Rome Part 13

Meanwhile the opposing factions have been face to face for thirty-four years. How have they behaved, and how have they altered since then?

The official Vatican behaviour never varied until Pius X. ascended the Chair of Peter. Pius IX. had set the example of violent public utterances, and had permitted the subsidised clerical newspapers to attack Victor Emmanuel both in his private and public character. On the other hand he would never tolerate in his presence a word against the King, and his own letters to him were not only friendly but affectionate. This little comedy scandalised the Italian's sense of decorum, and as a policy has succeeded in alienating Italian sympathy.

The general tendency on the secular side has been conciliatory; the Italians, indeed, began with a farce on the morrow of their entry into Rome, a farce duly recorded in the name of the street which runs past the church of the _Gesu_. The _plebiscite_ registered the will of the "whites" but not the will of the "blacks," none of whom voted; and the forty-six votes against the new _regime_ which appeared in the total, had been cast by the "whites" themselves. Nevertheless the Catholics in Rome who do not make a _politica_ of their religion, willingly allow that they enjoy a large measure of liberty. Not long since at the request of the visiting chaplain the authorities arranged for a man to be brought back to the prison where his wife was still undergoing sentence, in order that their civil marriage might be completed with the religious rite. For some years past the present Cardinal Vicar of Rome has administered the Easter Communion to the inmates of the _Regina Coeli_ prison to the joy of the prison officials and the reciprocal consolation of the cardinal and the black sheep whom he that day bears home on his shoulder rejoicing. It is well known that the officers encourage the men to attend to their religious duties at Easter, and remind them of these as the seasons come round. Every soldier may then have leave of absence for confession and communion, and a rule is made requiring all men out on leave in this way to bring back with them the Communion ticket which is given at the rails to each Easter communicant. Many of the soldiers choose to go to S. Peter's, and the carabineers in their sober black uniforms may always be seen there during Holy Week.

It will readily be understood that both incongruities and accommodations are rife in such a condition of affairs as the existence of a State Church by the side of a hostile papacy. The King wants a regimental banner blest, or the Pope wants to have the roads kept while fifty thousand pilgrims flock to S. Peter's. During the latter years of Leo XIII.'s pontificate the Italian police were invited into the basilica, and headed a procession with all the decorum of its traditional vergers, the _Sampietrini_. These reciprocal interests even require telephonic communication between the Quirinal and the Vatican. In theory, the House of Savoy, the members of the Government and every person in its pay down to the _custodi_ of the ruins and museums of Rome with their families are excommunicated.

In practice the Pope provides a chaplain for the Royal palace, the parish priest has of late years entered the Quirinal and penetrated to the royal bedrooms for the customary blessing of houses on Easter eve, Italian officials and their families receive absolution like any one else, and the irony of history required that the "excommunicated"

Queen Margaret of Savoy was the only princely personage to fulfil the conditions of the last Jubilee year in Rome.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FROM THE TERRACE OF THE HOUSE OF DOMITIAN

Before us is the church built on the site of the Temple of Venus and Rome and dedicated to S. Francesca Romana, the greatest of Roman saints. To the left the huge ruins of the basilica of the first Christian emperor, while to the right is the Arch of t.i.tus, commemorating the fall of Jerusalem, and the road with its _via crucis_ which leads to the church of S. Bonaventura, the biographer of S. Francis, built against the Stadium of Domitian.

The view is taken from the terrace outside that domestic basilica of the Flavian House which still retains more of the form of a Christian basilica than any other pagan building. Here are brought together the old and the new, Christian and pagan, papal and imperial--the shock of the two world empires. See interleaf, pages 44, 50.]

And the "blacks and the whites"? In the "eighties" the distinction between those who clung to the old _regime_ and those who adopted the new was still sufficiently marked, but in the last decade of the century the "blacks" became "gray" or as they themselves liked to express it _caffe-latte_, neither black nor white. The acceptance of invitations to the Quirinal has, up to now, entailed the forfeiture of those official invitations to the Vatican which are extended to the Roman aristocracy for every great papal function. Many of its older members still absent themselves from all official "white" receptions, and a daughter is still presented not at the Court but to the Pope, with her _fiance_, on her engagement. But in private society the great "black" ladies now know and meet the "white" society with which many of the Roman families are related by marriage; and it is not infrequently the case that one branch of an old Roman house clings to the Pope while another attaches itself to the King. But everywhere, even where the parents absent themselves from official "white"

society, their children now go to the Quirinal. Thus we are very far from the time when no member of the Roman aristocracy met the King or Queen, when the Court was entirely composed of new men, or the Piedmontese whom the King brought with him. The day has gone by when even in a ball-room the "blacks" took care to label themselves by wearing a yellow (papal) rose, and only priests and the English converts still make a point of not saluting the sovereign. One Roman prince, however, has kept up a picturesque protest--and the great door of Prince Lancellotti's palace has never been opened since the day the King of Italy entered the Pope's capital. Even when, quite recently, invitations to a ball were issued from the great silent house, all the guests crowded through the postern door.

When one asks any of the old school now whether the old Government did well or ill, the best, and the wisest, answer that they can give us is "They were _altri tempi_, other times." And this is the reason why it is impossible that the two parties should continue to exist after the present generation. The cleavage has really been due to the fact that the Vatican and Quirinal parties live in two different epochs; they live in different worlds and speak a different language. The old fas.h.i.+oned "blacks" can only think in a circle of ideas and sentiments, political and moral, to which they were born but which has no present point of contact with reality, with the living world around them, with "things as they are." The old has its beauty and the new has its uglinesses, as always; but also they frequently change these positions. Fifteen years ago one of the most distinguished Italian diocesans wrote a pamphlet ent.i.tled "_Roma e l'Italia, e la realta delle cose, pensieri di un prelato italiano_"--"Rome, Italy, and things as they are; thoughts of an Italian Prelate." As soon as his name was discovered, he was told to withdraw the pamphlet, publicly from his own pulpit. This was not encouraging to others who thought as he in a country where secular public opinion still counts for so little, the individual "courage of your opinions" counts for still less, and where a public opinion among ecclesiastics is simply non-existent. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, a Cardinal Secretary of State had the courage of his opinions as the following pa.s.sages from his Memoirs will prove. He is known for his protection of the Jesuits against the Jansenists during his sojourn in Paris as papal Envoy Extraordinary, and by the Pacca law, which is called after him, prohibiting private owners from disposing of great works of art out of Italy. "Providence," he writes, "has taken away the temporal power from the Holy See and prepared those changes in States and Governments which shall once more render it possible for the Pope, although a subject, to rule over and govern the whole body of the faithful." "The popes, relieved from the burden of the temporal power which obliged them to devote a great part of their time to secular affairs, may now turn all their attention and all their care to the spiritual government of the Church; and when the Roman Church lacks the pomp and magnificence which temporal sovereignty has given her, then there will be numbered among her clergy only those who _bonum opus desiderant_."

That pathetic combatant for papal rights in the twelfth century Gelasius II., exclaimed to his cardinals "We must leave Rome, where it is impossible to stay." That plaintive cry need, we trust, have no further echo: the ages of which Gregorovius writes that popes "were obliged to leave Rome to realise in foreign countries that they were still actually reverenced as representatives of Christ" closed, we hope, with the entry of the Italians into Rome and the consequent creation--in lieu of the elusive "_Roma intangibile_"--of what Bismarck happily called an "intangible Vatican."

THE END