James Cardinal Gibbons of the Archdiocese of Baltimore was the second American cardinal and an enormously important figure both within the history of the Church in America and the history of America in general. His championing of the rights of labor in the nineteenth century helped direct America on a more peaceful path in the relationship between labor and capital than existed in many other nations. Many posts could be written about this man and I intend to write them! Today we will focus on the fact that he was the first American cardinal to participate in a papal conclave.
When Pope Leo XIII died in 1903 Cardinal Gibbons happened to be in Rome. Without that fortuitous circumstance he would most likely have not been able to participate in the subsequent Conclave. In 1914 with the death of Pope Pius X, Cardinal Gibbons boarded a rapid steamer to cross the Atlantic but arrived too late to participate in the Conclave. Thus the Conclave of 1903 was the only one Cardinal Gibbons was fated to participate in, but it certainly was a dramatic one.
The first Conclave to occur within the glare of modern media, the proceedings leaked like a sieve to eager waiting journalists, so much so that after this Conclave Pope Pius decreed that participants were to take an oath of silence as to the proceedings of all future conclaves.
The front runner was Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, Leo XIII’s Secretary of State. He would almost certainly have been chosen Pope by the Conclave but for the exercise of the Austrian veto by a Polish Cardinal at the behest of Austrian Emperor Franz Josef. (Three Catholic powers had traditionally claimed a right of vetoes in conclaves: the King of France, the King of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor. Contemporary Catholics who sigh for Catholic confessional states are often bone ignorant as to how much traditional Catholic confessional states interfered in the operation of the Church.) Why the veto was used remains a mystery. The Cardinals met the use of the veto with outrage, but its use stopped Rampolla as a viable candidate. After the election of Pope Pius, he banned the use of vetoes in any future conclaves.
After five days and seven ballots, Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto, a man of humble birth who had risen to be Patriarch of Venice, was chosen Pope, and decided to reign as Pius. Although the Holy Spirit chose a most convoluted path in the Conclave of 1903, the choice of Pope Pius X was a great one. He would be a masterful Pope, immensely popular with the average Catholic. Fond of children he had a wry sense of humor. When Roman aristocrats complained that he had not made his sisters Papal countesses he responded that he had made them the sisters of a pope and he didn’t see how he could improve on that! His piety, his wisdom and his leadership assured that he would become the first pope canonized since the seventeenth century, almost by popular acclaim, modernists, of course, excepted. Cardinal Gibbons and the other participants in the Conclave could be proud of their work.
Donald R. McClarey
Paul Zummo
My view of St.Pius is not quite as wholly positive. He was a great reformer and his impact on the Church as such was nearly wholly positive, but he had the manners of a bull in a china shop and set back several of his predecessor’s achievements. The “Anti-Modernist Oath” may have been a legitimate reaction to a real and serious problem, but it was unpopular even among the most loyal of Catholics – read what the great Church historian Fr.Adrian Fortescue had to say about it – because of its blunt use of authority without any attempt to argue or even cajole. It actually ended up putting the real modernists in a better light than they might have managed by themselves.
Equally damaging was the collapse of the relationship between France and the Papacy, which Pope Leo had spent all his long pontificate repairing. This was probably what the Austrians (who had the best secret service in Europe and were well dug into French institutions, regarding France as an inevitable enemy) intended. They knew their man: Sarto had been born under Austrian rule, and had never really been reconciled with Italy. Within two years of his election the French Government was fighting to dismantle the Church. Bad though this was, it led to something worse: the ascendency of Action Francaise, the first mass Fascist movement, among French Catholics. Altogether, by the time Pius died, the Austrian secret services had good reason to congratulate themselves on their job.
Action Francaise outlasted the First World War and Clemenceau’s statesmanlike effort to keep the Catholics within the wartime alliance. By the height of misfortune, Pope Pius eventually saw the evil (the leader of AF, Maurras, was not a Catholic and only saw the Church as useful) and did draft a condemnation of the movement, but he died before he could make it public, and by the time Pius XI rediscovered and enacted it – against stiff opposition – the mischief was made and the French Church was thoroughly colonized by AF. This had effects that lasted right down to the schism of Archbishop Lefebvre, a very typical AF Catholic.
It was also a disaster that the man who followed him, Benedict XV, was a pacifist fanatic whose unmitigated and unsympathetic condemnation of “the useless slaughter” of world war one was an outrage to the feelings of all the countries who knew that there was nothing “useless” about struggling to survive German aggression (while it did not flatter the diseased German attitudes either, thus achieving 100% negative result). As a result, the Vatican was probably the only party to be excluded from the Versailles negotiations on principle.
There is something terrible and doom-laden about all this. I really do believe that the wrath of God hung over the Western world in those days of hybris at the beginning of the last century, and that He had already decided to visit upon us the full results of what was already then the visible arrogance of men trying to make a just society without God. The fact that two Popes in a row were elected who were, whatever their other virtues, politically ineffective and indeed counterproductive, suggests to me that the Holy Spirit had turned from favour to chastisement. But this is a personal view.
As in so many things Fabio we will have to agree to disagree in our overall assessment of Pope Pius X and Pope Benedict XV. In regard to France I think the bad blood was almost all caused by the French State, that went so far as to demand that officers inform on other officers going to Mass. I do like the quip of Petain at that time. Although he had ceased going to Mass and was not a believer he responded when asked to inform on the officers under his command who did, that it was impossible for him to say, since he always occupied a pew in the very front of the Church and therefore did not see who else was in attendance. Considering that level of persecution I think the patriotism shown by the clergy during World War I in France was truly remarkable.
As to the anti-Modernist campaign I concede it went too far, although some of the Modernists attacked, Loisy comes to mind, were truly pernicious. Modernism unchecked in our time I believe has done endless damage to the Church. Perfectly orthodox scholars did suffer in the campaign against Modernism and that is to be regretted, although not nearly as much as I lament the current state of most “Catholic” colleges and universities today.
I have no love for Prussian militarism and I would have been an ardent foe of it if I had been alive in America during the Great War. However, I think there was much truth in Pope Benedict’s lament that the Great War was the suicide of Europe. More on Pope Benedict tomorrow.
Pope Pius’ utter ignorance of diplomacy enabled all the worst individuals in French politics. It is my view that Combes could never have done what he did, had Cardinal Rampolla been elected; which is exactly what Vienna wanted. The same goes for Loisy. I agree that he is a dreadful individual, but the textbooks still treat him with kid gloves just because Pope Pius had not. If a man like Fortescue, who had stood up and been counted in the defence of the Papacy, was not happy about the dictatorial air of Pius’ Vatican, one has to say that there might have been something to consider.
As for Benedict XV, he ended up distrusted and hated by all sides. If the careful steering of the boat of St. Peter is one of the duties of his successor, nobody can see he was a success at it. And I know a story or two about him that make the fanaticism in his character – in things that have nothing to do with politics – both clear and painful.
Well Fabio, the peace conditions that ultimately ended the War were quite similar to what were first proposed by Pope Benedict. I can’t see how he could have realistically adopted any policy other than neutrality during the War with Catholics fighting on both sides. I think you also need to give him credit for his humanitarian activities during the War that saved several hundred thousand lives.
I think World War I would have come about whether Pius X was elected or not, and the difficulties between the French Church and the Vatican were irrelevant to the calculations that led to the catastrophe of July 1914. In regard to the French Church and the Vatican I think you need two sides acting in good faith to make diplomacy a success and I think too many factions among extreme Republicans in the Third Republic were just too anti-Catholic to act in good faith.