Giancarlo Rossi, The 1905 Conclave and the Battle for the Church (New York: Catholic Workers’ Press, 1965)
… The death of Pope Gregory XVII in Brussels in October 1904 marked the end of the Church’s most tumultuous period since the Counter-Reformation. Under Gregory, the Church had, unthinkably, gone to war, and even more unthinkably, it had lost. The world was full of Papal Legion veterans and disillusioned Catholic Liberals intent on bringing the war over the faith to their own countries, and the battle between them had led to Gregory earning the dubious distinction of being the first Pope ever expelled from two countries.
Under the circumstances, the next Conclave could hardly be expected to be an ordinary one. Even the place where it would be held was a matter of much debate. Rome, of course, was out of the question; the Italian government of the time was less radically anti-clerical than the one that had fallen over the Vatican treasures scandal, but it was still no friend of the Church, and any meeting there would be on terms set by the civil authorities. Paris, under socialist rule, and Madrid, from which Gregory had been politely but firmly ejected after becoming a political flashpoint, were nearly as unacceptable. Brussels, favored by the hard-line faction among the cardinals, was rejected for fear of political influence, and Vienna because nobody wanted to test whether the Habsburg emperor still had a veto over papal candidates.
Several smaller European cities had their supporters – Prague, Warsaw, Munich and Lisbon were all considered – but due to political instability or factional associations, none could secure majority support. For a time, it seemed that the Conclave might founder before it had even begun, and the anti-clerical press gleefully suggested that the Palais des Papes in Avignon be reopened for business. In the circumstances, Empress Isabel’s invitation to hold the Conclave in Rio de Janeiro proved a godsend. Nobody had seriously considered a New World city – Gregory had appointed several non-European cardinals, the first in centuries, but they were still a small minority – but once suggested, it was an obvious choice. Isabel was both impeccably Catholic and reticent about interfering in Church affairs, and Rio was far from the squabbles of postwar European politics.
The cardinals who assembled in the Rio de Janeiro cathedral in March 1905 were deeply divided about the future of the Church. After thirty-two years of Pius IX and twenty-six years of Gregory XVII, none could really be called liberal; the Catholic Liberals were a movement of the grass roots and the lower rungs of the hierarchy, not the College of Cardinals. But there were sharp distinctions between those who wanted to continue with Gregory’s militant ultramontanism and those who favored a pastoral papacy to heal the Church’s wounds. There were also fault lines between the more traditional conservatives, with their focus on high-level power politics, and the cardinals associated with the Papal Legion, who called for a doctrinal brotherhood that transcended national and class boundaries. The cardinals were also aware that the French Emperor and the Spanish king still claimed the right of civil veto, and while they had repudiated the veto in principle, few wanted to risk the unnecessary complications that one would cause.
Inevitably, the Conclave became deadlocked between several candidates, each of whom claimed the support of a vocal minority. After a month of balloting, there was little movement; none of the candidates would yield, and none were able to sway the others’ supporters. The debate began to shift toward possible compromise candidates, outsiders who might bridge the gap between the factions. It may have been the spirit of the first New World Conclave at work, but the two candidates that emerged from the back-room meetings and straw ballots were both from the Western Hemisphere: Atenógenes Silva y Álvarez Tostado, Archbishop of Michoacán, and Joaquín Arcadio Pagaza y Ordóñez, Archbishop of Monterrey.
Both archbishops had the desired combination of doctrinal conservatism and political moderation, but beyond that, they could hardly be more different. Pagaza was an academic and a man of letters, the author of several books of poetry and scholarly works on theology, and he would be a philosopher-pope. Silva, who had come up as an administrator of charities and hospitals, was known in his central Mexican diocese as “the Father of the Poor.”
Ultimately, on the ninety-ninth ballot, the desire for a pastoral papacy won out, and Silva was elected. The smoke rose over Rio on April 29, 1905, and the world learned that it had a new Pope, Celestine VI. There had been no Popes named Celestine since the thirteenth century, and the last one hadn’t ended well, but he had been a humble Pope, and this was evidently what Silva wanted to emulate.
Celestine was in fact a pastoral Pope, one who steered clear of combative political stances in favor of ministry, charity and institutional development. Although careful about maintaining the purity of doctrine, he did not oppose secular democracy as the nineteenth-century Popes had, and under him, the Church would begin coming to terms with modernity. The Conclave had won breathing space to heal the rifts that divided the faithful.
But Celestine would also create new divisions. Although he withdrew from secular political struggles, he had no such compunction about
Church politics, and in internal matters, he was a Legionnaire’s Pope who abhorred distinctions of race, nationality and social class. He was the voice of those who were deeply ambivalent about the Legion’s conduct during the war but who valued its camaraderie and commitment to the equality of believers. He was particularly outraged when Catholics were oppressed by other Catholics, and condemned forced labor in the colonies and exploitation of the European and American poor. He also continued Gregory’s practice of appointing cardinals from outside the traditional circles of Church power, drawing from both the diocesan priesthood of Europe and the non-European world. During Celestine’s reign, cardinals would come from as far afield as Angola, Vietnam and the Philippines.
It was the last of these that would again, unintentionally, embroil the Church in secular politics. Since the late 1870s, the Philippines had been a dominion of the Spanish crown, with broad internal autonomy. However, the bureaucracy and the education system were still dominated by a self-perpetuating cadre of Spanish-born Dominican and Augustinian priests who often undermined the authority of the elected government. The nationalists, who had initially been mollified by dominion status, were increasingly impatient with the government’s inability to dislodge this clique, and the returning Legionnaires, who had known freedom from caste discrimination during the war and some of whom had held positions of command, added fuel to the fire.
But that was as nothing to the petrol that Celestine poured on the flames in 1908, when he elevated one of the few Filipino bishops to archbishop of Manila and appointed him a cardinal. The new archbishop, Teófilo Navarro, was a man of strong nationalist sympathies, and joined the government in bringing the entrenched bureaucracy to heel. The friars, much closer to the centers of power in Madrid than either the cardinal or the dominion prime minister, persuaded the Spanish cabinet that it was in fact the Filipino government and priests that were attempting to undermine Spanish rule. A fact-finding mission in 1909 yielded inconclusive results, but the Cortes, seeing the integrity of the empire at stake, declared a state of insurrection late that year and removed the dominion government. The prime minister refused to step down, and Navarro supported him, calling on the faithful to protect the country’s freedom. In an overheated emotional environment, matters quickly spiraled out of control, and the result, in February 1910, was a war that neither side wanted…
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Zélia Alalouf, Bridge to the Twentieth Century: The Brazil of Isabel I (São Paulo: Nova Fronteira, 2010)
… On paper, Brazil in 1900 was the master of its domain. Its losses in the war hadn’t been heavy, immigration to the industrial cities had continued even during wartime, and the postwar economic turnaround had come quickly. Grão Pará was part of Empress Isabel’s domain, in personal and customs union with Brazil, and Brazilian companies joined those of Europe and America in harvesting the wealth of the Amazon. The industrial cities of the southeast were as polyglot as any in the New World, Iberians, Germans and Eastern Europeans rubbing shoulders with Africans, Arabs and the newest arrivals from Vietnam.
To the south, the breakup of Argentina had removed a potential rival, the
gaucho republics were friendly, and Paraguay had descended into low-grade civil war between the ruling family’s allies and liberal reformers. To the west, the Andean republics were a perennial source of immigrants for Brazilian plantations and factories. Venezuela was unhappy but chastened, and was preoccupied with its own civil strife. Brazil was primed to break away from French economic dominance and become a more equal ally, and the choice of Rio to host the Papal Conclave was a symbol of Brazil’s rise in the world.
For Isabel, however, the wartime gains would prove a poisoned chalice. Like the Tall dynasty in the Toucouleur Empire – although she would have bridled at the comparison – she was trying to preserve an idealized commonwealth of pious yeomen in the face of industrial modernity. Even before the war, discontent had been growing in the industrial cities: the immigrants who lived there may have been mostly Catholic, but most had little use for Isabel’s ultramontane utopianism or for the autocracy, censorship and cultural repression by which it was maintained. And still more was there discontent among those who were not Catholic, including those who followed Islam and the outlawed
candomble faiths.
Nor did the challenges come only from the immigrants. Although the laws of Grão Pará and Brazil were strictly separate, people now moved freely between them, and it was not lost on many Brazilians that Grão Pará had a liberal constitution, universal suffrage and land reform. The Brazilians who went to work in the Amazon came home with new ideas, and the
quilombos of the Brazilian back-country took inspiration from the success of their counterparts across the border. The spirit of the Cabanagem and the Marianada were once again returning to Brazil.
In another country, or in Brazil at another time, this might have been a recipe for civil war. Certainly, when the allegations of fraud that followed the 1908 election gave rise to widespread street protests, there were many who urged Isabel to crush them with the army. But Brazil had been torn apart by civil war in the 1830s and 40s, and nearly torn apart again in the 1850s and 60s, and the empress was unwilling to go down that road again. And when she learned that parish priests had come out to join the demonstrators, she refused to order the army to shoot the clergy of her beloved Church. Instead, she acceded to the protesters’ demand for a constitutional assembly, to be chosen by universal male suffrage within six months.
The assembly that convened in early 1909, the product of the “Quiet Revolution,” was something different from any congress that had met in Brazil before: the traditional upper-class planters and provincial notables sat cheek by jowl with trade unionists, Afro-Brazilian peasant leaders and Koreans from the back country. And the July Constitution would mark the end of the empress’ autocracy: henceforward, Brazil would have responsible government subject to imperial reserve powers as well as strong guarantees of civil liberties. The new Brazil would still be a conservative country, and the Church would play a central role in guiding social reforms, but the last twelve years of Isabel’s reign would be different from the first forty…
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Alison Gordon, The Reinvention of the Caribbean (Univ. of Kingston Press, 1998)
… The British Caribbean in 1900 was much the same, politically and socially, as it had been in 1870: a tiny upper class, a large underclass of servants and agricultural workers, and little in between. In theory, the law made no distinctions based on race; however, economic oligopolies and strict property qualifications for the franchise had kept the racial stratification of the nineteenth century intact. In the Jamaican election of 1901, only 25,000 people from a total population of 820,000 had the vote, and malapportionment in favor of rural areas meant that some constituencies had less than 100 voters. These came almost entirely from the white planter class, the Kingston merchants and the educated mixed-race population, with the black majority represented hardly at all.
The Jamaican elites maintained a loose alliance to protect their privileges, but were in an uneasy relationship with each other as well as the underclass. The merchants, many of whom were immigrants, had different priorities from the planters and clashed with them on tariffs and public spending, while the theoretical equality of the mixed-race elite didn’t translate to equality in the social hierarchy. No matter how rich a creole was, he could not expect to become a member of the sporting clubs where much of the colony’s business was done, and their own social clubs were shut out of much of the deal-making. It is little wonder that Alexander Gordon gave up a safe seat in the Jamaican legislature to stand for Parliament in Stepney; as he said at the time, the risk of standing as a foreign mixed-race candidate in a London constituency was worth the possibility of being in a position to actually do something.
In the event, he could do little. Jamaica had responsible government and a highly effective parliamentary lobby, and was thus largely impervious to the social changes occurring in Britain. The smaller islands were little better; they had no responsible government but were still fiefdoms of their governors, and their day-to-day government was conducted by executive and legislative councils appointed from the upper classes that shared the governor’s social circles. If anything, they were even more socially and racially stratified than Jamaica was.
But the 1900s were also a time when radical ideas were beginning to flow into the islands. In the wake of the armistice, merchants from Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Niger Valley coast set up shop in Kingston and Bridgetown to join the sugar and coffee trade. The Afro-Atlanticism of Blyden gained some purchase among black intellectuals and the more discontented of the mixed-race elite; Abacarism, although tied to a strange faith, also influenced Jamaican nationalists with its notions of democratic self-rule and consent as a fundamental pillar of government.
The Anglo-Caribbean upper class reacted to these developments much as might be expected. In 1904, the Jamaican legislature barred African merchants from Kingston - a measure that the Sierra Leone merchants’ association appealed to the House of Lords, winning a reversal on the ground that British subjects could not be prevented from trading anywhere in the British Empire. Failing that, both Jamaica and Barbados banned nationalist clubs as seditious, but the number of arrests and trials between 1905 and 1910 shows that they were anything but successful in eliminating anti-colonial sentiment. And in 1908, an independent candidate affiliated with the nationalist All Jamaicans’ Party was elected in a Kingston constituency, signaling a dangerous fissure between the white and mixed-race ends of the elite coalition. The other legislators refused to seat him, but he was re-elected in 1910 with a larger majority, and when he was again denied his seat, he called for a general strike…
… Cuba and Puerto Rico, self-governing Spanish dominions since 1876, were content enough during the postwar decade. Liberal governments and incremental land reform had reduced disaffection in the countryside, and since dominion status had conferred universal Spanish citizenship, many islanders formed connections to the mother country through work or study. These trends were stronger in Cuba than in yeoman Puerto Rico; Madrid and Barcelona both had Cuban communities by the mid-1900s, with Afro-Cubans heavily represented in the Barcelona left and in the avant-garde music scene. Havana, in turn, grew into a multiracial cultural center reminiscent of contemporary Paris, giving form to the “rumba age” of the early twentieth century.
By this time, Cuba had also become part of the emerging Afro-Atlantic network. Like other colonial powers, Spain had settled freedmen in Africa, with more than a thousand emancipated slaves being given passage to Fernando Po between the 1840s and 1860s. There, they intermarried with the indigenous population and the
fernandino creoles, becoming a hybrid people that preserved Cuban heritage much as the Agudas and the Malê preserved Brazilian cultural elements. By the time of the Great War, Santa Isabel on Fernando Po was part of the Coaster trading system, and afterward, it became the Coasters’ connection to the Spanish Caribbean.
The Fernandinos opened the doors of Havana and San Juan not only for themselves but for the other Coaster peoples; traders, students and intellectuals from Sierra Leone, Liberia, francophone West Africa and even South Carolina were present in both cities. The result was a fusion of musical, artistic and literary styles that would make Havana a place of pilgrimage from throughout the Americas…
… The forgiveness of the French debt had brought much-needed economic stability to Haiti, and the administrations of Lysius Salomon and Oswald Durand – the first two Haitian presidents to actually finish their terms – had brought a measure of political stability. The conflict between the mulatto economic elite and the black peasantry was far from over, but the country’s developing political institutions were giving it a place to play out short of the knife. The governments of the 1880s and 90s also focused on rural development, and for the first time in Haiti’s history, the peasants actually saw some benefit from the state in the form of roads, schools and water infrastructure. As well, Haiti drew increasing investment from South Carolina, francophone Africa, and even the Malê, who considered the Haitian revolution the mother of their own.
But progress in Haiti was often a matter of three steps forward and two back. Despite improvements, most peasants still lived in extreme poverty, and corruption remained widespread. Under strong presidents like Salomon and Durand, the country stayed within bounds; under weak ones, when oppressive local officials were not controlled and administrative and judicial avenues of appeal broke down, the discontent could touch off rebellion. The country briefly reverted to the old ways during the succession of short-lived, weak administrations in the mid-1890s, with rival candidates encouraging rebellion in the countryside in order to overthrow the incumbents. The return of Salomon’s predecessor Boisrond-Canal in 1894, combined with the fragile prosperity that Haiti achieved as a neutral country during the war, righted the ship temporarily, but in the mid-1900s, the country again fell into crisis.
The root of the problem was the economic slump Haiti experienced after the war. The return of Papal Legion veterans to Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and the latter country’s own economic downturn, meant that there was less of the seasonal work that many Haitian peasants relied on to sustain themselves, and the return to peacetime trading patterns meant that Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien no longer profited from being neutral ports. Many Haitians, urged on by out-of-power politicians, came to believe that foreigners had stolen their prosperity, and in 1903 and 1904, there were riots in which three Senegalese teachers were killed. France demanded compensation, which the Haitian government could ill afford, and the demand only fueled anti-foreigner sentiment.
Worse was to come in 1905, when Haitian seasonal workers in the Dominican Republic rioted after their pay was stolen. Several Dominicans died in the clashes, at which point the Dominican army intervened, crushing the riots and taking most of the workers prisoner. This might have been the end of the matter, except that Dominican mobs ranged through the countryside massacring Haitians wherever they could be found. Accurate figures have never been determined, but thousands, and possibly more than ten thousand, were killed.
The Haitian government, already primed to protect the nation’s sovereignty against foreign encroachment, reacted with fury, and after the Dominican Republic refused to make reparations, it declared war. In October 1905, the Haitian army invaded Dominican territory along a broad front. It made initial progress, with the outnumbered Dominicans falling back in the north and south, but the southern offensive stalled in the mountains and the army suffered as Dominican partisans attacked its tenuous supply lines. In 1906, the Dominicans took the offensive, but their attack also bogged down, and by midyear, the battle had settled into trench warfare with Haiti occupying about a quarter of Dominican soil.
The fighting would drag on for another year and a half, with casualties mounting on both sides, before the governments of both countries fell and a consortium of mediators from South Carolina, Africa and Europe persuaded them to refer their dispute to the International Court of Arbitration. The war would end, not with a bang but with a ruling; in April 1909, the court ordered Haiti to vacate Dominican territory and directed the Dominican Republic to pay compensation for the massacre. By that time a fragile peace had returned to Hispaniola, and the reparations helped Haiti to recover under the technocratic administration of Laurent Mézard, but the scars of the war would be a long time healing…
… On the rim of the Caribbean, Mexico believed that it was finally coming into its own. The election of a Mexican Pope was celebrated throughout the country as a sign of Mexico’s new place in the world, and wartime industrial development had brought new wealth and amenities to the cities. Mexico City in particular became a showplace, with lush parks and gardens, theaters and opera houses, and districts of mansions. But there was a stark contrast between the opulence of the cities and the desperate poverty of the countryside, and while the last quarter of the nineteenth century had been a time of internal peace and development, the government was corrupt and dictatorial and the middle class increasingly unsatisfied.
The governments of the 1900s were unconcerned about the growing discontent; indeed, it seemed that the insulated upper class was hardly aware that any discontent existed. Their preoccupations were the development of the capital city, ensuring the growth of the industrial belt in Nuevo León, Tamaulipas and Veracruz states, and increasing Mexican presence on the world stage. They did achieve these things to varying degrees, and also managed to put the Yucatan house in order after half a century of conflict; a 1903 British-brokered deal resulted in the breakaway Maya republic of Chan Santa Cruz being admitted as an autonomous Mexican state, with its acts ratified by the Mexican government and its president confirmed in office as governor.
But as peace was made in the south, unrest grew further north. Monterrey, the center of Mexico’s wartime industrial growth, became known as the “Mexican Barcelona,” with four-cornered clashes between industrialists, liberals, leftist trade unions and Catholic unions. The last of these included many Legion veterans and claiming inspiration from Pope Celestine although not sanctioned by him. In Jalisco, Guanajuato and Queretaro, land reform protests spiraled into peasant revolts, which by 1908 had come dangerously close to the capital. Angered by what it saw as the government’s weak response to the rebellions, the military took power in 1909, sparking another conflict that would ultimately implicate the Church and the international left…
and the fact that just like in OTL, Anti-Haitianismo will still exist, along with its hatred of dark skin). 
