The revolt against spiritual authority belongs rather to the
history of modern thought than to that of the papacy. The
Renaissance and Protestantism had their effect in
producing that Enlightenment which swept over
western Europe in the 18th century. Although
Intellectual Movement against the Papacy.
Descartes died in 1650 in the communion of the
Church, his philosophy contained seeds of revolt; and the
sensualism of Locke, popularized in Italy by Genovesi, prepared
the way for revolution. In an age when Voltaire
preached toleration and the great penologist Beccaria attacked
the death-penalty and torture, in the States of the Church
heretics were still liable to torture, the relapsed to capital
punishment; and in a backward country like Spain the single
reign of Philip V. (1700–1746) had witnessed the burning of
over a thousand heretics. If ecclesiastical authority fostered
what was commonly regarded as intolerant obscurantism, to
be enlightened meant to be prepared in spirit for that reform
which soon developed into the Revolution.
3. 1789–1814. In the decade previous to the outbreak of
the French Revolution the foreign policy of Pius VI. had been
directed chiefly against decentralization, while his
chief aim at home was to avoid bankruptcy by increasing
his income. From 1789 on the French
situation absorbed his attention. France, like the States of
The Papacy and the Revolution.
the Church, was facing financial ruin; but France did what
the government of priests could not: namely, saved the day
by the confiscation and sale of ecclesiastical property. It
was not the aim of the Constituent Assembly to pauperize or
annihilate the Church; it purposed to reorganize it on a juster
basis. These reforms, embodied in the Civil Constitution of
the Clergy, were part of the new Fundamental Law of the
Kingdom. The majority of the priests and bishops refused to
swear assent to what they held to be an invasion of the divine
right of the hierarchy, and after some months of unfortunate
indecision Pius VI. (1775–1799) formally condemned it. Thenceforward
France treated the papacy as an inimical power. The
sullen toleration of the non-juring priests changed into sanguinary
persecution. The harrying was halted in 1705; and soon after
the directory had been succeeded by the consulate, the Catholic
religion was re-established by the concordat of 1801. From
1790 on, however, the rising power of France had been directed
against Rome. In September 1791 France annexed Avignon
and the Venaissin, thus removing for ever that territorial pawn
with whose threatened loss the French monarchs had for centuries
disciplined their popes. In 1793 Hugon de Bassville (q.v.), a
diplomatic agent of France, was murdered at Rome, a deed not
avenged until the Italian victories of Bonaparte. In the peace
of Tolentino (Feb. 1797) the pope surrendered his claims to
Avignon, the Venaissin, Bologna, Ferrara and the Romagna;
he also promised to disband his worthless army, to yield up
certain treasures of art, and to pay a large indemnity. Bonaparte
believed that after these losses the temporal power would
collapse of its own weight; but so peaceful a solution was not
to be. During republican agitation at Rome the French general
Duphot was killed, a French army advanced on the city, and
carried the aged pontiff a prisoner of war to Valence in
Pius VII.,
1800–1823.
Concordat
of 1801. Dauphine, where he died on the 29th of August 1799.
His successor Pius VII., elected at Venice on the
14th of the following March, soon entered Rome and began his
reign auspiciously by appointing as secretary of state Ercole
Consalvi (q.v.), the greatest papal diplomatist of the 19th century.
The political juncture was favourable for a reconciliation with
France. In the concordat of 1801 the papacy
recognized the validity of the sales of Church
property, and still further reduced the number of
dioceses; it provided that the government should appoint and
support the archbishops and bishops, but that the pope should
confirm them; and France recognized the temporal power,
though shorn of Ferrara, Bologna and the Romagna.
The supplementary Organic Articles of April 1802, however,
centralized the administration of the Church in the hands
of the First Consul; and some of these one-sided regulations
were considered by Rome to be minute and oppressive;
nevertheless, the Napoleonic arrangements remained in force,
with but brief exceptions, till the year 1905. The indignation
of the pope and his advisers was not deep enough to prevent
the ratification in 1803 of a somewhat similar concordat for the
Italian Republic. In 1804 Pius consented to anoint Napoleon
emperor, thus casting over a conquered crown the halo of
legitimacy. The era of good feeling was, however, soon ended
by friction, which arose at a number of points. At length,
in 1809, Napoleon annexed the papal states; and Pius, who
excommunicated the invaders of his territory, was removed to
France. The captive was, however, by no means powerless;
by refusing canonical institution to the French bishops he
involved the ecclesiastical system of Napoleon in inextricable
confusion. After the return from Moscow the emperor negotiated
with his prisoner a new and more exacting concordat, but
two months later the repentant pope abrogated this treaty and
declared all the official acts of the new French bishops to be
invalid. By this time Napoleon was tottering to his fall;
shortly before the catastrophe of Elba he allowed the pope to
return to the States of the Church. Pius entered Rome amid
great rejoicing on the 24th of May 1814, a day which marks
the beginning of a new era in the history of the papacy. In
September of the same year, by the bull Sollicitudo omnium
ecclesiarum, he reconstituted the Society of Jesus.
Though the relations with France dominated the papal policy during the revolutionary period, the affairs of Germany received no small share of attention. The peace of Luneville (1801) established the French boundary at the Rhine; and the German princes who thereby lost lands west of the river were indemnified by the secularization of ecclesiasticalSecularizations of 1803. territories to the east. The scheme of readjustment, known as the Enactment of the Delegates of the Empire (Reichsdeputationshauptschluss) of 1803, secularized practically all the ecclesiastical states of Germany. Thus at one stroke there was broken the age-long direct political power of the hierarchy in the Holy Roman Empire; and the ultimate heir of the bulk of these lands was Protestant Prussia.
4. 1814–1870. The foreign policy of the papacy so long as conducted by Consalvi, or in his spirit, was supremely successful. From 1814 to 1830 Europe witnessed the restoration of legitimate monarchy. The once exiled dynasties conscientiously re-established the legitimate Church, and both conservative powers made common cause against The Papacy and the Restoration. revolutionary tendencies. Throughout Europe the governing classes regarded this “union of throne and altar” as axiomatic. For the pope, as eldest legitimate sovereign and protagonist against the Revolution, Consalvi obtained from the Congress of Vienna the restitution of the States of the Church in practically their full extent. By concluding concordats with all the important Catholic powers save Austria he made it possible to crush Jansenism, Febronianism and Gallicanism. By bulls of circumscription, issued after consultation with various Protestant states of Germany, he rearranged their Catholic dioceses and readjusted ecclesiastical incomes. By unfailing tact he gained the good will of Great Britain, where before him no cardinal had set foot for two centuries, and secured that friendly understanding between the British government and the Vatican which has since proved so valuable to Rome. After Consalvi’s retirement, Leo XII. (1823–1829) continued his policy and secured further advantageous concordats. In the sixteen months' reign of Pius VIII. (1829–1830) came the achievement of Catholic emancipation in England and the Revolution of 1830; and the pope departed from the principle of legitimacy by recognizing Louis Philippe as king of the French. The pontificate of Gregory XVI. (1831–1846) was singularly infelicitous. The controversy with Prussia about the education of children of whose parents but one was Roman Catholic led to the imprisonment of Droste-Vischering, archbishop of Cologne, and later of Dunin, archbishop of Gnesen–Posen; but the accession of the royal romanticist Frederick William IV. in 1840 brought a pacific reversal of the Prussian policy, sometimes
