Viale Prelà, Michele

VIALE PRELÀ, MICHELE. - Cardinal, b. at Bastia (Corsica) on 29 Sept. 1798, d. at Bologna on 15 May 1860.

Ordained priest in 1823, he was directed toward a diplomatic career and began his cursus as auditor of the nunciature in Switzerland. After a long stay in the Secretariat of State, in 1838 he was assigned to Munich as internuncio, promoted nuncio in 1841 and raised to the archiepiscopal dignity of Carthage, and finally transferred to Vienna in 1845. His choice qualities won him broad sympathies and firm friendships in the Austrian capital, chief among them that of Metternich: a circumstance that proved invaluable to the Holy See in 1848, because V. P. was able to remain in place, almost on a personal footing, even after the departure of the Austrian ambassador from Rome, and to avert a complete rupture between the Vatican and the imperial government at the extremely difficult moment when a schism was even being threatened against the Pontiff, who in Vienna was regarded as subservient to the Italian revolution. When the capital too rose up against Habsburg absolutism, the nuncio followed the imperial family to Innsbruck at the sovereign's express invitation; and from there he had to move to Soden, in order to follow closely the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly of Frankfurt and report on them constantly to the Secretariat of State. In September, even before the official restoration of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the Empire, he was again in Vienna, intent on making relations with Rome cordial once more.

But V. P.'s diplomatic masterpiece was the conclusion of the Concordat of 1855, the first idea of which he suggested to one of the most authoritative Austrian prelates, Joseph von Rauscher, as early as the spring of 1849, taking as his occasion the promulgation of the Constitution of the Empire granted by Francis Joseph on 4 March of that year. He thus took part in the episcopal conference directed by Cardinal von Schwarzenberg, from which there issued precisely the invitation to the sovereign to negotiate a concordat with the Holy See. The conference's request was accepted by the government only in 1852, and the negotiations began between V. P. and von Rauscher — who had meanwhile become Archbishop of Vienna — in the early part of 1853. The establishment of a concordatory regime with Austria held quite particular importance for the Holy See, because it was a matter not only of arriving at an instrument that could serve as a model for negotiations with other governments after the revolutionary storm of 1848, but of erasing every trace of the Josephinist "jurisdictionalism" that had until then dominated the ecclesiastical policy of the Habsburgs. V. P. was equal to the grave task and in three years of laborious negotiations reached the goal, to the full satisfaction of Pius IX. A cardinal in pectore from 1852 and proclaimed in 1853, he remained in Vienna as pro-nuncio until the signing of the Concordat (18 Aug. 1855), ratified by the Pope on 3 Nov. with the bull Deus humanae salutis auctor and proclaimed a law of the State in Austria two days later. Having finally returned to Italy, V. P. was appointed Archbishop of Bologna and immediately took possession of his see, to which Cardinal Antonelli had insistently wanted him appointed in order to remove from Rome the most able pontifical diplomat, so as to prevent the Pope from entrusting him with the Secretariat of State.

Although he had until then lived far from the pastoral care, V. P. was, in the four years in which he governed the diocese, a truly exemplary prelate, who devoted his greatest care to the formation of his clergy and to the improvement of the morals of the faithful. After the fall of the pontifical dominion in Emilia in 1859, he studiously avoided all contact with the new political authorities, showing himself a strenuous defender of the rights of the Church.

Renzo U. Montini