Part #167: Pope on the Ropes
“The Roman Catholic Church fundamentally represents an attempt to unite humanity across colours and tongues. It revives and refines an ancient
lingua franca for its own use. It removes men of potential from their self-identified ‘nations’ and returns them as wiser men who know that the needs of the Church, the needs of humanity, come before the petty short-sighted desires of the unworthy rulers of the ‘nations’ they once called home. Yet, of course, the project ultimately failed, to the point that there exist regions where Catholic is identified with the alien, the other. If we are truly to seek a global society, then we must first identify where and why this bold attempt has gone wrong…”
– Pablo Sanchez, Pax Aeterna, 1845.
Footnote to this paragraph: This represents one of the few surviving examples of Sanchez commenting on religion, and is trustworthy as it is attested to be quotes in contemporary letters and diaries from Sanchez’s university colleagues who discussed the Conclave of 1846 with him. Of course the vast majority of the mentions of religion in the Sanchez ‘canon’ cannot be considered original, due to both editing by the Biblioteka Mundial and the presence of multiple deliberately inconsistent versions released by some Diversitarian governments under variant policies prior to the adoption of the Iverson Protocol.
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From: “Religion and Government in Europe, 1648-1901” by Georg Steiner (1983, authorised English translation)—
The end of the eighteenth century saw the biggest crisis to afflict the Roman Catholic Church since the Reformation. Indeed, to some eyes the danger of Jansenism was a more insidious poison than that of Protestantism had been. Protestantism had begun as a difference of opinion within the Church—or rather many variations on the same opinion—but had swiftly hardened into something that defined itself by its opposition to Catholic touchstones such as the principle of apostolic succession and the belief in transubstantiation. In the beginning there had been attempts to effectively carry on the institutions of the Church as normal while merely replacing the Pope’s authority, as in Henry VIII’s initial “Anglo-Catholic” Church of England, but these had been shortlived. By the 1700s, the Roman Church could view Protestantism as an enemy and rival, but not a matter of internal dissension by its very definition. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 had created the principle of
Cuius regio, eius religio (the ruler of a state defines the religion of that state by his own religious beliefs). The Thirty Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 had hardened this new model of religion in government: there were Catholic nations and Protestant nations, and both had to grapple with the problem of minorities from the other side, as with the expulsion of the Huguenots from France and discrimination against Catholics in Britain. With this hardening, it seemed unlikely that any nation currently identifying as Catholic would flip to Protestant—or vice versa—as had happened in the past, sometimes multiple times over.
Despite this solidifying of attitudes, another internal struggle arose within the Roman Church in the eighteenth century. This time the threat was Jansenism. Based (posthumously) on the writings of the Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), Jansenism sought to build upon the theology of St Augustine, emphasising original sin and predestination. In so doing it contradicted several core beliefs of the Jesuits, who were powerful at the time within the Church, and conflict was inevitable. As with (it seems) the name of almost every political and religious group in history, ‘Jansenist’ began as a derogatory term given to the group by their enemies, and was intended to evoke ‘Calvinist’—the Jansenists’ emphasis on predestination led to many accusing them of being crypto-Calvinists within the Roman Church.
After the Jansenists made some alterations to their doctrine in the mid-seventeenth century, Pope Clement IX intervened in the dispute and there was a measure of toleration for some thirty years. Jansenism became particularly strong in France, where its best-known proponents included the theologian Antoine Arnauld and the philosopher Blaise Pascal. Port-Royal Abbey in Paris became the centre of Jansenist thought. However, after Arnauld’s death in 1694, the movement fell under the
de facto leadership of Pasquier Quesnel. In 1692 Quesnel had published his great work
Réflexions morales sur le Nouveau Testament (“Moral Reflections on the New Testament”) which had taken a radically Jansenist tone, yet for some reason had been approved by the mainstream Church and recommended by several senior French bishops and cardinals who, it transpired, seemed never to have read it thoroughly. The resulting embarrassment and controversy resulted in King Louis XIV asking Pope Clement XI to intervene. The papal bull
Unigenitus (1713) condemned Quesnel’s work in strong terms, only fanning the falmes of the controversy when many French clergy rejected the bull and called for an ecumenical council to discuss the matter further. The matter was further confused when Louis XIV died in the middle of the dispute and was succeeded by his infant great-grandson Louis XV under the regency of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans. The Duke was less strongly behind the papal position than the Sun King had been, with the result that the Universities of Paris, Nantes and Rheims rescinded their previous acceptance of
Unigenitus and prolonged the controversy further.
The Jansenists eventually lost the struggle and were persecuted in France, but the authorities never quite managed to eradicate them and, later in the reign of Louis XV, often found their presence politically useful. For many years (and for obvious reasons) the French monarchy had put forward the ideology of Gallicanism—that the king should have power over the national church, as opposed to the ideology of Ultramontanism in which the Pope’s power was supreme. The presence of the Jansenist heresy allowed Louis XV to pointedly flirt with the idea of converting France over to being a Jansenist ‘national Catholic’ church, not unlike Henry VIII’s original ideas for the Church of England, if the Pope failed to give way on whichever diplomatic issue was currently causing problems for the Bourbons. It helped that ‘Jansenist’ had become an increasingly meaningless label. Even before
Unigenitus the Jansenists had already schismed into three loose factions based on whether they accepted Clement IX’s original compromise or not and whether they accepted Papal infallibility. The matter was further confused by the existence of Jansenists who accepted
Unigenitus, which begged the question of whether they were truly Jansenists at all. So ‘Jansenist’ could now simply be taken to mean ‘Catholic, but denying or ignoring the authority of the Pope’, with all the theological details of the original Augustinian/crypto-Calvinist discussion long forgotten.
Jansenism still might, perhaps, have remained nothing more than a French oddity.[1] However, as the world watched in astonishment, the United Provinces of South America came into being in the 1780s and changed things forever by its very existence. The UPSA had fought with the assistance of the British and Americans and against the Spanish and French, but its people had no desire to abandon their Catholic faith. Indeed if the Church had been accommodating, they would likely have continued being good Roman Catholics for the foreseeable future. But Pope Gregory XV could not be accommodating. The Papacy was under influence from both the French and the Spanish; usually he could maintain some measure of independence by playing them off against one another, but not in this case. The Spanish called in favours from Naples and Parma, too, ruled by branches of their royal family, and the pressure was on. The Spanish government hoped that the UPSA’s legitimacy could be undermined with papal bulls condemning its break from Spain, and that the people might fight to overthrow the fledgeling new government if the Pope called for a popular crusade against it. Gregory XV was under fewer illusions than the optimistic Spanish; he had had agents working in Platinea for years due to the controversy over the Jesuit Reductions, and was at least somewhat aware that public opinion in the UPSA was very different to what the Spanish imagined. However, he could not simply refuse.
The papal bull
Discidium (“separation”) of 1789 was far more watered-down and conciliatory in tone than the Spanish had hoped for. But it nonetheless was fuel on the flames of an existing controversy in the UPSA between bishops over what position they should take regarding the new nation’s government and the Pope’s authority. Like many bulls before it,
Discidium created instant battle lines over whether any individual member of the Catholic clergy recognised it or not. In the UPSA, the majority chose to recognise it as a politically motivated bull sent under duress and voted to reject it. At the time, most of them doubtless hoped that they could continue to be conventional Roman Catholics and this would be a temporary dispute, resolved as soon as the Spanish boot was removed from the Pope’s neck. But this would not happen for some years, and it would come in a form that scarcely represented a return to normality. As it was, the old label ‘Jansenist’ continued to flit around, driven in part by the large number of French immigrants that the UPSA had absorbed, desertees from the Duc de Noailles’ army in the Second Platinean War. Soon, in mainstream political discussion in nations like the ENA and Great Britain, ‘Jansenist’ came to primarily signify ‘one of those Meridian Catholics who rejects the Pope’.
Indeed, the notion that one could be
Catholic without being
papist was something of a revelation to many in those nations, and helped reignite the debate over Catholic emancipation. It was particularly influential in the Confederation of Carolina, which had acquired a large number of new Catholic subjects after the Second Platinean War and would go on to gain even more.[2] Carolina had traditionally been just as hostile to Catholics as New England, many of its colonists being Ulster Protestants. Yet it was the very contrast between the old Ulster propaganda image of Catholics being unthinking cattle who would kill their own spouses if their priest told them to do it, and the reality of thinking and feeling human beings who happened to believe in transubstantiation rather than consubstantiation, which helped demolish the old prejudices. Jansenism became a very popular self-identification among the Catholics of Cuba and Hispaniola as a result, and they were more readily accepted into Carolinian society—yet this opened the door to the later, more lukewarm acceptance of mainstream Roman Catholics as well. By contrast, in New England things remained more bitter as the remaining Catholics of the former New France tended to adopt an ultramontane line, particularly after the Jacobin Revolution. They both viewed this as a stronger statement of identity and also felt that Jansenism was associated with the UPSA, which had a negative image due to the unsuccessful rebellion the Canajuns had attempted during the Second Platinean War.
Jansenism therefore presented a critical threat to the Roman Catholic Church even before the turn of the nineteenth century. But, of course, that century dawned inauspiciously (to say the least) for the Church with the Rape of Rome in 1802. Although official accounts have always portrayed this as a deliberate policy enacted by the ultimate evil of Lisieux and his sidekick Hoche, the reality was of course very different: Lisieux needed to get rid of Sans-Culottes which he no longer trusted, Hoche needed to push south while he campaigned in Bologna, and both their needs were met by sending Sans-Culottes regiments to attack Rome. Hoche probably did not expect them to be so successful, assuming that Charles VIII and VI of Naples and Sicily would support the Papal States militarily. But regardless of the intentions, the result was the same: a burnt city, a Pope cut to pieces in the street by a knife-wielding Jacobin mob, and the death of over half the cardinals currently in the city. When the Conclave met in the Caserta Palace in Naples to elect a new Pope, no-one was even sure whether they had a quorum or not, it remaining uncertain how many were dead or missing.
The radical election of Henry Benedict Stuart as Urban IX was likely the right decision to stop the Church from falling apart altogether in the short term, and Urban did successfully re-establish the Church and its institutions in Rome. However, his controversial election did not help the Church’s global image. Many faithful Roman Catholics were uncertain about whether this Conclave and this Pope truly represented an apostolic succession from his martyred predecessor Benedict XV. This uncertainty led to more battle lines being drawn, all over the world, and Jansenism naturally profited. Often a faction in one nation would describe itself as following the true apostolic succession and declaiming all the others as Jansenists. Furthermore, the Jansenist Church in the UPSA was by now already providing models for others. Instead of bishops being appointed from on high, all the bishops of a nation would now gather in council each time one of their number stepped down or passed away, and together agree to elect a replacement. In 1863, reflecting the democratic traditions of the UPSA, the Jansenist Church there added a synodic element, allowing the assembled clergy to elect three candidates for a bishopric which the conclave of bishops would then decide between. Variations on this model were copied elsewhere, occasionally by state Jansenist churches but more commonly in an informal manner by Jansenists living as a minority in the midst of Protestants or Roman Catholics.
Though Roman Catholics still outnumbered Jansenists, it was around this time that the term ‘Catholic’ with no qualifier became more ambiguous; previously it could be assumed that anyone simply calling themselves ‘Catholic’ was a Roman Catholic who followed the Pope’s authority. Now, though, with the controversy and division over Urban IX, believers who agreed that Urban’s apostolic succession was legitimate now often called themselves ‘
Roman Catholics’ or even just ‘Romans’, in opposition to Jansenist Catholics. Of course, this kind of terminology is now the most common one in most languages.
The Church struggled on through the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, focusing on trying to rebuild its position, little able to expend effort on coping with the new issues raised by the rise of democracy in the Popular Wars. The flexible Jansenists, meanwhile, could multiply a dozen interpretations and positions to debate endlessly and still agree they were all good Catholics. These years were those of the weak Popes Benedict XVI, Pius VI and Clement XVI, who were mere puppets of Naples in political terms. This pressure, as had that of the Spanish decades earlier, robbed the Papacy of much of its authority in the eyes of its global following. It was hard to take the doctrine of papal infallibility seriously when it was obvious that an encyclical was politically motivated by Neapolitan foreign policy aims.
Clement XVI was succeeded by his namesake Clement XVII in 1833, who was the first Pope since Benedict XV to be elected by a Conclave close to its pre-Rape of Rome membership. Many younger men had been promoted to Cardinal by necessity, and that altered the character of the Conclave. For now those men were content to go with Clement XVII, a safe pair of hands in the midst of the Popular Wars. But they would not be quiescent for long. Clement XVII died after thirteen years on St Peter’s throne and the Conclave met once again in 1846. And that was where the trouble started.
The Conclave was a heterogenous mix of traditionalists and modernisers, old and young, those who expected the Pope to always be Italian and have a political bent to his nature and those who disagreed. The all-purpose insult of ‘Jansenist heretic’ was thrown back and forth between almost anyone, for it could mean anything one wanted. And the Conclave failed to elect, over and over. Taking a long time to decide on a Pope was nothing new; two or three-year interregnums had happened several times due to a deadlock in the College. But the last time this had happened was the fifteenth century; in living memory, even after the chaos of the Rape of Rome, election had generally been fairly swift once the Cardinals gathered. This bitter disagreement was therefore treated as a novelty by many across Europe, and was immortalised in the British folk song
Choosing a Pope (which may be derived from a now-forgotten French original,
Fumée Noire, according to Jacobsen and Standing (ibid.)):
Choosing a Pope, oh they’re choosing a Pope,
But black smoke still from the chimney,
Losing all hope, we’re losing all hope,
Who will take St Peter’s key?
Though now often performed in a sanitised version, originally it was a drinking song, with repetitions of this chorus separated by verses in which increasingly desperate Cardinals try to elect more and more outlandish people, animals and things to the Papacy. Rather than having a single codified set of lyrics, it may have been intended as a competitive game, with each drinker coming up with something more bizarre and offensive than the last. The modern codified version includes verses about electing a woman (one of the less bawdy efforts on that subject), electing a eunuch, electing a corpse, electing a donkey, and eventually concludes with St Peter coming down from the gates of heaven to resume his seat “because I can’t stand any more of this racket”. It does not include some earthier efforts of the original song such as Judas Iscariot, Jean de Lisieux (and in later versions, Pablo Sanchez) being proposed for election instead.
The song is a comedic exaggeration of the process, but not of the cardinals’ desperation. Three months in, it was hoped that they might have found a candidate pleasing to all in the form of the Portuguese Cardinal Luís de Saldanha da Silva, the Patriarch of Lisbon. However, the minority opposed to Saldanha managed to intercept a controversial letter from the Cardinal in which he criticised the actions of King John VI of Portugal earlier that year…
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From: “A Historiographic Glossary” by James Kavanagh (1978)—
Pânico de '46 (Eng. “Panic of ’46”). A period of crisis in the Kingdom of Portugal, in particular in and around the capital Lisbon, April-July 1846. The Panic consisted of riots by the mob, some attempted organised uprisings by neo-Jacobin, Populist and other revolutionary groups in the city, looting and a run on the Banco de Lisboa by subjects afraid of revolution and instability. This caused an economic crash. The underlying causes of the Panic were public dissatisfaction with King John VI’s authoritarian crackdowns since the Popular Wars, as well as underlying resentment over Portugal’s humiliating losses in those same wars, which was blamed on the King’s former foreign policy. Though John VI had tried to place the blame on the Duke of Aveiro and had him dismissed, this was not entirely successful in shifting the blame. The specific trigger for the Panic, however, was the even more humiliating defeat of the Portuguese East India Company in Timor by exilic Dutch forces.[3] While this event happened in 1845, news did not reach home until the following year. Predictably, John VI responded to the riots and unrest by deploying troops and restoring order at the price of several bloody massacres. Foreign mercenaries were employed and accused of being indiscriminate in their killing. The remaining Portuguese revolutionaries fled over the border into Spain. This can be thought of as the initial domino in the chain of events that would lead to the Iberian Revolution and the European front of the Great American War…
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From: “Religion and Government in Europe, 1648-1901” by Georg Steiner (1983, authorised English translation)—
…considered by some, though by no means all, the Cardinals to be an inappropriate position for a Pope to take. After several more ballots, Saldanha publicly withdrew his name from consideration, but this did nothing to resolve the deadlock. The Conclave had several candidates that were worthy but inadequate men, and none of the factions were willing to compromise.
Saldanha himself is thought to have had a hand in how the crisis was eventually resolved after seven months of deadlock. The Conclave took the radical step of electing a man who had only recently been promoted to cardinal himself, and that promotion had largely been accomplished as a way of kicking him upstairs. Filippo Corazzi was a Roman, certainly, whose family had lived in the city for generations. But he was not a man from a privileged background. He had been a simple priest for many years, becoming universally adored far beyond his formal see. There remains a persistent rumour that he received the confession of Henri Rouvroy for the part he had played in the Rape of Rome when Rouvroy visited Rome in 1809.[4] His elevation to Bishop of Boiano in 1820 had perhaps been an attempt to force him to get in line and abandon some of his single-mindedness, as this diocese within the Kingdom of Naples was subject to considerable influence from King Gennaro.[5] However, Corazzi had proceeded to become a figure of adoration among the poor there as well and receive at least grudging respect from the local Neapolitan nobles. Gennaro had eventually left him be providing he did not do anything too controversial, and Corazzi knew when to pick his battlefields. It had been his repeated subtle pushing of Gennaro’s boundaries that had led to his hasty promotion to Cardinal in 1839; his successor in Boiano, a more conventional bishop, struggled to fill his shoes and was often booed by the people in the streets.
Cardinal Corazzi was thus a controversial choice for Pope, but one who could appeal to multiple factions in the Conclave for different reasons: the young men saw him as a man of radical ideas, the old men saw him as one of them, for his age was young for a Pope but certainly older than many of the newer Cardinals. His performance in Boiano was significant, as he had stayed on the right side of the Neapolitan monarchy while still developing a reputation for independence. The Cardinals hoped he could replicate that feat on the world stage. They would be proved right—but not, perhaps, in the way they had hoped.
Corazzi was elected by a two-thirds majority of the Conclave and white smoke issued from the Sistine Chapel—prompting much eye-rubbing from passing members of the public, who had half expected this to go on forever. A ragged cheer arose in the streets even before the new Pope’s identity was known: Corazzi rode a wave of public support just from the fact that he had broken the deadlock. That cheer rose to a crescendo when he appeared on the balcony before a crowd in St Peter’s Square, the words
Habemus Papem! still ringing in everyone’s ears. Corazzi was still well remembered from his parish work in Rome years ago. He would definitely be a Pope to remember. He took the papal name Innocent XIV and was swiftly coronated, this being the only time he ever wore the papal tiara.
One question that has arisen, of course, is who Corazzi himself was casting his vote for all this time before his name was raised. A probably apocryphal story circulates of a young priest who dared to ask this question to the Pope in 1866, towards the end of his life. Innocent laughed at the young man’s audacity, perhaps seeing something of himself in the priest, and answered: “I spoiled my ballot every time, of course. I voted for someone who was not a Cardinal, who had no rank at all in our hierarchy in fact, and thus by the conventions of these times was not fit to sit the throne.”
Nervously, the priest ventured a further question: “And who was that?”
According to the story, Innocent smiled: “Why, the son of a carpenter from Nazareth. Quite unsuitable material for a position of this rank. You may have heard of him.”
The story may be apocryphal but Innocent’s real voice can certainly be heard in it. No other Pope to bear that name, perhaps, fit it so well. Innocent changed the Church forever. All the rich possessions of the Papal household, save those with religious and historical significance, were sold off to raise money to set up new charitable orders. The crowned heads of Europe viewed this with contempt and called him the Beggar Pope or the Pawnshop Pope, but the act made him greatly popular with ordinary Roman Catholics who had long felt insulated and distant from the Church. The uncertainties of past apostolic successions were wiped away. Here was a man reaching out to his people, not merely expecting their loyalty. Innocent dressed simply, walked the streets of Rome in disguise when he could get away with it, and cared little for the pomp and circumstance of his role.
Many of those who had elected him were somewhat horrified by this. But a Pope could not be impeached. He could, however, as the Borgias had proved many times, be assassinated. Innocent, however, was fortunate enough to possess a younger brother (Giovanni Corazzi) who had been a skilled mercenary leader and had fought in the Nightmare War. The younger Corazzi had eventually repented of his many
crimes de guerre under his brother’s direction and become a man of gentleness, but he retained his old contacts and the possibly subvertible Swiss Guard were supplemented—and sometimes supplanted—by Corazzi’s men. Innocent is known to have survived at least three assassination attempts, and those were the ones publicly admitted to. On at least one occasion, an assassin got as far as raising his rifle before deciding that he could not take a life such as this. He turned himself in, became a quiet theologian under house arrest, and in 1983 was posthumously canonised.
It is uncertain precisely when Innocent conceived his most controversial policy. Perhaps it had slowly developed in his mind over a period of many years, an idle daydream from the days when even reaching the rank of bishop had seemed laughable. Or perhaps it had developed since his election. Innocent loved the city of Rome, his birthplace, but hated the grubby political intrigues that his job forced him to spend time on as a result of his authority over the city and the last remnant of the Papal States. The rest, of course, had been swallowed up by Naples over the course of the Jacobin Wars and the Popular Wars. Furthermore, he privately argued that aside from personal distaste, such matters distracted him from the real business of the head of the Church and the government of a global flock far removed from the worldly concerns of the Eternal City. Whatever its precise origins, Innocent seems to have carefully waited before the round of failed assassinations and the ensuing neutralisation of many of his opponents (mostly consisting of exile to distant dioceses overseas) before broaching the subject.
Innocent agreed the arrangements of his proposal with the ageing King Gennaro of the Three Sicilies before publicly announcing them in his papal bull
Incorruptibilis in 1849. He also consulted with representatives across the city of Rome, who were concerned about his original idea, and he agreed to modify it. Rather than the entire Papal States being signed over to Naples, Rome—and a small amount of the surrounding region, including its port of Civitavecchia—would become an independent state, the Roman Republic reborn. Aside from Hoche’s brief period of brutal occupation, this was the first time in a thousand years that Rome had come under the rule of a secular authority, and the first time in almost
two thousand years since it had lacked a monarchy. Innocent’s notion was simple. He believed that the Roman Catholic Church’s problems could ultimately all be traced back to a failure to obey Christ’s commandmant to the rich young man—“If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.”[6] The Church had failed because it had become too concerned with worldly matters. Not simply wealth, as the Protestants had long criticised the Church for, but also concerns of state. When the Pope was the monarch of a petty realm as well as the head of the Church, those two concerns had too often come into conflict. “No man can serve two masters,” Innocent argued, “We must choose whether we shall place worth in the treasure of this world, of gold and riches and a crown and temporal power, or whether we shall dismiss these and place worth in the treasure of heaven to come. And where our treasure is, there our hearts will be also.”[7]
Naturally the idea of signing away the Patrimony of St Peter was a shocking move and prompted more failed assassination attempts. Yet it was done. King Gennaro paid a substantial price for the hinterland he acquired, which Innocent funnelled into more of his charitable projects and missionary activities into the (slightly) more open Feng Dynasty of China. However, if Innocent had hoped that allowing Rome to remain a separate and independent state, not a pawn of the Neapolitans, would prevent this escalating into a war—he had been too, well, innocent. The Hapsburgs in particular were horrified by what they saw as a Bourbon coup. King Leopold of Italy rejected the deal as illegitimate, accused Innocent of having stolen the Papacy, and declared what would become known as the Patrimonial War—and what future generations of historiographers would fold seamlessly into the global conflict known as the Great American War…
[1] As it did in OTL, although the term was revived in the 20th century to describe some of the actions of the Church in Quebec—again, only with the meaning of ‘Catholic, but ignoring the Pope’.
[2] This is a slight oversimplification on the part of the author, as this is not an issue that mainly concerns his thesis, but Carolina did not strictly annex regions like Cuba until later on—they were theoretically under joint ENA imperial control, it was just that in nearly practice all the occupation troops and authorities were drawn from nearby Carolina.
[3] See Part #163.
[4] See Part #105.
[5] Also true in OTL; the bishopric of Boiano was actually vacant between 1819 and 1836 due to disagreement between the Papacy and the Neapolitan monarchy.
[6] Matthew 19:21. Also appears in the Gospels of Mark and Luke.
[7] Quoting, respectively, Matthew 6:24 and Matthew 6:21.
