XI. IN AND ABOUT THE VATICAN
It would be a very bold or very incompetent observer of the Roman situation who should venture upon a decided opinion of the relations of the monarchy and the papacy. You hear it said with intimations of special authority in the matter, that both king and pope are well content with the situation, and it is clearly explained how and why they are so; but I did not understand how or why at the moment of the explanation, or else I have now forgotten whatever was clear in it. I believe, however, it was to the effect that the pope willingly remained self-prisoned in the Vatican because, if he came out, he might not only invalidate a future claim upon the sovereign dignity which the Italian occupation had invaded, but he might incur risks from the more unfriendly extremists which would at least be very offensive. On his part, it was said that the king used the embarrassment occasioned by the pope's attitude as his own defence against the anti-Clericals, who otherwise would have urged him to far more hostile measures with the Church. The king and the pope were therefore not very real enemies, it was said by those who tried to believe themselves better informed than others.
To the passing or tarrying stranger the situation does not offer many dramatic aspects. When you are going to St. Peter's, if you will look up at the plain wall of the Vatican palace you will see two windows with their shutters open, and these are the windows of the rooms where Pius X. lives, a voluntary captive; the closed blinds are those of the rooms where Leo XIII. died, a voluntary captive. Whatever we think of the wisdom or the reason of the papal protest against the occupation of the States of the Church by the Italian people, these windows have their pathos. The pope immures himself in the Vatican and takes his walks in the Vatican gardens, whose beauty I could have envied him, if he had not been a prisoner, when I caught a glimpse of them one morning, with the high walls of their privet and laurel alleys blackening in the sun.
But otherwise the severest Protestant could not cherish so unkind a feeling toward the gentle priest whom all men speak well of for his piety and humility. It is a touching fact of his private life that his three maiden sisters, who wish to be as near him as they can, have their simple lodging over a shop for the sale of holy images in a street opening into the Piazza of St. Peter's. We all know that they are of a Venetian family neither rich nor great; their pride and joy is solely in him, as it well might be, and it is said that when they come to hear him in some high function at the Sistine Chapel their rapture of affection and devotion is as evident as it is sweet and touching.
Their relation to him is the supremely poetic fact of a situation which even one who knows of it merely by hearsay cannot refuse to feel. The tragical effect of the situation is in the straining and sundering of family ties among those who take one side or the other in the difference of the monarchy and papacy. I do not know how equally Roman society, in the large or the small sense, is divided into the Black of the Papists and the White of the Monarchists (for the mediaeval names of Neri and Bianchi are revived in the modern differences), but one cannot help hearing of instances in which their political and religious opinions part fathers and sons and mothers and daughters. These are promptly noted to the least-inquiring foreigner, and his imagination is kindled by the attribution of like variances to the members of the reigning family, who are reported respectively blacker and whiter if they are not as positively black or white as the nobles. Some of these are said to meet one another only in secret across the gulf that divides them openly; but how far the cleavage may descend among other classes I cannot venture to conjecture; I can only testify to some expressions of priest-hatred which might have shocked a hardier heretical substance than mine.
One Sunday we went to the wonderful old Church of San Clemente, which is built three deep into the earth or high into the air, one story above or below the other, in the three successive periods of imperial, mediaeval, and modern Rome. It was the day when the church is illuminated, and the visitors come with their Baedekers and Hares and Murrays to identify its antiquities of architecture and fresco; it was full of people, and, if I fancied an unusual proportion of English-speaking converts among them, that might well have been, since the adjoining convent belongs to the Irish Dominicans. But I carried with me through all the historic and artistic interest of the place the sensation left by two inscriptions daubed in black on the white convent wall next the church. One of these read: “VV. la Repubblica” (Long live the Republic), and the other: “M. ai Preti” (Death to the Priests). No attempt had been made to efface them, and as they expressed an equal hatred for the monarchy and the papacy, neither laity nor clergy may have felt obliged to interfere. Perhaps, however, it was rightly inferred that the ferocity of one inscription might be best left to counteract the influence of the other. I know that with regard to the priests you experience some such effect from the atrocious attacks in the chief satirical paper of Rome, The name of this paper was given me, with a deprecation not unmixed with recognition of its cleverness, by an Italian friend whom I was making my creditor for some knowledge of Roman journalism; and the sole copy of it which I bought was handed to me with a sort of smiling abhorrence by the kindly old kiosk woman whom I liked best to buy my daily papers of. When I came to look it through, I made more and more haste, for its satire of the priests was of an indecency so rank that it seemed to offend the nose as well as the eye. To turn from the paper was easy, but from the fact of its popularity a painful impression remained. It was not a question of whether the priests were so bad as all that, but whether its many readers believed them so, or believed them bad short of it, in the kind of wickedness they were accused of.
There can be no doubt of the constant rancor between the Clericals and the Radicals in their different phases throughout Italy. There can be almost no doubt that the Radicals will have their way increasingly, and that if, for instance, the catechism is kept in the public schools this year, it will be cast out some other year not far hence. Much, of course, depends upon whether the status can maintain itself. It is, like the status everywhere and always, very anomalous; but it is difficult to imagine either the monarchy or the papacy yielding at any point. Apparently the State is the more self-assertive of the two, but this is through the patriotism which is the political life of the people. It must always be remembered that when the Italians entered Rome and made it the capital of their kingdom they did not drive out the French troops, which had already been withdrawn; they drove out the papal troops, the picturesque and inefficient foreign volunteers who remained behind. Every memorial of that event, therefore, is a blow at the Church, so far as the Church is identified with the lost temporal power. One of the chief avenues is named Twenty-second September Street because the national troops entered Rome on that date; the tablets on the Porta Pia where they entered, the monument on the Pincio to the Cairoli brothers, who died for Italy; the statues of Garibaldi, of Cavour, of Victor Emmanuel everywhere painfully remind the papacy of its lost sovereignty. But the national feeling has gone in its expression beyond and behind the patriotic occupation of Rome; and no one who suffered conspicuously, at any time in the past, for freedom of thought through the piety of the fallen power is suffered to be forgotten. On its side the Church enters its perpetual protest in the self-imprisonment of the pope; and here and there, according to its opportunity, it makes record of what it has suffered from the State. For instance, at St. John Lateran, which theoretically forms part of the Leonine City of the Popes and is therefore extraterritorial to Italy, a stretch of wall is suffered to remain scarred by the cannon-shot which the monarchy fired when it took Rome from the papacy.