A Decade of Italian Women, vol. 2 (of 2)

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

And if in the seventeenth century communications between one part of the world and another had been as rare and as difficult as in the ninth; if men had been then as ignorant, as simple, and greedy of the marvellous; if the press, which is to such error what a terrier is to a rat, had not been in existence, the historians of Europe might have chronicled a second she–pontiff, the "Pope Olympia," as having ascended the papal throne in the year 1644. For assuredly no John, Benedict, nor Boniface of the worst and darkest age of the Church ever lived more scandalously under petticoat government, or gave greater occasion to the assertion, that a woman was the real Pope in his stead, than did Giovanni Batista Pamfili, who was elected in that year.

Pope Olympia was born in 1594, at Viterbo. A daughter of the noble and ancient, but poor, family of the Maidalchini, she was, as the daughters of impoverished nobles generally were, destined for the Church from her infancy, and educated in a convent. But as this branch of the ecclesiastical profession could lead to nothing, at the best, more exalted than the station of a lady Abbess, Donna Olympia, who felt herself to have a soul above bead–counting, intimated, with a firmness and decision all her own, her intention of marrying. And an alliance was accordingly formed for her with a provincial gentleman, as noble and as poor as herself. As Giovanni Batista Pamfili, afterwards Pope by the name of Innocent X., was past eighty when he died in 1655, and must accordingly have been born in or before the year 1575; and as his brother, Donna Olympia's husband, must have been an elder brother, it follows that this poor noble, whom the ambitious and shrewd lady chose to wed, rather than accept the nullity of a cloister life, was more than nineteen years her senior. Nor does it appear that he had any requisite, either of station, function, or talent, which might have seemed capable of affording assistance to Olympia's views of rising in the world.

SACERDOTAL CELIBACY.

But the noble Roman maiden, who had already, we are told, given a specimen of her talent for governing, by exerting sway over her companions in the convent seminary, had looked out on the Roman world with a shrewd and observant eye, and knew well what she was about. What had the poor country noble to render him worthy of Olympia's hand and adapted to her views? He had a brother. Men who marry don't rise in the ecclesiastical states. And you can't marry a Cardinal, nor even a Bishop. Yet to hook yourself more or less indissolubly on to something of this sort, is the only possible means by which "excelsior" aspirations can be gratified in the world of Rome.

Man, even when tonsured and gowned, was not made to live alone. And although sacerdotal policy has with marvellous success contrived to cut off its priests from the great family of mankind, fence out their hearts from all the most sanctifying and ennobling sympathies of humanity, and make their interests, affections, prejudices, ambitions, always distinct from, and often hostile to those of their fellow–creatures;—though all this has with fatal skill been accomplished by the ordinance of celibacy; still in this, as in every other case of battle with the laws of nature, the measure of success accomplished does not attain to the reversal of these laws; but is limited to causing them to operate evilly instead of beneficially for mankind.

The priest–world of Rome accordingly, while deprived of the legitimate and beneficial influence of woman, has in most ages been more subjected than other social systems to her abnormal and mischievous power. And Donna Olympia was perfectly well aware, that the needful hooking–on process above mentioned might be accomplished with sufficient solidity for her purpose without any coupling gear of Hymen's forging.

But, as injury, done to any wheel or spring of a beautiful piece of mechanism, deranges the working of the whole, fatally in proportion to the perfection of the entire contrivance, so the celibacy law in its fight against nature turns other portions of human passion to evil issues, which otherwise and elsewhere work to good. The sacred family tie, which in other communities produces so much that is great and virtuous, becomes the abomination of nepotism at Rome, and affords the only other channel besides the one alluded to above, by which the grandeurs and pomps and wealth of sacerdotal success can be made available to the weaker sex.

To command, therefore, both these avenues to the temple of Fortuna Sacerdotalis—to hang on to the gown by both these ties of connection—to contrive by one step to obtain the means of action in both these ways—this was the master–stroke, which the high–looking Roman maiden accomplished by her marriage with the poor and no longer young noble to whom she gave her hand. The husband with his poverty–stricken coronet was in himself altogether useless to his aspiring wife's ambitious views. But of a brother–in–law with the tonsure, something might be made. A priest, noble, not without capacity, unburdened with scruples, already employed in some subaltern affairs, of malleable material—give her such an one for an ally, and the papal court for an arena, and Donna Olympia felt, that she could do the rest.

ROMAN HISTORIANS.