflict about?  I have to speak in very broad terms.  In general, the revolutionary struggles of the 19^th century were concerned, as I have said, with two issues: liberalism and nationalism.  Liberals advocated individual liberty and free enterprise, and they opposed both the authority of the king, the aristocracy, and established churches, and many of the cultural traditions of Europe.  On the radical fringe, they opposed chastity and marriage and favored the liberation of women.  Worst of all, perhaps, was their determination to reduce human nature to its purely economic dimensions.  Their heirs are Libertarians and Libertarian-oriented "conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr. and Ronald Reagan.

Most, though not all, nationalists were also liberals but their primary focus was not so much on social revolution as it was on building up strong nation-states that eliminated every obstacle to unity, whether the obstacle was the authority of a local state (like Louisiana and South Carolina, for example) or an established Christian Church.  The opponents of these revolutionary movements were often called by the newly invented term, conservatives, but we have to be careful about using terms like liberal and conservative.  The people we call liberals in America today are, for the most part, what are still called socialists in Europe, while the so-called conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh are actually liberals who advocate the liberal agenda of the 19^th century.   Most "conservative Republicans" would have had few objections to the principles of Robespierre.

Let’s sketch out a few details: American liberal nationalists in the 1850’s usually favored a strong national government and opposed states rights; they advocated the interests of industrialists and bankers and opposed the farmers; while not attacking Christianity per se, they did not like the churches to have an active influence on society and inclined to liberalized divorce laws and women’s rights.  President Lincoln, for example, opposed states rights and never went to Church, as one friend put it, except to mock the sermon.  At the end of the American War between the States, South Carolina had the strictest divorce law in America.  When a Reconstruction government was imposed by the party of Abraham Lincoln, it passed the most liberal divorce law the country had ever known.

Early conservatives, by contrast, tended to defend the constitutional rights of the states and the interests of the farmers, and they wanted to preserve traditional marriage and Christian morality. When the Reconstruction government in South Carolina was replaced by Governor Wade Hampton and "The Redeemers," it immediately reintroduced a strict law on divorce.

The conflict is much clearer in European countries, where conservatives wanted to restore or preserve monarchy, aristocracy, and the power of their established churches.  European Liberals advocated the principles of the French Revolution that had killed King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette and killed or exiled much of the aristocracy.  The revolutionaries in France had also destroyed the Catholic church and replaced it with their own cult of the Supreme Being.  They made divorce as easy as paying a library fine and encouraged pornography and prostitution.  Not all liberals went this far, of course, but in Italy, radical movements like the Carbonari and Young Italy called for the Unification of Italy, but they also wanted to destroy the Catholic Church and the entire moral order that it stood for. 

In high school and college, we Americans are usually taught that the movement for the unification of Italy, the so-called Risorgimento, was a lot like our own American Revolution.  The object was to drive out the different rulers who ruled over the different parts of Italy and replace them with a unified patriotic government led by great Italian patriots like King Victor Immanuel of Piedmont, his Prime Minister Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, and the soldier Giuseppe Garibaldi—all this under the inspiration of the democratic ideologue Giuseppe Mazzini.  If Mazzini was supposed to be the Thomas Jefferson, Garibaldi was the George Washington…You get the idea.

This whole story, though it is also what they teach in Italian schools is a mostly fairytale.  To understand the Risorgimento and its opponents, we have to have an idea of what Italy was like in the first half of the 19^th century.  After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West during the 5^th and 6^th centuries AD, Italy disintegrated into little principalities and city-states that gradually won their independence.  After centuries of fighting and foreign invasions, the Austro-Hungarian Empire eventually took over much of northern Italy, including Milan.  The far South—Naples and Sicily—was ruled by Spanish Bourbons, cousins of the royal families of Spain and France.  The center was dominated by the Estates of the Church ruled by the Pope—Il Papa re, as he was called.

In the Northwest the tiny kingdom of Piedmont straddled both sides of the French-Italian border.  In fact neither the King nor his Prime Minister Cavour had actually mastered the Italian language established by the great Florentine writers Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.  In public they spoke French, and the only Italian they knew well was the dialect of Piedmont, which to this day sounds French and barely intelligible to other Italians.

Italy was conquered by Napoleon in the 1790’s and made a tributary kingdom to revolutionary France.  Most of the rulers went into exile, and two successive Popes, Pius VI and Pius VII were kidnapped, threatened, and abused.  Pius VI actually died because of his mistreatment.  Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo meant a return to the status quo ante, and the old rulers resumed their thrones.  But the idea of Italian unity had become very attractive.  Some liberals hoped that an enlightened liberal Pope, if one could be elected, would unify the country; others pinned their hopes on tiny Piedmont, where the future Prime Minister Benso di Cavour was openly working for unity.  There were several obstacles to reunification.  Obviously Austria and the Neapolitan Bourbons did not intend to give up without a fight—though the French backed Piedmont.  

More importantly, Italy was not a unified country in any sense.  As the great Austrian statesman, Prince Metternich observed, Italy was a mere “geographical expression.”  There was in theory a national language, the Tuscan dialect of Florence, but few Italians could read much less speak this language.  Every region had its own dialect, and Sicilian, for example, was as different from Italian as Spanish was.  To this day, northern and southern Italians, who do not tend to like each other, abuse each other with nicknames like  Polentoni (big Polentas, alluding to the pale skin, large stature, and blond hair of some Northeners) and Terroni (implying Southerners were as dark as the dirt they grubbed in).  

To be contined...