The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally Bloody History of Papal Elections (20 page)

Pius promptly demonstrated his independence of Vienna by refusing the emperor’s invitation to go there. After his coronation in Venice he set off instead for Rome, where he made Ercole Consalvi a cardinal and his secretary of state. He tried to treat with Napoleon, going to Paris in 1804 to take part in Napoleon’s coronation as emperor; before going he prepared a bull regulating papal elections just in case Napoleon would not let him return. It was never published, though on 6 July 1809 he issued
Novae leges in nova Pontificis electiones si casus contigerit ut, illius obitus obveniat inter politicas perturbationes
(“New law in case the Pope dies dur- ing times of political disturbance”) just after his arrest by the French and his internment at Savona. From there he was taken to Fontainebleau where he remained a prisoner from the middle of 1812 to the beginning of 1814. He was finally released to return to Rome in March 1814, and a few months later he brought the Society of Jesus back into being. When Napoleon escaped from the island of Elba in the Mediterranean, where he had been exiled, Pius had to leave Rome once more, fleeing to Genoa. He settled back in Rome at the beginning of June 1815.

Pius VII died on 20 August 1823. Throughout his pontificate his policy toward the powers had been governed by the intelligent and skilled Consalvi. At the Congress of Vienna he had negotiated the

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restoration of the papal states, with the exception of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, which remained French. His policies were not liked by the intransigents among the cardinals because they believed the papacy had conceded too much to liberal ideas; pro- gressives outside the college thought it had not conceded enough. He had, however, a supporter in Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian chancellor and architect of the new Europe which arose, looking very much like the old, after the Napoleonic wars.

The twenty-five-day conclave took place in the Quirinal Palace, with the
zelanti
determined to put an end to Consalvi’s policies and restore what they saw as the ancient authority of the Church. Metternich tried to create a coalition of those who wanted to see Consalvi elected, but this did not find favor even with the moder- ate
zelanti
. Cardinal Albani, one of their number, proposed Francesco Saverio Castiglione, who had been the late pope’s pre- ferred candidate. Austria, it turned out, did not approve, and Albani had to say so. Castiglione, who was within a few votes of becoming pope, then threw his support behind Annibale Sermattei della Genga, who took the name Leo XII. He fulfilled the wishes of the
zelanti
as far as was possible, concerning himself with religious matters rather than political ones. He died, a dis- tinctly unpopular figure because of the narrowness of his vision, on 10 February 1829.

The turn of Francesco Saverio Castiglione came at the next conclave, 24 February to 31 March 1829. He had the backing of Metternich and the French as a moderate
zelante –
the more aggressive ones divided the conclave amongst itself and did not have a chance of being elected; their cause had been deeply damaged by the unpopularity of Leo. Castiglione was proposed by Albani and this time won the necessary two-thirds – perhaps because he was ill and seemed unlikely to last long. In fact, as Pius VIII, he served only just over eighteen months.

So on 14 December 1830 the cardinals gathered again in the Quirinal Palace. The factions had not changed, but the unrest in

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The Conclave

the papal states had considerably worsened. Indeed, the whole of Europe was on edge after the July revolution in France had brought about the fall – yet again – of the ancien régime and the establish- ment of parliamentary democracy. Metternich wanted someone who would stem the tide of liberalism. In Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari, a monk whose name in his Order was Mauro, he had just the man. As a young man he had published a 500-page volume in Rome entitled
The Triumph of the Holy See over the Assaults of the Rejected Innovators Confused by their own Arguments
. That was in 1799, in the midst of the crisis occasioned by the imprisonment of Pius VI. It seemed an overoptimistic title then; it seemed even more so in 1830, but Cappellari’s views had not changed. The Austrian party among the cardinals was still led by Cardinal Albani. Their first candidate was Bartolomeo Pacca, who was Bishop of Ostia and dean of the Sacred College, but he was unable to command a large enough majority. Pacca then proposed Vicenzo Macchi, but he was opposed by the French because
,
after a stint in Paris as papal nuncio, he was thought to have been too close to their recently deposed King Charles X. The
zelanti
, on the other hand, wanted Emmanuele de Gregorio, Bishop of Frascati, who had collected a large number of votes in the previous conclave. Albani announced that he was unacceptable to Vienna, so the
zelanti
put forward Giacomo Giustiniani, who was Bishop of Imola and had been nuncio in Spain. Spain promptly vetoed him, how- ever, because as nuncio he had, the Spanish government believed, been too pushy over the rights of the clergy. This was the point at which the electors finally turned to Cappellari. Albani conceded, and Cappellari was elected on 2 February after fifty days of debate. He took the name Gregory XVI and is – so far – the last member of a religious order to be elected pope; the Camaldolese to which he belonged were Benedictines of a strict observance.

As pope, Cappellari maintained his hostility to the modern world, a hostility which embraced railways as much as freedom of speech. His concerns were strictly religious, and he was especially

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effective in promoting the Church’s missionary activity and encouraging the reform and expansion of the religious orders. But he is remembered most for his illiberal views and the failure – for which he was personally only partially responsible – to reform the administration of the papal states.

After the two short pontificates of Leo XII and Pius VIII, Gregory, who was sixty-six on his election, reigned for over fifteen years. It might have been expected that the electors at the next conclave would choose an older man for a shorter pontificate. In fact the fifty cardinals who gathered in the Quirinal Palace (for the last time, as it turned out) opted for Giovanni Maria Mastai- Ferretti, who had been Bishop of Imola and was fifty-four years old. He was thought to be a moderate liberal because he sympa- thized with the nationalistic aspirations of the Italians and was in favor of reform in the papal states. The problems of the papal states dominated the election, especially so because no foreign cardinal managed to reach Rome in time to vote. In the conclave, which lasted only two days with four sessions of voting, Mastai- Ferretti’s chief rival was the intransigent Luigi Lambruschini, secretary of state under the late pope, who was opposed to all modernization. The conclave was under pressure from both Austria and, especially, France. Metternich, it seems, would not have been happy with quite such an intransigent a pope as Lambruschini might have been. He felt that to maintain stability the next pontiff had to be able to steer a more conciliatory course. What he did not want to see – and what he instructed his represen- tative Charles Gaetan Gaysruck, Archbishop of Milan, to say – was that he did not want Lambruschini’s predecessor as secretary of state, Tommaso Bernetti, as pope because he was too sympathetic to the French. In the end, however, Bernetti did not get a single vote (even the English Cardinal Charles Acton collected two on the second ballot). Mastai-Ferretti was the only serious candidate other than Lambruschini, who never collected more direct votes than the nine of the first ballot. On the fourth ballot Mastai-Ferretti

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had twenty-seven direct votes; thirty-four were needed. Nine more were added by the procedure of
accessus
(see above, p. 126). The two-day conclave ended on 16 June 1846, when Mastai-Ferretti took the name Pius IX.

The pontificate of Pius IX – now declared a “Blessed” – proved to be, so far at least, the longest in history. He died on 7 February 1878, after thirty-one and a half years as pope. He disappointed those who had placed their hopes in a liberal pope by showing him- self one of the most intransigent in the face of the modern world – an attitude summed up in the eighty propositions of the “Syllabus of Errors” of 1864, the last of which condemned the belief that the papacy could or ought to come to terms with modern civilization. His reign was marked by both the First Vatican Council, which declared the pope both Primate over the whole Church and infallible in faith and morals, and by the loss of the papal states. In 1870, the year the council closed, the last vestige of the papal lands, the city of Rome itself, fell to the troops of Victor Emmanuel and became capital of the new Kingdom of Italy. The pope retreated into the Vatican palace.

Though Italy, in the Law of Guarantees of May 1871, promised full freedom for the cardinals in any future conclave, Pius IX legislated for the worst. In the constitution
In hac sublimi
of that same August he decreed that the conclave’s location was to be decided by the cardinals in the curia. The election was to be valid as soon as more than half the cardinals in the world had assembled – the two-thirds majority still stood for those present. In
Consultari ne post obitum
of October 1877 he denied representatives of the great powers any say whatsoever in a conclave. Only days before his death he issued new instructions about the duties of o
ffi
cials of the conclave.

The conclave began on 18 February 1878 and ended on 20 February; it was even shorter than that which had elected Pius

IX. But before the conclave could even open it had to be decided, in accordance with Pius’s instructions, where it was to be held;

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there were those who felt that, despite the Law of Guarantees, Rome was unsafe. One of those who thought so was Giocchino Vincenzo Pecci, since 1846 bishop of Perugia and since 1877 the camerlengo, or chamberlain, of the Church, which meant that he was in charge of organizing the conclave. Only a handful of curial cardinals voted for Rome the day after Pius’s death. On 9 February, however, Cardinal Camillo di Pietro pointed out that while no other country had invited them, Italy had at least guaranteed the cardinals freedom; the vote swung the other way, though a small number voted to transfer the conclave to Spain.

The situation in the conclave was different from anything that had gone before, at least for the last 1500 years or so. There were no states of the Church to be defended, no great power concerned about the political role the popes might play in the affairs of Europe. There were certainly Church–state problems such as the clash in Germany about ecclesiastical authority over marriage and education (the
Kulturkampf
), or in Britain the relations of the Westminster government to the Catholic population of Ireland. These questions required the election of a moderate pope, not one of the
zelanti
, but the powers did not attempt to interfere. Some may have felt that their views would be more adequately expressed in the conclave by the cardinals. It had been Pius IX’s deliberate policy to increase the number of non-Italians among the college of cardinals, a sign of Rome’s tendency to centralize authority. There were sixty-four cardinals, of whom twenty-five were non-Italians. Almost all of them, thanks to the railways, could get to Rome on time. Only two, Paul Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin, and John McCloskey, Archbishop of New York, failed to arrive in time to vote. One other cardinal was absent through ill health.

Pecci was a relative unknown, though he had impressed the cardinals by his e
ffi
ciency in organizing the conclave. He was thought to be a moderate, politically and theologically, and he was advanced from the very beginning by Cardinal Bartolini. Votes were scattered among the other possible candidates, but Pecci

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received nineteen on the first ballot, and the two-thirds majority on the third ballot. He took the name Leo XIII.

He was a remarkable success. When the body of his predecessor was moved at the end of July 1881 from St. Peter’s to Saint Lawrence outside the Walls, a mob attacked the procession and tried to throw Pius’s body into the Tiber in a manner reminiscent of events of a millennium earlier. Leo’s pontificate changed all that. Though he was personally conservative, and more so toward the end of his life, he managed to bring the papacy out of the isolation into which Pius IX had committed it. His international policies were not always successful, particularly the efforts of his secretary of state Cardinal Rampolla to build bridges with the anticlerical regime in France, but the great powers began once again to take the papacy seriously. Not everyone, however, was happy with Rampolla’s efforts. No sooner had Leo died, on 7 July 1903, than the foreign minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire tele- grammed his ambassador to the Holy See telling him that the Emperor Franz Joseph would use his veto against the election of Rampolla. The objection was threefold: the cardinal secretary of state had been too sympathetic to France, too sympathetic to the Slavs, and too sympathetic to the Christian Socialists in the Empire. The French, however, were not entirely hostile to the elec- tion of Rampolla, and Spain, where he had served as nuncio, was positively in his favor.

The conclave opened on 31 July in the Vatican. This time all but two of the sixty-four cardinals arrived in time; one was ill, the other in Australia. The first votes set the trend. Rampolla was way in the lead with twenty-four votes; next came the Carmelite friar Girolamo Maria Gotti, who was known as an able administrator and somewhat in the line of the late pope, doctrinally conservative but liberal in the Church’s relation to the world. Five votes went to the saintly Patriarch of Venice, Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto, whom Leo XIII had often spoken of as his successor. Rampolla’s votes remained constant, Gotti’s declined, and Sarto’s rose as the voting