Of all the weapons then used, the most effective throughout Europe was the solemn protest drawn by Sarpi and issued by the Doge. It was addressed nominally to the Venetian ecclesiastics, but really to Christendom, and both as to matter and manner it was Father Paul at his best. It was weighty, lucid, pungent, and deeply in earnest,—in every part asserting fidelity to the Church and loyalty to the papacy, but setting completely at naught the main claim of Pope Paul: the Doge solemnly declaring himself "a prince who, in temporal matters, recognizes no superior save the Divine Majesty."
The victory of the friar soon began to be recognized far and near. Men called him by the name afterward so generally given him,—the "terribile frate." The Vatican seemed paralyzed. None of its measures availed, and it was hurt, rather than helped, by its efforts to pester and annoy Venice at various capitals. At Rome, it burned Father Paul's books and declared him excommunicated; it even sought to punish his printer by putting into the Index not only all works that he had ever printed, but all that he might ever print. At Vienna, the papal Nuncio thought to score a point by declaring that he would not attend a certain religious function in case the Venetian Ambassador should appear; whereupon the Venetian announced that he had taken physic and regretted that he could not be present,—whereat all Europe laughed.
Judicious friends in various European cabinets now urged both parties to recede or to compromise. France and Spain both proffered their good offices. The offer of France was finally accepted, and the French Ambassador was kept running between the Ducal Palace and the Vatican until people began laughing at him also. The emissaries of His Holiness begged hard that, at least, appearances might be saved; that the Republic would undo some of its measures before the interdict was removed, or at least would seem to do so, and especially that it would withdraw its refusals before the Pope withdrew his penalties. All in vain. The Venetians insisted that they had committed no crime and had nothing to retract. The Vatican then urged that the Senate should consent to receive absolution for its resistance to the Pope's authority. This the Senate steadily refused; it insisted, "Let His Holiness put things as before, and we will put things as before; as to his absolution, we do not need it or want it; to receive it would be to acknowledge that we have been in the wrong." Even the last poor sop of all was refused: the Senate would have no great "function" to celebrate the termination of the interdict; they would not even go to the mass which Cardinal Joyeuse celebrated on that occasion. The only appearance of concession which the Republic made was to give up the two ecclesiastics to the French Ambassador as a matter of courtesy to the French king; and when this was done, the Ambassador delivered them to the Pope; but Venice especially reserved all the rights she had exercised. All the essential demands of the papacy were refused, and thus was forever ended the papal power of laying an interdict upon a city or a people. From that incubus, Christendom, thanks to Father Paul and to Venice, was at last and forever free.
The Vatican did, indeed, try hard to keep its old claim in being. A few years after its defeat by Fra Paolo, it endeavored to reassert in Spain the same authority which had been so humbly acknowledged there a few years before. It was doubtless felt that this most pious of all countries, which had previously been so docile, and which had stood steadily by the Vatican against Venice in the recent struggle, would again set an example of submission. Never was there a greater mistake: the Vatican received from Spanish piety a humiliating refusal.
Next it tried the old weapons against the little government at Turin. For many generations the House of Savoy had been dutifully submissive to religious control; nowhere out of Spain had heresy been treated more cruelly; yet here, too, the Vatican claim was spurned. But the final humiliation took place some years later under Urban VIII.,—the same pontiff who wrecked papal infallibility on Galileo's telescope. He tried to enforce his will on the state of Lucca, which, in the days of Pope Paul, had submitted to the Vatican decrees abjectly; but that little republic now seized the weapons which Sarpi had devised, and drove the papal forces out of the field: the papal excommunication was, even by this petty government, annulled in Venetian fashion and even less respectfully.[1]
[1] The proofs—and from Catholic sources—that it was the Pope who condemned Galileo's doctrine of the earth's movement about the sun, and not merely the Congregation of the Index, the present writer has given in his History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, vol. i. chap. iii.
Thus the world learned how weak the Vatican hold had become. Even Pope Paul learned it, and, from being the most strenuous of modern pontiffs, he became one of the most moderate in everything save in the enrichment of his family. Thus ended the last serious effort to coerce a people by an interdict, and so, one might suppose, would end the work of Father Paul. Not so. There was to come a second chapter in his biography, more instructive, perhaps, than the first,—a chapter which has lasted until our own day. A. D. White.
{February, 1904, number DLVI.} II.
The Venetian Republic showed itself duly grateful to Sarpi. The Senate offered him splendid presents and entitled him "Theologian of Venice." The presents he refused, but the title with its duty, which was mainly to guard the Republic against the encroachments of the Vatican, he accepted, and his life in the monastery of Santa Fosca went on quietly, simply, laboriously, as before. The hatred now felt for him at Rome was unbounded. It corresponded to the gratitude at Venice. Every one saw his danger, and he well knew it. Potentates were then wont to send assassins on long errands, and the arm of the Vatican was especially far-reaching and merciless. It was the period when Pius V, the Pope whom the Church afterwards proclaimed a saint, commissioned an assassin to murder Queen Elizabeth.[1]
[1] This statement formerly led to violent denials by ultramontane champions; but in 1870 it was made by Lord Acton, a Roman Catholic, one of the most learned of modern historians, and when it was angrily denied, he quietly cited the official life of Pope Pius in the Acta Sanctorum, published by the highest church authority. This was final; denial ceased, and the statement is no longer questioned. For other proofs in the line of Lord Acton's citation, see Bellarmine's Selbstbiographie, cited in a previous article, pp. 306, et seq.