ANTONELLI, GIACOMO. - Cardinal, b. 12 April 1806 at Sonnino of a modest family that had enriched itself in government contracts and in the reclamation works of the Pontine marshes and had remained faithful to the Pontiff during the French domination, d. in the Vatican on 6 Nov. 1876. He studied at the Roman Seminary and then at the Sapienza, and having become a deacon and taken his doctorate, he received from his father Domenico the capital necessary to establish a family prelature. He turned at once to public affairs, displaying acuteness of mind, skill in extricating himself, and rare gifts as an administrator. Courteous, imperturbable, refined and obliging in manner and at the same time quick to discern the right way out of the most intricate and controversial questions, he was not long in being effectively supported, especially by Cardinals Zurla and Lambruschini, who opened the way for him to a most brilliant career.
Thus he was, successively, referendary of the Segnatura, assessor at the criminal tribunal of Rome, apostolic delegate in Orvieto, Viterbo and Macerata. The critical conditions of the treasury and the discontent aroused in certain provinces by the cholera epidemic of 1837 offered him the opportunity to show himself clearly endowed with administrative intuition and political sensitivity. He soon became substitute for Cardinal Mattei at the ministry of the interior (1841), while shortly thereafter Gregory XVI appointed him canon of St. Peter's, apostolic protonotary, and on 5 Jan. 1845 summoned him to succeed Cardinal Antonio Tosti in the office of pro-treasurer of the Apostolic Chamber, sending him in March the letter of appointment as treasurer general. Barely a month later, A. succeeded in happily settling the arduous problem of the properties of Eugène de Beauharnais, resorting to a loan and arriving at the division of that landed estate into small lots to be ceded to poor peasant subjects of the Papal States.
Close to Pius IX from the time of his election, he was, uniquely, his intimate and devoted counselor and collaborator in temporal matters, overcoming, by tenacity in action, calculated coldness and unsurpassable firmness, the uncommon internal and external political difficulties. Created cardinal deacon of the title of St. Agatha of the Goths and then of St. Mary in via Lata, on 11 June 1847, he followed with conviction and effectively collaborated in the vast plan of reforms that Pius IX intended to carry out in order to make the Papal State capable of effectively sustaining itself in the new times. As president of the Council of State he supported the plan of a defensive league among the Italian states; he contributed to the drafting and promulgation of the Statute; he broadly supported the program and the work of Pellegrino Rossi; but he opposed, instead, with strong farsightedness, everything that, with the requested declaration of war on Austria, could in any way impair the full sovereignty of the Papacy and of the Church. Between 10 March and the famous 29 April 1848, he became convinced that the critical moment was approaching, in which it became necessary to break with the innovators, who saw in the Pope only the Italian prince, or tended to undermine definitively his authority in the eyes of his subjects and of the world, in order then to depose him. And so, after the killing of Rossi and the assault on the Quirinal (15-16 Nov.), A. knew very skillfully how to avail himself of the work of the representatives of the major powers, agreed in wanting the removal of Pius IX from Rome, but divided as to the place of exile, which each wanted to be in its own territory in order to make use of it either in a liberal or in a reactionary sense, and he succeeded in bringing the Pontiff to Gaeta, whence he was able, with the help of France and others, to bring him back to Rome upon the fall of the Republic.
Pius IX rewarded him by appointing him Secretary of State, and such he remained until the end of his life, striving internally, and not without success, to modernize the governmental structure with enlightened and well-conceived reforms, to maintain public order, and to constitute a good nucleus of military forces; abroad, to press upon governments in favor of the Pontiff by means of the ever more influential Catholic public opinion. A. felt, in fact, as Consalvi and Bernetti had before him, that sooner or later the great liberal movement would end by prevailing, sweeping away the civil principality of the Church but, precisely for this reason, he knew that the Pope must not and could not bargain. And there were twenty-one years of resistance to the bitter end conducted with rare shrewdness by means of ever more intransigent notes and protests, aimed at making evident the use of violence on the part of the adversaries, and at saving the honor of the millennial institution, without the future being compromised by it and the right impaired, so that there might triumph that principle of effective and visible sovereignty on which substantially in our own days the Conciliation has been able to be realized. Even after 1870 he continued to fight, not accepting the unilateral solution represented by the Law of Guarantees, and still relying, and more than ever, on the forces of the great Catholic world, especially in making manifest the dangerous absurdity of the treatment inflicted on the Pontiff.
The complex political personality of A., who in many respects recalls certain great ecclesiastical statesmen of the preceding centuries, was and still is the object of many accusations and many criticisms, perhaps also because of his likable and agreeable presence, to which his slender person and his lively and penetrating eye contributed not a little, as did his taste for conversation and for society, his love for the fine arts and for a certain collection of his of precious stones and marbles. He was not without heart, and this was seen, among other things, in the generous assistance lavished on the wretched family of the hatter Antonio De Felici who in 1855 attempted to kill him in the Vatican. He was a most devoted friend of St. John Bosco and a benefactor of the Salesian works. He favored his brothers and relatives extensively. The series of misunderstandings with De Merode is explained by the opposite temperaments of the two contenders, the one so generous, impulsive and open, the other as hermetic, cold and calculating. And besides, all the objections raised, being polemical in nature and lacking documentation, are gradually dying out, like the intrigue woven around the Fausti-Venanzi case, which came to nothing other than to strengthen the influence of A. with Pius IX, who probably, more than favoring him, felt all the importance of his work.