Gregory XVI, Pope

GREGORY XVI, Pope. - Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari, b. at Belluno on 18 Sept. 1765 to the nobles Giovanni Battista and Giulia Cesa-Pagani, d. at Rome on 1 June 1846. Of quick and lively intelligence, of a reflective and simple mind, he soon showed an austere, firm and tenacious temperament, deep feelings of convinced and evangelical goodness and religiosity, and a marked inclination for study and scholarly speculation.

The taking of the veil by his sister Caterina among the Benedictines of S. Gervasio, and the kindly encouragement of Canon Giovanni Carrera, his educator, induced him at the age of eighteen to enter the Camaldolese monastery of S. Michele at Murano (1783), taking the religious name Mauro. Having made his solemn vows on 23 Aug. 1786, a priest the following year, a teacher of philosophy and sciences in 1790, he successfully defended in public disputation a thesis on papal infallibility for qualification as a lecturer in theology, and received from the Holy Office of Venice the task of revising works to be published.

At the age of thirty, on 5 Aug. 1795, Don Mauro accompanied as his companion to Rome, to S. Gregorio al Celio and to S. Romualdo, the procurator general of the Order. The sad events of the Jacobin occupation led him to publish, with a dedication to the martyr Pius VI: Il trionfo della Santa Fede e della Chiesa contro gli assalti dei novatori, combattuti e respinti con le stesse loro armi (Venice 1799), a weighty apologetic work, a convinced and timely act of faith in the imminent and inevitable victories of the papacy and of Catholicism.

Abbot of S. Michele at Murano in 1805, procurator general in 1807, despite the raging of the Napoleonic persecution he managed, with the help of his confrere Placido Zurla, to prevent the dissolution of the Camaldolese communities of Venice and Padua. In 1814 Cardinal Fontana, with Pius VII's support, recalled him to Rome, where he soon received appointment as consultor to various Congregations, as well as assignments as examiner of bishops, supervisor of certain universities and institutes of higher education, and reviser of the books of the Eastern Church, while he declined insistent offers of the episcopal sees of Zante and Tivoli, in order to devote himself entirely to the revival of his Order, of which he became vicar general in 1823.

Meanwhile the times were ripening: highly esteemed by Leo XII, held in regard by scholars, a good connoisseur of affairs and of the workings of the Curia, pious, learned, extremely active, he was created cardinal in pectore by that same Pontiff on 21 March 1825 and published on 13 March of the following year. He did not hesitate then to take on that prefecture of Propaganda Fide, where, because of the relaxed decline due to the very climate of the previous century, and because of the neglect and stagnation brought about by the Revolution, everything had to be taken up and remade both in Rome and in the mission lands. There he distinguished himself by apostolic zeal and intensity of activity, elegantly resolving even difficult and long-standing questions, such as that of the Dutch Concordat (1827), or the other of the appointment of a Catholic metropolitan for the Armenians (1829).

Thus from the difficult and long Conclave, which opened with the vacant see of Pius VIII (d. 30 Nov. 1830), amid clashes of tendency skillfully exploited by the powers and looming threats of revolutionary disorders in Europe and central Italy, Cappellari came out elected pope, not without repeated and suppliant refusals, on 12 Febr. 1831, with 32 votes out of 41, choosing the name of G. XVI, precisely in memory of that Gregory VII who had stood up as the « medieval champion of the liberty of the Church », and whose footsteps he intended strenuously to follow precisely in order to love of that full ecclesiastical liberty which, with regard to the utterly free and vigorous Catholic expansion of North America, made him exclaim: "In no part of the world do I feel myself so much a pope as in the United States!"

Hence his whole inflexible program, his whole almost bellicose work of integral vindication and restoration of the religious and civil liberties of the papacy, of the Church and of the faithful masses, between the modern age, now at its sunset, and the contemporary age still at its dawn. Liberties and independence to be vindicated and restored, both in the face of the languishing caesaropapist overreachings of the old monarchies by divine right and with regard to the rising jurisdictionalist claims of Enlightenment and secularist liberalism. That is, in substance, in the presence of and in relation to a society either skeptical or largely imbued with a vague and empty romantic theism, and so intimately permeated with anti-Christian preconceptions and so taken up with material interests as to demand liberty for everything and for everyone, except for the Church, and no longer able to believe in and trust the intimate perennial force not only religious but also social and political of Catholicism. And therefore a pontificate of clear recall to the past evangelical glories, of resistance against the adverse forces of the moment, of recovery and propulsion toward the future. A work, then, essentially one of orientation, that of G., misunderstood and misconstrued by too many contemporaries and posterity, to which nevertheless time and events have given and are giving vindication.

Most pious and simple, clear in thought and consistent in action, nourished on religious and humanistic culture, which he had drawn from a monastic formation traditionally pervaded by the most Christian and civil medievalism, G. saw clearly and precisely, amid the convulsive and confused tangle of the ideas, tendencies and aspirations of the age, the great high road to be taken up and trodden again. Thus to his constructive and far-sighted magisterium there echoed anew on the universal plane, perhaps for the first time after some centuries, that concordant wave of fruitful devotion, that devout obedience of the episcopate, of the clergy and of the faithful ranks, which was precisely to constitute the fulcrum of the Church's greatness today. "A wonderful power has arisen as if by enchantment," wrote Eichendorff, "and it is the affirmation of Catholic opinion."

As regards the magisterium, the arduous problems springing from the succession and clash of opposing political regimes were resolved by the Pontiff with the natural development of a pondered ecclesiastical practice. Averse to entering into the merits of the different systems of ordering public affairs and to making a principle of legitimism or of progressivism, he declared himself ready to treat, for the exclusive safeguarding of spiritual interests and for the good of souls, with whoever in fact held political power. And he imposed on the hierarchy and on the faithful of every nation the duty of rendering obedience to the regime in force, in order to maintain public quiet without prejudice to the rights of the Church and to the pending questions de iure between the contending parties (encyclical Sollicitudo ecclesiarum, 7 Aug. 1831). Thus he also untied the knot of the "liberal equivocation"; he unmasked its snares by striking at the roots the philosophy of common sense and the theory of the liberating regenerations of Lamennais (encyclicals Mirari vos, of 15 Aug. 1832, and Singulari nos, of 25 June 1834). Nor did the reservations expressed about the writings of Bonald and De Maistre appear any less well founded and opportune, as too inclined to depreciate nature and reason, while at the same time the anti-intellectualist fideism of the abbot Bautain was also condemned (apostolic letter Accepimus, 20 Dec. 1834).

Then came the turn of the false doctrines of Hermes, intended to reduce faith to an empty romantic sentimentalism, devoid of rational content, and to disregard the charismatic work of Grace and the real human faculty of free will (apostolic letter Dum acerbissima, 26 Sept. 1835). But the culminating document remains the one with which G. severely rose up against the infamous slave trade, striking it definitively in all its aspects. The heartfelt apostolic letter on the matter of 3 Dec. 1839 had such an echo throughout the civilized world as to induce three years later the principal European powers to conclude a special treaty of suppression: that was the mortal blow dealt to a barbarous custom and a base commerce, which had already been repeatedly struck and prohibited by several pontiffs.

So great a solicitude of G. for the "savages," that is also for those primitive peoples by nature whose members the Pope required to be considered, in the light of the divine fatherhood, all members of the human family, equal, brothers and free, that is "men" like every other and not "impure animals," as the pseudo-official science of naturalism and evolutionist sociologism was just then preparing to do, could not be dissociated, in the heart of the former prefect of Propaganda Fide, from a very particular love for the missions. Sylvain rightly notes that G. "consecrated every moment of his pontificate to the development of the Catholic missions," and that "none among the many and grave preoccupations was ever capable of distracting him from so glorious and important an objective." And indeed G., also in this a worthy son of St. Romuald, may be considered a far-sighted pioneer of today's successes of the missions in every part of the globe. To the rapid strengthening of missionary penetration both among the pagans and among the heterodox, a penetration soon sealed by the blood of new martyrs especially in the Far East and by the expansion of missionary stations in Abyssinia, in Egypt, in Algeria, India, the Americas and Oceania, as well as in northern and eastern Europe, there corresponded worthily the rise and flourishing of special institutes devoted to the formation of missionaries and to the collection of the related economic means. Thus, alongside the full and most fervent revival of old and new religious families, also in the missionary sense, one will recall the meritorious initiatives of the work for the Propagation of the Faith of Lyons, of the Holy Childhood and of the Leopoldine Society of Vienna. Nor did there lack on the Pontiff's part prudent measures intended to counter the work of the Protestants, to reorganize and strengthen the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda and its College, as well as to establish in the mission lands special seminaries for the indigenous clergy. The establishment of fully thirty-six new apostolic vicariates, the founding of fifteen new dioceses and the appointment of 95 bishops, always by decree of Propaganda, are clear demonstration of the deserved reward gathered by G. in this field of his multiform pontifical activity.

Equally directed toward the highest and purest religious ends was his ecclesiastical government, always and in every sphere. His solicitude for the harmonious union of the episcopate and for the better formation and discipline of the secular clergy was matched by constant care for the rebirth of the religious Orders and Congregations after the revolutionary storm, and for the establishment and strengthening of new foundations, especially those intended for the education of youth and for social assistance. He canonized five saints (1839), among them St. Alphonsus Liguori and St. Peter of Alcantara, and carried out several beatifications, recognizing the ancient and constant cult of thirty-four servants of God. He extended to the universal Church the Office and Mass of St. Aloysius Gonzaga and called for the introduction of the cause of the apostle of children, John Baptist de la Salle. Important norms were issued for the observance of liturgical prescriptions and for the return to the genuine sources and forms of sacred music. Most devoted to the Virgin, he became a vigorous promoter of the movement and of the preparatory acts for the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. It suffices to recall the interest G. took in clarifying the prodigious circumstances of the conversion of the Jew Ratisbonne; the indulgences granted to the faithful devoted to the Miraculous Medal; the introduction of the adjective immaculata into the praefatio of the proper Mass of the Conception; the addition of the invocation Regina sine labe originali concepta to the Litany of Loreto. Besides several notable structural reforms of the organs of the Curia, such as the renewal of the body of apostolic protonotaries, he held fifty consistories, delivering allocutions almost always worthy of note for zeal and firmness. He held supremely at heart the decorum and prestige of the Sacred College: fortunate in his choice of the eighty-two cardinals he created (one thinks of the palaeographer Mai, the polyglot Mezzofanti, the most pious pastor Mastai-Ferretti), in every act he availed himself of the counsel and collaboration of the most competent cardinals of the Curia. He knew how to bring new energies and abilities into the episcopate, preconizing no fewer than seven hundred and fifty-five patriarchs, archbishops and bishops.

Equally directed to the exclusive safeguarding of the moral and spiritual rights of the immense flock entrusted to him, and always immune from any temporalistic preoccupation or influence, his prudent and far-sighted ecclesiastical "policy" proved itself in the even difficult and arduous relations with the various States. A policy which, if it could make valid leverage on the ever more concordant, coordinated and consenting pastoral force of the great majority of the episcopate and clergy of every country, found on the other hand new and notable support and knew how to avail itself of the growing civic-social influence of the masses of the faithful upon the public opinions of the respective nations.

Assisted and seconded by direct collaborators such as a Bernetti and a Lambruschini, G. thus succeeded in keeping high on every occasion the prestige of the Church and of the Holy See, sometimes overcoming, at other times preparing the overcoming of the gravest and most manifold difficulties.

In Piedmont the closure of age-old disputes was reached by re-establishing the nunciature, settling the questions relating to civil status, to the suppression of the tithes of Sardinia, to the tributes for the clergy and to ecclesiastical immunities. Vigilant and agile was the line of conduct followed by the Pontiff in the face of the suspicious indifferentism first, and then the self-interested intrusiveness of the July Monarchy, in substance too sceptical to wish to appear persecutory, while among those Catholics the warning of Ozanam prevailed: "Renounce the political spirit in favour of the social spirit." The Holy See encouraged there the healthy neo-Guelph tendencies and supported there the movement for freedom of teaching; the generous sacrifice of the Jesuits found some compensation in the tacit return of the Benedictines and Dominicans. A happy balance of constructive compromise was able to be reached in Belgium, where through the prudent and able work of the nuncio Pecci even the thorny controversy of the examination commissions was overcome. In the Iberian peninsula, between Cristina, Isabella and Don Carlos, between Miguel, Pedro and Maria da Gloria, with the complicating of dynastic conflicts, amid ideological contrasts, between an operative regalist absolutism and an insurgent laicist liberalism, the Church had to suffer widespread persecutions and vexations and, as usual, paid the price for everyone. Until, thanks to the firmness of G. in safeguarding principles and to his flexibility in seizing every resolving contingency, in Spain, once Espartero was undone, a new concordatory arrangement was set in motion (1843-45), and in Portugal, by receiving Carreira in Rome and sending Monsignor Capaccini to Lisbon, a climate of evident pacifying détente took shape.

The same cannot be said of Switzerland, where in the political conflict between federalists, faithful to the ancient autonomies of the cantons, and radicals of a centralistic and unitary tendency, a harsh religious contrast is inserted, the former being intent on safeguarding the liberties of the Church, the latter tending toward laicist and rationalist oppression. Sustained by the force of right and by the comfort of G., led by Leu and Meyer, the Catholics fought victoriously from 1832 onward against the attempt to organize the Helvetic Church in a national sense and autonomously from the Holy See. But the radicals, defeated on the plane of democratic legality, resorted to the right of force: on 11 Dec. 1845 the defensive league of the Sonderbund arose, and thus the hostilities of civil war opened.

While in Austria there are noted (1833-44) signs precursory of an imminent détente through the practical and gradual disuse of the Josephinist legislation, with a consequent re-accentuation of the influence of Rome, relations with Prussia turn of necessity to the extreme, as the effort to realize the confessional unification of the State grows ever more intense, with the campaign of mixed marriages and with underhanded manoeuvres intended to give rise to a syncretistic synthesis of the different confessions. To the yielding connivance of certain bishops and prelates Gregory XVI promptly responded, reaffirming the wise directives of Pius VIII (brief Litteris, 25 March 1830), and condemning the doctrines of Hermes. There then arose in the persons of Droste-Vischering and Dunin admirable champions of truth and of the Faith, against whose arrest the voice of the Pope was raised (alloc. conc. of 10 Dec. 1837, 13 Sept. 1838, 8 July 1839), arousing a wave of enthusiasm and indignation not only in the country, but throughout the civilized world. More prudent than Frederick William III, his successor, fourth of the same name, realizing that instead of unity one was threatening to arrive at irreparable fractures of the fabric of the State, from 1840 onward changed policy, freed the imprisoned pastors and, creating with Catholic officials a special Catholic section at the Ministry of Cults (1841), prepared thirty years of religious peace in the country.

As for England, Scotland and Catholic Ireland, the action of Gregory XVI was no less lively and intense, but always deliberately confined to the purely religious plane, aiming more at making a breach in the prejudices and in the laws that forbade those faithful to enjoy the traditional liberties recognized for all other citizens, than at incurring through diplomatic negotiations the danger of foreseeable state interference. Thus, thanks also to his paternal friendship with Wiseman and to his unconcealed admiration for the vindicatory efforts of the Irish, the flourishing of the Roman Church in those lands became notable, while the number of apostolic vicariates was doubled (1840) and the solution of the problem of Ireland imposed itself ever more, even politically; for whose clergy the Pope enlarged and reorganized the national college of S. Agata ai Monti.

And finally, beside such alternating fortunes of old Europe, Russia on the one hand and the Americas on the other stood out in sharp contrast of looming shadows and vital lights. In the face of martyred Poland and oppressive Russia, the attitude of Gregory XVI took concrete form with equitable consistency in the repeated invitations addressed to the Polish faithful to refrain, for their own spiritual and material good, from recourse to disorder and violence, but even more in the reiterated protests aimed at unmasking the perfidious hypocrisy inherent in barbaric Muscovite absolutism. In the Americas, conversely, the timely consent and recognition effectively expressed by the Pontiff toward systems of non-anti-religious democratic freedom, against any claim of Iberian interference or a priori distinction between different types of government, provided only that the freedom of the Church was always preserved, laid the good foundations of the goals achieved today. And it suffices to mention the consolations that came to Gregory from the United States, where through persuasive and free proselytism ever new ecclesiastical jurisdictions arose and the national councils succeeding one another in Baltimore grew at every session ever more numerous and edifying.

If, therefore, Gregory not only in the government of the Church and in his ecclesiastical "policy" with regard to the various States was not in principle opposed to regimes of free constitution, but on the contrary, as has been written by Hofmann apropos of Greece, he "in strenuously defending religious principles in the internal struggles [of every nation] certainly rendered services to the cause of holy liberty against state-worship," showing that he appreciated the advantages of the free expression of public opinion in a sense that was not Enlightenment-inspired but medievally civic and Christian, what remains of the trumpeted "obscurantism" of this Pontiff? That of Gregory's "obscurantism" was in large part nothing but a skillful propagandistic invention of contemporary and later liberals. And this is precisely the enormous error in which, with regard to Gregory too, many historians continue to flounder, who instead of judging certain figures within the framework of the time in which they lived and of the institutions they governed, reduce their function to acting as spokesmen for the impassioned and contingent polemical jabs of this or that contending party.

Nor does there hold, nor can there hold, even the facile, typically liberal distinction of Farini between the enlightened and apostolic wisdom of Gregory's religious government and the alleged flaws of short-sighted and reactionary obscurantism in his civil government and in the face of the burning problems of Italian nationality. Such a distinction now appears groundless upon an objective and serene examination of the facts and circumstances, from which, on the contrary, the perfect and consistent coherence of the Pope stands out clearly.

Gregory, noted Audisio a century ago, "had a mind capable of understanding his age, its dangers and its trials... [But] he found [in the Papal State and in Italy] a system established, tenacious and compact in every part... [So that] frank in religion [he had] to proceed in politics with caution and respect. The thought of the great popes of the Middle Ages, of making Italy their point of support and themselves the nucleus of the Italian powers, seemed forgotten. Nor did the Italian powers well remember the Italic tradition of binding themselves civilly to the papacy. And while the sects with iniquitous means conspired to achieve independence and a some unification of dismembered Italy, the princes themselves abandoned this powerful lever to those [sects]». It is clear therefore that, even had G. wished it, in order to raise Italy up again in the sense mentioned, which could be nothing other than the neo-Guelph sense of yesterday and today, it would certainly not have been enough that he alone and on his own account wished it, but rather that all those Italian and foreign princes should also intend it so, and still more the aberrant moderate liberals in presuming to impose their ideological schemes on the papacy and the Church, and above all also the extremist sects and their anticlerical adherents. The later tragedy of Pius IX, between 1846 and 1850, teaches this: from the failure of his famous League among the States of the peninsula through the decisive hostility of Piedmont, to the collapse of his negotiations for a peaceful renunciation by Austria, down to the killing of the constitutionalist and federalist Pellegrino Rossi, the revolution, the assault on the Quirinal and the departure for Gaeta.

On the other hand, as a convinced upholder and restorer, in a medievalizing sense, of the freedom of the Church — the better so within the general framework of civic and political liberties — G., not only as pontiff but also as temporal sovereign, could not and should not sacrifice that freedom to these liberties, especially in his own States. Therefore what Cardinal Antonelli declared in exile at Gaeta (May 1849) to Balbo, after the experiences of Pius IX, applies perfectly to him with regard to the political and administrative problems of the Papal State: «the conscience of the Holy Father absolutely does not permit him to establish anything that would impede his spiritual freedom: the temporal dominion of the popes was established for no other purpose than to procure for them such freedom in relation to external powers; such freedom would be useless if it did not remain to the pontiffs within their own State» (cf. P. Dalla Torre, L'opera riformatrice ed amministrativa di Pio IX fra il 1850 e il 1870, Rome 1945, pp. 9-13; and, for the whole of the aforementioned Italian policy of Pius IX, the fundamental studies of P. Pirri, in Rivista di history of the Church in Italy, 1 [1947], pp. 38-84; 2 [1948], pp. 183-214). Not therefore a closed and blind obscurantism on the part of G., but rather a prudent, coherent and closely adhering sense of irrepressible and often uncontrollable realities and demands, not only political but also and above all religious. There remained, it is true, in the face of such categorical rights and duties of an altogether particular sovereignty, the just rights of subjects, to whom in any case there belonged, in a Catholic sense, besides the age-old privilege, also the traditional duty of serving and collaborating first of all in the great spiritual cause of the independence and the necessary freedom of the papacy, that is, of the Church. But here too the conduct of G., if seen in this light and rightly judged, cannot give rise to objections of principle, because he did everything that was granted him to do for his subjects; at most reservations may be advanced about the manner in which some among his many and well-devised measures and provisions were, owing to circumstances or the responsibility of those who executed them, carried out and applied.

And in fact, having chosen as the only possible path that of reforming the institutions rather than granting constitutions, having rejected as injurious to his sovereign freedom the foreign imposition of the dictates of the reformist Memorandum of the powers of the Holy Alliance (1831), and having freed himself, by strengthening the army, from the binding weight of the dual Franco-Austrian occupation, G. in substance did on his own account far more than the Memorandum itself asked of him. Thus, thanks to the wise counsel of Cardinal Gamberini and of others, every field of administration became, once again, the object of thorough study, of often radical modifications and of valuable innovations, from central to local administration, municipal and provincial, from administrative to civil and criminal jurisdiction, from the juridical and social activity of the State to its financial and military activity. And yet, according to an expert cultivator of the historical antecedents of Italian administrative law, Schupfer, and as the recent researches of Ventrone and others also demonstrate, «to say that the administration of the Papal States was among the least valuable in Italy would be to say something untrue... Merits were not lacking [since the time of Pius VII]... and the upward movement of organic reforms continued its course under G. XVI» and under Pius IX, so that «the most difficult step toward freedom, that toward a perfected administration, could by then be said to have been surmounted». «One certainly cannot fail to note — observes Ventrone — that the liberties, especially the political ones, [were] greatly limited... [But] on the other hand — he adds — one certainly cannot do wrong to a State for not wishing to commit suicide». At this point, since it is impossible here to give even a summary picture of the vast work of G. as temporal sovereign, and also of how much he, a man of great culture, did with marked love for the sciences and the arts and for culture in general, and for public education in particular, see the study by P. Dalla Torre on L'opera riformatrice ed amministrativa di G. XVI (in G. XVI. Miscellanea commemorativa, Rome 1948, II, pp. 29-121, with ample bibliography).

Death, received with the humble and austere monastic simplicity in which he had always lived («I wish to die as a friar and not as a sovereign», he said with gentle firmness to those who still strove to surround his final moments with pomp), overtook him at his post on 1 June 1846. He had reigned for fifteen years and was 81 years old. He was buried in St. Peter's, and on the monument erected to him there stands out, with good reason, as a unifying commemoration of all his great deeds, the «Propagation of the Faith». With his right hand on the globe, G. points out to the missionaries who surround him the Cross, as if to urge them to pursue through the centuries their work of apostolate with the same intrepid courage as his own, and with the same most firm perseverance.

Paolo Dalla Torre