CHAPTER ONE

MOVING TOWARD VATICAN I: VERSUS LIBERALISM

1. Gregory XVI and the Difficult Heritage of the Enlightenment

1.1. The Triumph of the In very poor health, from his election on March 31, 1829 until his death on November 30, 1830, Pius VIII was succeeded, in February 1831, by the general of the Order, Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari. He chose the name of Gregory XVI. At the time of his election, Cardinal Cappellari was not yet a . He is the last man, so far, to be elected pope to his episcopal consecration. This very fact sets the tone for two centuries of striking evolutions within the Roman . The new pope already had well developed papal ideas long before he was elected to his high office. Gregory XVI’s view of the papacy was monarchical and elitist, as had been prefigured somewhat in his 1799 book Il trionfo della Santa Sede.1 In it, Cappellari had defended the church as a monarchy, independent of civil powers, and presented the Roman Pon- tiff as a supreme monarch, applying the term “infallible” long before the promulgation of the of papal . After his election, his book attracted new attention. Moreover it was being read within a new context: the period from the late eighteenth century until 1830 had been one of numerous revolutions. In the aftermath of the American Revolu- tion of 1776, and the of 1789, the faced the Napoleontic era; and then on the eve of the election of Gregory XVI, the crises of the summer of 1830 which forced the church to reposition itself continually. Among the most pressing challenges for the new pope was the rise of the Italian Risorgimento movement, which strove for a unification of under one republican state. The movement was mainly sustained by

1 Published in a new edition shortly after his papal election. Trionfo della Santa Sede e della Chiesa: Contro gli assalti dei novatori combattuti e respinti colle stesse loro armi (Ven- ice, 1832). 8 chapter one liberal powers from several fractions, and in 1832 these forces were bun- dled together in the Giovane Italia movement, led by Giuseppe Mazzini. Mazzini would spend the next four decades pursuing revolutionary actions to promote Italian unification; and he would end up being the main spokesperson for the Risorgimento movement.2 Risorgimento fiercely aimed its arrows at anyone or anything hinder- ing the foundation of the Italian State, such as the Austrian occupation in northern Italy and the vast papal territories in the centre of the coun- try. On numerous occasions, rebel troops attempted to occupy parts of the , and Gregory XVI reacted by summoning the Austrian troops to combat the liberal rebels, many of whom ended up in the papal prisons. Naturally, the situation was more complex, and stretched beyond Ital- ian borders. Perhaps somewhat ironically, the pope, at the same time, had approved of the new Belgian Constitution. Drafted after the 1830 Belgian Revolution and the foundation of the new State of Belgium, it supported the separation of church and state. This is even more striking, when one takes into account the fact that Pope Gregory had decided to condemn the Polish Catholic uprisings against the Tsarist regime. Russian Tsar Nicholas I had, since 1825, undermined the positions of Roman Catho- lics and Greek Catholics in the Russian ruled Polish territories, forcing many to convert to Russian Orthodoxy, thereby blocking communication between the Catholic territory and the pope. The pope’s reaction can be understood, in the light of his attitude toward Risorgimento. If he disapproved of rebellion in Italy, he consequently would do so in other regions. International political and ideological developments such as these pro- vide part of the background against which the Mirari vos3 can be understood. It rejected any limitation of ecclesiastical power as well as the growing power of secular society. The 1832 encyclical also bears the marks of the church’s difficulties dealing with the aftermath of the American and French Revolutions of the eighteenth century. Mirari vos chose the path of refutation. Along with it came a condemnatory linguis- tic that rejected religious indifference, freedom of conscience, and

2 See for general political background, Italy in the Nineteenth Century, 1796–1900, ed. John A. Davis [The Short Oxford History of Italy] (Oxford, 2000). 3 Gregory XVI, ‘Mirari vos (August 15, 1832),’ Acta Gregorii Papae XVI, ed. A.M. Bernas- coni (, 1971), 1:171–2. See as well: Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos: On Liberalism and Religious (Kansas City, 1998).