Pius VII, Pope

PIUS VII, Pope. - Barnaba Gregorio Chiaramonti, b. 14 Aug. 1740 (not 1742) at Cesena, son of Count Scipione and the marchioness Giovanna Ghini. After his early studies at the Jesuit College of Ravenna he became a Benedictine: in 1775 he was in Rome as abbot of St. Callixtus, in 1782 bishop of Tivoli, in 1785 of Imola, and shortly afterwards cardinal. In the government of the dioceses entrusted to him Chiaramonti revealed those gifts of gentleness and meekness that were to characterize his conduct even in the most arduous and tragic moments of his life.

On the death of Pius VI at Valence on 29 Aug. 1799, the Conclave for the election of the new Pontiff assembled at Venice, where numerous cardinals had taken refuge under Austrian protection. The deceased Pontiff had established that the future conclave should assemble precisely wherever the majority of the cardinals might be. The Conclave lasted from 1 Dec. 1799 to 14 March 1800; its secretary and organizer was the young prelate Ercole Consalvi. For the government of Vienna the preferred candidate was Card. Mattei. In the ballots Card. Bellisomi, bishop of Cesena, at first prevailed, opposed by Austria, and then the Savoyard Card. Gerdil (v.). In the end the votes concentrated on Card. Chiaramonti, who in homage to his predecessor called himself Pius VII.

The election displeased Vienna, where the newly elected had a reputation for a certain inclination toward democratic ideas: there was talk of a homily delivered at Imola in which he had affirmed that there was no antithesis between democracy and Christianity. After the coronation, which took place in S. Giorgio Maggiore on 21 March 1800, the imperial government invited him to Vienna to settle peacefully the question of the Legations. Pius resolutely refused and as soon as he could (6 June) he left Venice and by sea went to Pesaro and from there entered Rome on 3 July. On 15 May his first encyclical had appeared from Venice: with simplicity and firmness it proclaimed the Church's right to follow its divine laws in full independence. Pius made Consalvi (v.) cardinal and Secretary of State; and between the two there was always complete understanding and sympathy. The Peace of Lunéville (1801) restored the Papal State to the condition in which it had been before the Treaty of Tolentino. Pius now found himself faced with the problem of religious restoration in France and in the countries through which the revolutionary storm had passed. The First Consul, immediately after the battle of Marengo (14 June 1800), charged Card. Martiniana, bishop of Vercelli, with communicating to the Pope his intention of establishing between the Church of Rome and the French Republic agreements in a spirit of peace. Pius agreed, and entrusted the negotiations in Paris to Msgr. Spina and the theologian Caselli: in Paris they met with the abbot Bernier, representative of the First Consul. The First Consul, by offering to restore religious peace in France, intended to exploit the support of the Church and the clergy. Pius soon had to renounce the projects of defending the refractory bishops, of saving the patrimony of the Church of France, of making Catholicism once again the official religion of the French State. The long and exhausting negotiations were broken off in June 1801. Pius had to send Card. Consalvi to Paris and the Concordat was signed on 15 July 1801. When the Pope had its text before his eyes, grave opposition arose on the part of the cardinals, but Consalvi obtained the papal ratification of the agreement and Pius signed the Concordat on 15 Aug. and sent to Paris with the authority of legate for its application Card. Caprara. Then the First Consul, to calm the opposition of the old revolutionaries, promulgated the Organic Articles, which subjected certain religious activities to state and police control, in the spirit of the old jurisdictionalism. All that remained for Pius was to protest against these arbitrary acts of the French government in the allocution to the cardinals of 24 May 1802. On 18 Apr. 1802 the Concordat was promulgated in Notre-Dame and the Te Deum was solemnly sung. In reality many were the discontented, both among the anti-revolutionaries and among the more intolerant revolutionaries. Pius was accused of having betrayed the Church. As a consequence of the Concordat, the ecclesiastical principalities in Germany disappeared in 1805 and the property of religious bodies was confiscated. With the proclamation of Napoleon Bonaparte as emperor of the French, pressing solicitations were made to Pius to go to Paris for the ceremony of the imperial coronation. The cardinals were opposed and echoed several Catholic governments. Pius, drawn by the hope that some advantage for the Church might derive from his personal sacrifice, set out on 2 Nov. accompanied by seven cardinals and four bishops. The papal journey to France, the first after the Avignon period, gave rise to moving religious demonstrations on the part of the populations along the itinerary Florence-Turin-Mont Cenis-Lyons. On 25 Nov. at Fontainebleau Pius was received in the forest by the Emperor in hunting dress during a hunt: a rather coarse reception with which the Pope was not enthusiastic. The coronation ceremony took place in Notre-Dame on 2 Dec.: Pius received from the Emperor the oath to maintain peace for the Church and the people; Napoleon himself took the crown from the altar and placed it on his head. The day before, Pius had succeeded in persuading Napoleon to contract a religious marriage with Josephine, and this was done in secret. Napoleon tried to persuade the Pope to remain in France, at Paris or at Avignon. Pius evaded every insistence; he warned that if they wished to detain him by force, the Emperor would have in his hands only the monk Barnaba Chiaramonti, because he had left detailed instructions in Rome on the matter. Pope and Emperor parted coldly: from that time began the tension that was soon to lead to the rupture. Pius re-entered Rome on 16 May. During the stop at Florence he succeeded in obtaining the submission of the Jansenist bishop of Pistoia, Scipione de' Ricci (v.).

Strengthened by the prestige that came to him from the imperial coronation, Napoleon began to act at his own discretion with regard to the Church and the Papacy. In France as in Italy he issued measures even in the religious sphere, going so far as to demand the annulment of the marriage contracted in America by his brother Jerome and the rupture with England and the other governments opposed to the Empire. To the papal resistances Napoleon responded by militarily occupying Ancona. Pius protested, but Napoleon, after the victory of Austerlitz, replied haughtily, calling himself the firstborn son of the Church just as the Carolingian and Capetian monarchs his predecessors had been; whereas the Papal State was a gift of the emperors and the popes must follow imperial policy.

When Napoleon made his brother Joseph king of Naples, Consalvi protested, invoking the rights of the Pope and his high sovereignty over the Kingdom: the Emperor replied with the threat of having the cardinal arrested and assigned Benevento and Pontecorvo, papal lands, to Talleyrand and Bernadotte as fiefs. Consalvi renewed his protests, but was forced to abandon his office (17 June 1806). The Pope entrusted the secretariat of state to Card. Casoni, who soon had to withdraw and was replaced by Doria and then by Gabrielli, who continued the policy of resistance. Napoleon then had an ultimatum presented to the Pope: the right to nominate a third of the cardinals, the coronation of the King of Naples, the adoption of the Napoleonic Code, recognition of the Gallican liberties and of the Organic Articles, the appointment of an autonomous French patriarch, the abolition of ecclesiastical celibacy and of the religious Orders. The Pope's refusal precipitated events: on 2 Feb. 1808 General Miollis occupied Rome. P., raising a new protest, declared to the French general that from then on he considered himself a prisoner. The French regime turned to open violence: the cardinals were either expelled or arrested. After the arrest of the secretary of state Gabrielli, the Pope replaced him with Pacca. From Palermo the English offered P. hospitality in Sicily and the means to escape, but the Pope refused. An attempt to arrest Card. Pacca in the Quirinal Palace itself was averted by the Pope's personal intervention. Meanwhile Napoleon, on 2 Apr. 1808, promulgated from St-Cloud a decree establishing the union of the Marches with the Kingdom of Italy. On 17 May, from Schoenbrunn, he suppressed the temporal power of the popes, declaring Rome an imperial city and assigning the Pope an annual income of two million francs. P. responded by ordering Pacca to publish the bull of excommunication against all those who had ordered or perpetrated the acts of violence against the Holy See (10 June 1809). On 20 June Napoleon wrote to Murat that the Pope was a madman who ought to be locked up; Pacca and all those who were most loyal were to be arrested. The task of this odious operation was undertaken by General Radet: on the night of 5 July, having scaled the Quirinal, he entered the room where the Pope was and ordered him in the Emperor's name to renounce the temporal domain. The Pope, rising to his feet, replied: "I cannot, I must not, I will not. I have promised God to preserve the Church's States for her, and I shall never fail in that oath." Radet then forced P. and Card. Pacca to get into a carriage and depart. On 8 July the two prisoners reached

Florence, whence they immediately set out again for Genoa, Alessandria, Cenisio; on 21 July they were at Grenoble. Pacca was shut up at Fenestrelle. The Pope was taken to Valence, then to Avignon and finally on 15 Aug. to Savona, where imperial orders soon arrived for close surveillance of the illustrious prisoner lodged in the episcopal palace. In appearance sovereign honors, in reality a true prison, control of personal relations and of epistolary correspondence; little by little the Pope was to be completely isolated. The Emperor hoped to reduce P. to complying with his wishes, convinced that he had to deal with a weak old man incapable of resisting when he no longer had prudent and faithful counselors at his side.

In the affair of the divorce from Josephine in order to marry Maria Luisa of Austria, the Pope, the only competent authority in the matter, was ignored. The cardinals who, as a sign of disapproval, abstained from attending the solemn ceremony of the new marriage were stripped of their property and exiled, with the prohibition of wearing the insignia of their dignity. When Napoleon ordered that the bishops nominated by him should take possession of their sees without concern for canonical institution, the Pope condemned the intruded bishops. In reprisal the imprisonment of P. became harsher: his books were taken from him and even the necessities for writing. In Nov. 1800 and in March 1811 Napoleon assembled two ecclesiastical councils in Paris in order to prepare a national council. This was in fact convened for June 1811; meanwhile a commission of bishops was sent to Savona to put pressure on the Pope: under threat of the annulment of the Concordat he was to confirm the bishops already nominated; for the future, once three months had passed from the nomination without the pontifical canonical institution having intervened, it was to be given by the metropolitan bishop or by the eldest of the suffragans; the Pope was moreover to swear an oath of fidelity to the Emperor and to reside at Avignon. P., after a long resistance, ended by yielding, accepting, as a preliminary to negotiation, the proposal that a clause be inserted into the Concordat by which the Pope was to give canonical investiture within six months, after which the metropolitans would provide it. As soon as P. had drafted the document he repented, but it had already left for Paris. The national Council sat from 17 June 1811 to 5 Aug. The planned decree, which the Emperor's representatives wrung from the bishops, was brought to Savona by a new delegation of imperialist cardinals and bishops. P., oppressed by the insistences of all those who spoke of the needs of the Church, after a long struggle (3-20 Sept. 1811) gave in, with the reservation that the metropolitan should proceed by virtue of a formal delegation from the Pope. Napoleon flew into a rage on reading the papal brief and from Dresden, on the eve of the Russian expedition, sent orders to the governor of Turin, Prince Borghese, to transfer P. in complete secrecy to the castle of Fontainebleau. Having left Savona on 10 June although ill, P. reached the hospice of Cenisio on the 12th: almost dying, he received the Viaticum from those monks. Having recovered, and forced to depart, he reached Fontainebleau on 20 June, and imperialist cardinals and bishops were at his side so that he would surrender to the master's will. After the catastrophic Russian expedition, at the end of Dec. 1812, Napoleon returned to France and wished to attempt a rapprochement in order to impress the populations, but P. rejected the proposals put to him by the bishop of Nantes, Du Voisin, and by other bishops. On the evening of 18 Jan. 1813 Napoleon, again in hunting dress, abruptly visited P. In the following days Pope and Emperor discussed at length: on 25 Jan. an agreement was signed that was to constitute the preliminaries of a new concordat. The Pope accepted the decisions of the Council of Paris and obtained as a concession the liberation of Card. Pacca and of certain others, the restoration of the suburbicarian sees, the right to provide for ten sees. Napoleon hastened to publish such an act, which was to remain secret, to the advantage of his policy. Cards. Consalvi and Pacca, as soon as they arrived at P.'s side, made him aware of the error committed; on 26 March P. wrote to Napoleon retracting what he had consented to and declared in a letter to the cardinals that any canonical institution given by the metropolitans was null. The Pope remained in France until February 1814, when Napoleon, overwhelmed by defeat, ordered that P. be taken back to Savona and on 10 March that he be set free. P. entered Rome on 24 May, but in the spring of 1815, when Joachim Murat began his adventurous enterprise, the Pope took refuge in Genoa, but he had already returned to Rome by 7 June 1815. After 1815 he again had to confront the problems of the reconstitution of the State and of ecclesiastical restoration. To Consalvi belongs the credit for having succeeded, through negotiations conducted in London and Vienna, in obtaining that the Congress should decree the restitution of all the Pope's States, rejecting the Austrian claims to the Legations. Only Avignon remained with France; to the Austrian Veneto was ceded a small strip of Ferrarese territory on the left bank of the Po; Benevento and Pontecorvo were also restored by the Kingdom of Naples; the pre-revolutionary papal legislation was in part re-established, and the administration was reorganized on new foundations more suited to the times. Cardinal Consalvi saved the Pope from grave responsibilities, showing him the necessity of drawing a veil over the past and of renewing the state administration. The motu proprio of 6 July 1816 annulled feudal rights, reorganized the tribunals, and unified the administrations of the provinces and municipalities along Napoleonic lines. The reform of the ecclesiastical tribunals and the publication of new codes were also announced. Consalvi, on the other hand, adopted in domestic policy a great tolerance toward the followers of liberal ideas, resisting Austrian pressures, which would have wished to obtain control over the Papal State. In Rome P. granted the greatest hospitality to Napoleon's mother and family members, including Cardinal Fesch himself. With the bull Sollicitudo omnium of 7 August 1814 P. re-established the Society of Jesus, which had been suppressed by Clement XIV. To regulate ecclesiastical relations according to the new needs, around 1817-18 concordats were concluded with the monarchies of Spain, Sardinia, France, Naples, Bavaria, and Prussia. A notable revival is also evident in the missionary field. The Congregation of Propaganda Fide began to function again on new foundations, and thanks to the Pope's solicitations the work of religious assistance and of penetration in the Middle and Far East was being reorganized. Thought was being given to providing for the difficulties created in Latin America, shaken by the rebellion against Spanish rule, while the best hopes began to be realized in North America. P. died on 20 August 1823 following a fall in his own study, in which he suffered a fracture of the femur. He died without knowing of the destruction of the basilica of St. Paul, which had occurred a few days earlier in a serious fire. He was buried in St. Peter's; Cardinal Consalvi commissioned the Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen to create a grandiose funeral monument: Wisdom and Strength stand guard over the tomb. - See plate CIII.

Francesco Cognasso