|
Chapter
One
In the
islands of Oceania, the savages who fill the office of
priests often indulge the whim of declaring some
specific object to be…taboo; that is to say, sacred. And
from that point on no one can touch it under pain of
sacrilege and of death. Are we going to accord the same
faculty to the priests of the ideas of 1789, and will
everything that their eye has viewed with pleasure be
taboo for the rest of us mortals?...All revolutionary
institutions and all their consequences, whatever they
may be, taboo! One must be quiet and adore, or perish!
(Louis Veuillot, Mélanges, vi, 435)
Revolution and Counterrevolution
The terms Revolution and
Counterrevolution have become important in the
modern world owing to the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic Wars (which spread the Revolution’s effect)
from the years 1789 through 1815. Nineteenth and
twentieth-century European influence on all continents
has made familiarity with these terms global. The
worldwide use of them has, however, enormously confused
their meaning. In Moslem countries they are attached to
specific Islamic religious positions, while in Africa
they are used to mask tribal quarrels ignored by most
Westerners. The United States has applied them
indiscriminately to more or less radical versions of the
same Anglo-American revolutionary position. No one who
wants to grasp their real historical meaning and
significance can hope to do so by examining their use
and misuse in current debate. A serious study of the
problem of Revolution and Counterrevolution must begin
with Europe; with Latin and Germanic Europe; with those
regions convulsed by the events of 1789 and the years
that followed.
The terms Revolution and
Counterrevolution, as well as the related
intellectual-political expressions Left and
Right, ultimately concern judgments regarding two
problems crucial to an understanding of the whole human
condition. One of these problems centers on the question
of how we know our destiny as men, and what it is that
we must do to measure up to it. Revolutionaries used to
talk about this question in terms of the struggle of
reason and science against irrationality and
superstition, although the issue at stake has always
been infinitely more complicated than that supposed
conflict could ever suggest. The second problem, closely
bound up with the first, involves the relationship of
the individual to the community. Its leftist expression
has been the battle of individual freedom against social
authority. The average educated man in the West, shaped
as he has been by endless “progressive” social
influences and propaganda, has come to believe that the
Revolution, the Left, and leftism have truly encouraged
the reason, science, and freedom they so constantly
praise, and brought progress and human dignity in their
train. He has inevitably also been convinced of the
necessary corollary to such notions: that the
Counterrevolution, the Right, and rightism have promoted
irrationality, superstition, tyrannical authority, and,
hence, stagnation and enslavement.
Ignorance Regarding
Counterrevolution
A full
complement of scholars, including many writing in
English, has always been available for studies of the
revolutionary mentality. Leftist texts, the most minor
leftist squabbles, and the minutiae of daily leftist
life are known even to the point of madness.
Counterrevolutionary or rightist points of view,
however, have been less fortunate in their fate. Works
dealing with counterrevolutionaries are fewer in number
and less sophisticated in character. Moreover, it is
most frequently leftists themselves who write such
studies, their objectivity vitiated by their often blind
devotion to a worldview imbibed in open and subtle ways
since birth. Those points that ought to be made, those
principles the counterrevolutionary himself emphasizes
as being the truly significant ones forming his outlook,
are often ignored. Their place is taken by concepts that
leftist preoccupations and received ideas deem essential
to counterrevolutionary thought. The
counterrevolutionary and counterrevolutionary beliefs
are thus misrepresented by the man of the Left, who
ascribes to them all manner of weak and specious
reasoning, thereby underlining the brilliance and glory
of the revolutionary position. Most texts on the subject
do not deal with Counterrevolution. They deal with straw
men.
The complete victory of Anglo-American
revolutionary thought and practice in the United
States---a victory that I have discussed in my work on
Americanism---has rendered the counterrevolutionary
universe almost totally incomprehensible to authors in
this country. Scholars as well as laymen in our county
experience insuperable difficulties in describing the
counterrevolutionary’s concerns as the
counterrevolutionary himself would enunciate them.
Counterrevolutionary views are thus depicted in so
garbled a manner as to require any sane, rational human
being to dismiss them.
When one turns to Catholic
counterrevolutionaries, the English-speaking world’s
lack of knowledge is truly abysmal. As far as the
average man is concerned, again, both scholar and
layman, the idea of a peculiarly Catholic approach to
Counterrevolution is dubious in the extreme. He presumes
one of three possibilities to be true. Either it never
existed, or it was a curious aberration of the Latin
mind, subsequently foisted upon Catholic Christendom as
a whole, or it served simply as a sanctimonious
appendage to Counterrevolution in its sole “true” form:
the Counterrevolution of self-interested noblemen,
ambitious generals, or arrogant fascisti.
Whatever meager sources were available have declined in
number along with the influence of the Counterrevolution
in general since the end of the Second World War.
Hence, an English-speaking student, eager for
a fully developed understanding of history since the end
of the French Revolution, drinks but a small drop from a
vast ocean of source material that could be presented to
him. He completes his studies a cripple, ignorant of one
of the most vibrant and important intellectual forces of
the past several hundred years---indeed, of the past
millennium. In fact, he becomes the most pitiable of
cripples, since he has been told, and he actually
believes, that he really has the full use of his limbs.
Shallow Versus Profound
Counterrevolutionary Theory
A serious look
at the Counterrevolution must begin with an
acknowledgment of its notoriously disunified character.
There have been many different types of
counterrevolutionaries from its earliest history. One
strain, enormously influential among the rank and file,
is so far removed from a profound intellectual
discussion of philosophical and social problems that it
cannot be treated seriously as having anything to do
with counterrevolutionary thought. I shall simply
refer to this type of thoughtless counterrevolutionary
activity as “shallow”, and briefly outline its general
contours for the reader.
It is true that
counterrevolutionaries in general were friends of
authority and of order. Authority and order, however,
can be defended from a variety of standpoints. Some
people---those whom I am identifying as
shallow---defended them simply because they themselves
might have lost great advantages if the then present
authority and the then present order of things
collapsed.
Revolution
threatened ever-wider groups with harm and even total
destruction in the course of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Those groups endangered by it often
became counterrevolutionary only in the shallow sense:
they simply wanted to save themselves. Each threatened
group tended to confound the problem of authority and
order with the problem of its own self-interest. Each
defined the war of the Counterrevolution against the
Revolution as the struggle of its own established
position in life against opposing interests. Each saw
its own shallow, selfish, and perhaps even unjust issue
as being the earth-shattering issue. The
revolutionary depiction of the counterrevolutionary as a
mindless defender of the status quo, and the
Counterrevolution itself as merely a cover for the
exploitation of the have-nots by the haves, has
consequently been a relatively simple matter. It has
been a relatively simple matter because it is partly
justified by the behavior of shallow
counterrevolutionaries themselves.
Similarly, it is
true that counterrevolutionaries were generally friends
of tradition. But one can also defend tradition from a
variety of standpoints. Often, the shallow
counterrevolutionary was attached to one particular
traditional practice without understanding its
connection with other traditional practices or the way
in which it could be undermined by a seemingly abstract
but erroneous philosophical concept. Worse still,
sometimes the “traditional practice” beloved by the
shallow was really not traditional in the true sense at
all. Sometimes, as we shall see later, it was actually a
moderate revolutionary idea, custom, or institution that
seemed traditional because it had been rooted in
a given place for a respectable period of time.
As the
Revolution threatened ever-greater numbers of
traditional (or seemingly traditional) practices with
harm or total destruction in the course of the last two
centuries, each man who saw his favorite traditional
assaulted became a counterrevolutionary. But, once
again, he often became a counterrevolutionary in the
shallow sense. Thus, he confounded the defense of
tradition with the maintenance of his cherished practice
alone. He made of the Counterrevolution a struggle over
this one factor. His issue became the
earth-shattering and definitive issue. If he momentarily
won his case, he thought that the whole of the
Revolution had been defeated, when in fact he had struck
only one of its thousand heads. And if the “tradition”
he defended was actually not traditional at all, the
would-be counterrevolutionary was in fact unwittingly
lending a hand in his own destruction.
There was,
therefore, a natural division between the shallow and
what I should like to call the “profound”
counterrevolutionary. The profound counterrevolutionary
based his defense of order, authority, and tradition
upon serious principles. He became aware of the
historical development of a correspondingly principled
revolutionary attack upon the things he loved. He saw
that Revolution was not merely some peevish assault by
the have-nots upon the haves, even though such envy
might well have played a role in it. As a result, he
found himself constantly at odds with the bulk of the
counterrevolutionary troops, who were shallow in their
approach. He was unwilling to attribute to this or that
specific self-interest or tradition the overriding
importance assigned to it by his shallow compatriots. He
spoke of deeply rooted problems, when the troops wished
to hear nothing of difficulties, subtleties, and
long-term battles. The shallow wanted to be told that
the front line was clearly visible before them, and that
once it was taken, victory would be assured. As soon as
they were informed that victory would not be won until
the entire horizon was cleared of the enemy and the home
front purged of fifth columnists, they became annoyed
with and even suspicious of the informant. Hence, they
turned for direction to shallow “practical” men, who
told them exactly what they wanted to hear: that the
solution to the problem was easy.
Secular Versus
Religious Counterrevolutionary Thought and Activity
A second
division among counterrevolutionaries obtained between
those who possessed an essentially secular outlook and
those who embraced a primarily religious point of view.
This division did not correspond to the split between
the shallow and the profound opponents of the
Revolution, since there were representatives of both of
these “schools” in the ranks of those with secular as
well as religious orientations. Rather, it refers to a
conflict regarding the supposed struggle of reason and
science against irrationality and superstition.
All
counterrevolutionaries believed that the Revolution
placed too great an emphasis upon an individual and
purely cerebral path to wisdom. That does not mean,
however, that they were all anti-intellectual, as even a
superficial glance at many of their writings will
indicate. Among those who did take thought seriously,
however, there was a split of great consequence. Men who
were truly religious and thoughtful fought for a social
order rooted in eternal wisdom. Others were sufficiently
dechristianized to reject both the claims of the Church
and the very possibility of supernatural involvement in
human life. Their secularized thought tended to ground
the order of society in interpretations of human nature
having little to do with categories of objective Truth.
Hence, thoughtful though they might be, they became more
and more inclined to look for an answer to the problems
posed by the Revolution in purely natural, physical
actions, such as in the intervention of the police
power. The central themes of such secular
counterrevolutionaries differ markedly from
counterrevolutionaries of religious bent.
Interaction
Shallow and
profound, secular and religious, denote distinctions
that need to be made intellectually in order to present
the arguments crucial to understanding the development
of counterrevolutionary thought and action. Still, the
reader must note that it is impossible to erect
impenetrable walls between the various groups mentioned.
Each had its influence on the others. Indeed, in
practice, counterrevolutionaries sometimes moved back
and forth from one to another of these camps, just as
individual men can move from one attitude to another,
often contradictory one, in the course of their normal,
troubled lives. Nevertheless, the main point remains the
same. The tensions that resulted from such divisions
prevented the Counterrevolution as a whole from acting
cohesively over any length of time. Most importantly,
they prevented it from turning to account its most
telling intellectual point: the innate contradiction and
self-deception of the revolutionary mentality. It was
precisely this living lie of the Revolution that was to
be the chief focus of thinkers in the Catholic
counterrevolutionary ranks.
Catholic
Counterrevolution:
Stage One, 1790-1830
A Catholic
counterrevolutionary point of view developed in three
distinct though interconnected stages. The first of
these can be said to have begun with the Church’s
opposition to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. This
legislation, enacted by the revolutionary government in
France in 1790, made the Roman Church a mere department
of the radicalized French State. Stage One ended in 1830
with the accession of King Louis-Philippe (1830-1848) to
the French throne.
Two factors
characterize this period. One is the practical,
day-to-day subservience of Catholic
counterrevolutionaries to both the shallow and the
secularists in orientation. The other is the impressive
beginning of a theoretical Catholic “declaration of
independence” from such forces. The first of these
themes was symbolized by the way in which many Catholics
associated their cause with that of the political
movement called “legitimist” (referring to the
legitimacy of pre-1789 governments), while the second
was illustrated by the work of Joseph de Maistre
(1759-1821) and the Abbé de la Mennais (1782-1854). Let
us turn to a brief discussion of each of these crucial
facets of early Catholic counterrevolutionary history.
Legitimism
counted among its supporters counterrevolutionaries of
both the shallow and the profound varieties.
Unfortunately, the shallow tended to dominate the
movement. The shallowness of many legitimists was due to
their conviction that the Revolution was a development
connected with the events of 1789-1799 alone, and that
it could be destroyed by a simple restoration of the
older, legitimate order of things, as it supposedly
existed before the convening of the Estates-General.
This conviction was made all the more urgent by the fact
that many legitimists had lost a great deal during that
ten-year period of revolutionary turmoil, and in the
“half-way house” of Napoleonic pacification that
followed from 1799 until 1814-1815. They were exhausted
by exile and poverty, and equated their own revival with
the victory of the very principle of Counterrevolution
itself. Legitimism, in a sense, assumed that the old
order, the ancien régime, was revolution-less in
character.
In fact,
however, the ancien régime was badly infected
with revolutionary notions and practices. The failure of
legitimists to recognize this led them onto dangerously
thin ice. Sometimes, they acted as if the existence of
the mere forms of the old order would kill the
Revolution. Sometimes, the faith that legitimists had in
the pre-1789 structure was so strong that they believed
one could cooperate with moderate revolutionaries and
revolutionary principles quite easily, so long as they
had the legitimate framework of things automatically and
magically to defuse their impact. The results of their
error are clear. Legitimism was supreme in 1815, when
the Congress of Vienna brought the Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars to an end. France, the center of the
Revolution itself, was under legitimist control. The
brother of Louis XVI, Louis XVIII (1814-1824), reigned
in his stead. And yet the power of legitimism was
virtually crushed within the next few decades.
Catholics
frequently followed the shallow legitimists. They
recognized that the Church and Catholicism had prospered
infinitely more under the ancien régime than
under the Revolution. Insofar as they did not
distinguish their legitimism from that which was purely
self-interested, they created the impression that
Catholicism was concerned solely with the recovery of
lost financial and political privileges. They fostered
the conviction that Catholics believed religion could be
revived through monarchical police power alone, and
vigorous revolutionary ideas killed by simply enveloping
them in a purely formal Catholic environment. In fact,
to those who remembered and understood the anti-Catholic
elements of pre-1789 order, Catholic legitimists of the
shallow variety seemed to be dull-witted, unsuspecting
enemies of their own faith. A picture of Catholic
stupidity, anti-intellectualism, and even
auto-secularization was drawn, a picture that has still
not been completely erased. It has not been completely
erased, again, because it is partly justified,
persisting in our own day, as we shall later observe.
A Catholic
“declaration of independence” from shallow, secularized
legitimism was, however, already being drafted in Stage
One. It was being drafted in two ways, one of which was
decidedly more problematic in its consequences than the
other.
The more
problematic draft of this Catholic declaration of
independence can be read in the work of the Abbé de la
Mennais. De la Mennais, an aristocratic Breton apologist
of great renown, began as a fervent legitimist. He had
worked vigorously for the rebuilding of the Catholic
order of things in conjunction with the return of the
Bourbon Monarchy. By the 1820’s, de la Mennais chafed in
bitterness at his self-deception. Legitimists did not
seem to him to understand the errors of the old order,
or the need for a heartfelt incorporation of the faith
into every facet of life. Instead, their actions
indicated to him a cynical use of Catholicism in order
to obtain submission from a long-suffering population
and prevent further upheaval.
De la Mennais’s
conclusion, proposed in his journal, l’Avenir,
was that the Church must completely separate herself
from the State in order to perform her mission more
successfully. Convinced, like most
counterrevolutionaries, of the sound anti-revolutionary
instincts of the majority of the population, he began to
argue that the masses were a much more solid support
than monarchical authority for the rebuilding of the
Church. De la Mennais, in effect, claimed that certain
radical revolutionary concepts, like democracy and the
need for an immediate and total destruction of Church
ties with the political realm, were actually the sole
true pillars of the Counterrevolution.
The Church, as
we shall see, felt that modern democracy was a recipe
for the triumph of the willful, and separation of Church
and State a mask for totalitarianism. She could not
follow de la Mennais down the path that he had taken.
When she made this fact clear, in the course of the
1830’s, he became much more strident, and was eventually
excommunicated. Ultimately, de la Mennais rejected
orthodox Catholicism entirely, became one of the great
prophets of an infallible, democratic world order, and
abandoned all of the prerogatives of noble birth. He
even democratized his name to Lamennais, by which form
he is now known in history. Lamennais’ importance for
the development of liberal Catholicism, which plays a
crucial role in the battles described in this book,
cannot be overestimated. (1)
By contrast, a
more promising draft of the Catholic declaration of
independence can be seen in the political works of
Joseph de Maistre. De Maistre was an admirer of Edmund
Burke (1729-1797), whose Reflections on the
Revolution in France, published in 1790, was the
first major literary attack on the Revolution. Born in
Savoy, in the Kingdom of Sardinia, de Maistre was also a
legitimist. But the restoration he wanted was that of an
older order purged of intellectual principles and
practical measures productive of revolutionary
developments, an order that understood the true precepts
of authority, and that was sufficiently conscious of the
power of ideas to deal effectively with its principled
opponents.
De Maistre
realized that the Revolution, in a deeper sense, had
begun long before 1789. He also understood that the
autonomy of the Catholic Church would be essential to
its defeat. He was heartbroken by the fact that most
legitimists entertained the simple-minded view that
everything before 1789 was good and that the Revolution
could be suppressed through uninformed police action
alone. So convinced was de Maistre that the friends of
the ancien régime had failed to do their job
properly, that he mourned on his deathbed in 1821 that
he was dying with Europe. (2)
De Maistre’s
writings, especially his works On the Pope, and On
the Generative Principle of Constitutions, were
invaluable to a great number of nineteenth century
thinkers. Lamennais considered himself to be one of de
Maistre’s disciples, although his own thought
illustrates merely the weak points in the Savoyard’s
teaching, and his later career contradicted in practical
terms most of what his master held dear. Many liberal
Catholics, for various reasons, continued to appreciate
his work. All varieties of counterrevolutionaries were
crucially dependent upon him. One of the most important
of these, Louis Veuillot (1813-1883), wrote: “When I was
born, Joseph de Maistre blew the trumpet and I heard it.
It is necessary to place him apart, among the great men,
almost among the prophets”. (3)
Catholic
Counterrevolution:
Stage Two, 1830-1848
The second stage
in the development of the Catholic Counterrevolution,
already foreshadowed by the work of men like de Maistre
and their followers around Europe, can be said to have
been born in 1830 and is once again linked to events in
France. King Charles X (1824-1830), the youngest of
Louis XVI’s brothers, fled the country in July of that
year after an abortive attempt to strengthen the power
of the French Monarchy. His place was taken by King
Louis-Philippe, a member of the Orleans branch of the
Bourbon Family. Louis-Philippe was able to replace
Charles by swearing an oath to cooperate with the most
moderate of the revolutionaries, the liberals, the
majority of whom were members of the commercial,
capitalist, upper-middle classes.
Charles X’s
departure, and Louis-Philippe’s oath, transformed both
legitimists and those Catholics who supported them into
“out” groups. A new situation was created wherein
Catholic counterrevolutionaries were forced to rethink
the question of whether or not their cause was really,
of necessity, tied with that of the legitimists. A
similar situation was gradually faced by Catholic
counterrevolutionaries in other parts of Europe. The
conclusions they reached continued to be elaborated for
a century to come. Essentially, however, they all
pointed to one conclusion: Catholics must break free
from their subservience to secular and shallow
counterrevolutionary groups.
The new turn of
events was symbolized, more than anything else, by the
creation of the Catholic “party” in France. Within the
French Parliament, this movement was led by
Charles-Forbes-René, the Comte de Montalembert
(1810-1870). Its chief proponent outside was Louis
Veuillot, with his journal, l’Univers. The
party’s raison d’être was the need to defend
Church interests under the sway of a hostile regime,
and, confident that Catholicism alone was a force
sufficient to accomplish this, it saw no sense in
insisting upon the legitimist position. Catholiques
avant tout, “Catholics before all else”, was the
party’s proud motto. (4)
Stage Two Continued: A
New Catholic Confidence
A new
self-confidence was invigorating Catholicism in a
variety of other realms as well, thus aiding the
Catholic party’s declaration of independence in France.
This self-confidence reflected a widespread emphasis
upon the concept of the Incarnation and its importance
in daily life.
Aubert, in Le
pontificat de Pie IX, noes that Christocentric
interest abounded throughout Catholic Europe in the
first half of the nineteenth century. (5) In Germany,
such interest led to serious studies of the concept of
the Mystical Body of Christ that were reminiscent of the
writings of the Church Fathers. One of the most
impressive examples of this trend was the work of the
Tübingen professor, Johann Adam Möhler (1796-1838).
Möhler’s Symbolik (1832) grew to have a kind of
classic authority in Catholic Germany. This treatise
avoided discussing the Church as a purely juridical
structure and treated it, instead, “from the standpoint
of heaven”, as the continuation of the Incarnation, a
perpetual manifestation of God made man. The subtlety of
Möhler’s argument in this regard helped to make him a
precursor of all types of schools, from the most
orthodox to the most heretical. (6)
Möhler’s
influence extended to Italy, notably to Milan, Rome, and
Naples. In Milan, the journal, l’Amico Cattolico,
encouraged his work. Giovanni Perrone (1794-1876), the
influential Roman theologian, praised and defended him
in 1847 before a meeting of the Academy of the Catholic
Religion in the Eternal City. Rome saw another disciple
of Möhler in Joseph Kleutgen (1811-1883), Secretary of
the Society of Jesus, consultant to the Index, and
author of massive works on medieval scholastic thought,
especially Thomistic. The Neapolitan review, La
Scienza e la Fede, promoted a bibliography of
Catholic books to spread knowledge of religious works
among educated laymen. Möhler’s writings figured
prominently among them. (7)
The nineteenth
century witnessed a number of attempts to describe the
effects of a Catholic conception of life on civilization
as a whole, all of which efforts began to become known,
popularly, in the 1830’s and 1840’s. One can point in
this regard to the belief of some German thinkers that
the practice of Catholic life would inevitably make them
better Germans. Many authors have described the work of
the Nazarenes, a group of artist-converts living in Rome
who claimed that their Catholicity would perfect their
art. (8)
Adoration of the
Sacred Heart, which was promoted by the Jesuits, brought
before the average pious believer the idea of Catholic
influence upon the natural order as a whole. The
theological importance of this doctrine was then
expounded upon by Giovanni Perrone in his main
theological writings. Society, he insisted, could be
elevated in union with Christ, just as Christ’s human
nature, represented by His Heart, was elevated in union
with the Word, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.
(9)
The Spaniard,
Juan Donoso Cortes (1809-1853), and his fellow
countryman, Jaime Balmes (1810-1848), along with a host
of Frenchmen too numerous to mention, undertook to write
political philosophy from a Catholic point of view. (10)
At the same time, many thinkers, such as the Viscount
Villeneuve-Bargemont (1784-1850), Ludovico Bianchi
(1803-1871), Edouard Ducpetiaux (1804-1868), Cardinal
Carlo Morichini (1805-1879), and Frederic Le Play
(1806-1882) were initiating Catholics into the
connection between economics and Christian morality.
(11)
Catholic
parties, Catholic theologians, Catholic artists,
economists, and political theorists all seemed united in
the same enterprise: the declaration of the Church’s
independence from the domination of the secular world;
in short, the reiteration, with Montalembert and
Veuillot, of the slogan: Catholiques avant tout.
The Seeds of Stage
Three
It would be erroneous to
presume that Catholic subservience to shallow,
secularized, counterrevolutionary ideals totally
disappeared during the period in question. Indeed, it
can be suggested that in some ways it increased in
variety. This was true for two reasons.
First, legitimists did remain in power in many
countries for a long period of time, delaying a movement
toward Catholic independence. Until a disaster along the
lines of that befalling France should occur, the issue
of Catholic dependence upon legitimism was not a
pressing one. Moreover, there remained large numbers of
shallow Catholic legitimists true to the cause in
France; men who refused to admit that there might be an
error in their position. In fact, the more the
possibility of a legitimist order faded, the more such
men seemed committed to its absolute necessity for the
success of the Catholic world view. Secondly, a new
temptation towards shallow and secular Counterrevolution
gained strength during this stage of development. An
understanding of this temptation requires a brief,
general discussion of the growth of the Left.
The European Left, the political instrument
for transmitting revolutionary ideas into practical
measures, was composed of several wings after its
apparent defeat in 1814-1815. The more moderate wing
took the name “liberal”. It was, as noted above, chiefly
made up of the property-owning upper bourgeoisie, the
promoters of the Industrial Revolution, which was
changing the face of the continent even more profoundly
than political convulsions had done. Liberals wanted to
press the revolutionary assault upon authority,
tradition, and religion, but not so vigorously as to
encourage the danger of demagoguery, Jacobinism, and the
reappearance of the guillotine as an instrument of
terror. Liberalism hoped to offer two things to Europe:
the English parliamentary system, which it considered to
be the epitome of moderation, and the “freedoms of 1789”
in their broadest sense: freedoms of conscience, speech,
and economics. These freedoms it expected to regulate so
as to prevent radical revolution. Liberals envisioned a
small number of well-educated men of substance
controlling the State. They claimed that education,
properly reformed to exclude irrationality and
superstition, would eventually produce a population
which would be moderate, rational, efficiency-minded,
and capable of exercising political authority in its
entirety.
More radical than the liberals were the
democrats, usually castigated as Jacobins or
“sectarians” by their enemies. Democrats, also mostly
bourgeois themselves, thought of the liberals as
elitists and traitors to the Revolution. They longed for
a swift victory of the political egalitarianism espoused
by some members of the Parisian clubs and journals of
the most violent years of the Revolution, from
1792-1794. Democrats tended to ally themselves with
nationalists seeking unity for ethnic groups that were
divided into different states, and independence for
those under foreign rule. This alliance was dictated by
the fact that the great prophets of nationalism saw the
democratic expression of the General Will of a people to
be crucial to the complete liberation of the “national
soul”. Democrats were almost always in trouble with the
police, who generally forced their leaders into exile in
Paris or London.
Although there was no love lost between liberals and
democrats, both groups could co-operate where a true
counterrevolutionary threat came into the picture.
Liberal-democratic cooperation took place in Italy and
Germany for part of 1848, for example, chiefly because
of the common danger posed by the Right to the
revolutionary outbursts of these two groups in that
year.
Both
the liberal bourgeoisie and democratic forces, under
given circumstances, could manifest a willingness to
cooperate with Catholics as well. Such cooperation
occurred in the Low Countries in the 1830’s. At that
time, segments of both revolutionary and
counterrevolutionary groups united to overthrow the rule
of the legitimist Dutch King, who also happened to be a
fervent Protestant. Their victory led to the
establishment of the southern Dutch provinces as the
independent Kingdom of Belgium.
A
desire for cooperation also showed itself in France and
Italy some time after its appearance in Belgium, basing
itself upon the success of the Low Countries’ model. The
joint cooperation of all well-intentioned men even
seemed to have the blessing of the Church herself, given
the unexpected amnesty offered by Pope Pius IX to
proponents liberalism and democracy upon his accession
to the See of Peter. Nevertheless, the difficulties of
the liberal-democratic-Catholic entente soon grew
to massive proportions, the Revolutions of 1848---and a
third stage of counterrevolutionary evolution---being
the instruments of clarification. (12)
Stage Three: 1848 Onwards
In France, the 1848 Revolution engineered the
overthrow of the liberal regime of King Louis-Philippe
and the creation of the Second French Republic.
Democratic political desires were victorious in this
Republic, in that all adult males were granted the vote.
Many Catholics supported the fait accompli for a
variety of reasons, one of which Lamennais---had he
still been among the orthodox---might have approved: the
presumption that the Catholic Party, based upon the
“sound”, anti-revolutionary “silent majority”, would win
any truly democratic elections held in France.
It was precisely the type of bourgeois that
became liberal---the men of the Third Estate at
Versailles and their Parisian counterparts---who had
made the great Revolution of 1789 possible.
Counterrevolutionaries argued that bourgeois
liberalism’s theoretical foundations spawned and
sustained democratic movements as well, whether the
liberal liked to think so or not, since their basic
underlying revolutionary position was the same. A new
complication arose in 1848, the year that liberalism
seemed to give way to democracy, with the birth of yet
another, previously unsatisfied expression of leftism:
socialism.
The Revolution as expressed in socialism was
more concerned with equality in the economic and social
realm than it was with political egalitarianism. Its
appearance on the revolutionary stage frightened both
liberal and democratic bourgeois. So frightened were
they that they were more willing than ever before to
cooperate with anyone, even Catholic
counterrevolutionaries, in order to destroy the threat
to property. Like the shallow legitimist, the frightened
liberal or democratic bourgeois became a kind of shallow
counterrevolutionary himself. And like the shallow
legitimist, he equated the defense of his
threatened self-interest with the defense of order in
general. He did not understand that the entire
revolutionary mentality had to be rejected in order to
fight socialism correctly, justly, and effectively.
Instead, he wanted the Catholic to approve that part of
the Revolution from which he had benefited, and, indeed,
even to stop calling that aspect of it revolutionary.
Anything more radical than whatever had benefited the
liberal or democratic bourgeois could be assaulted as
being revolutionary and evil. Anything less radical was
actually a pillar of social order and truth. Because
many devout Catholics were members of the bourgeoisie
themselves, or fearful for the fate of private property,
or hopeful about the conversion of the opponents of
socialism on the “formerly hostile” Left, they could
easily succumb to the temptation to go along with this
shallow view.
Italy’s experience during the Revolution of
1848 illustrated the great difficulties of a
liberal-democratic-Catholic cooperation even without the
added complication of socialism. Liberals and democrats
in the Italian peninsula presumed that Catholic
friendliness under Pope Pius IX signified Catholic
conversion to their positions on the great issues of the
day. Hence, when legitimist governments in Italy in 1848
gave way to liberal regimes, and liberal regimes to
democratic ones, and both adopted anti-clerical laws
leading to their condemnation by the pope and his flight
from the States of the Church themselves, bitterness and
mutual recrimination once again became the standard for
leftist-rightist relations.
By 1850, the immediate disturbances caused by
the revolutionary outbursts of 1848 had been put down
all across Europe. But the revolutions of that momentous
year had demonstrated the existence of unanswered
questions in European life relating to the real role of
the growing Catholic movement. Catholic leaders
understood that these questions had to be addressed,
regardless of the cost involved. It was in answering
such questions that the Catholic counterrevolution
finally reached its maturity. And although the role of
France was crucial to this maturation, it is to the
systematic discussion of the issues that came from an
Italian journal that we will now turn for the framework
within which to continue the story. (13)
La Civiltà Cattolica:
A Systematic Presentation of the Catholic Position
On the first Sunday of March in 1850, Italians
in cities throughout the entire peninsula were exposed
to the most ambitious advertising campaign that they had
ever experienced. Four thousand wall posters and one
hundred twenty thousand broadsheets, from Piedmont to
Sicily, announced the imminent inauguration of a
bimensal journal, edited by members of the Society of
Jesus. Its appearance was being financed by loans from
Pope Pius IX, its initial home was Naples---a far calmer
city than Rome, which had just recently been retaken
from radical revolutionaries---and its name was to be
La Civiltà Cattolica, “Catholic Civilization”. (14)
La Civiltà Cattolica, the first issue
of which was published in April and distributed
simultaneously throughout the various states of Italy,
appeared twice a month in three-year series. It was
divided into series in order to facilitate the treatment
of a mixture of major themes over an extensive period.
The journal consisted of theological, philosophical,
scientific, historical, and sociological articles, as
well as strictly polemical works intended to popularize
points expressed more rigorously in scholarly essays. A
book review was added shortly after the April issue,
with the goal of ensuring Catholic publications the
publicity denied them by the liberal-dominated press.
The editors also soon established a chronicle of world
events, which was gradually expanded to great length, to
give to its readers a comprehensive account of
international affairs interpreted from a Catholic
perspective. Finally, fictional pieces were included in
each issue as literary translations of the ideas
expressed in the articles, reviews, and chronicles. (15)
The editors emphasized their unity of purpose
by publishing articles anonymously. Civiltà
contributors discussed their work at weekly meetings of
the editorial board, records of which are not available,
though accurate attributions of most of the main
articles have survived. One writer was supposed to set
the stage for another, or draw conclusions from the
premises established by colleague. “Sometimes, the same
truth comes to you exposed by this author as a theory,
implanted by another in a dialogue, rendered evident and
almost palpable by a third in a short story.” (16)
Whether in Naples or in Rome, where the journal moved at
the end of 1850, the editors prided themselves on their
loyalty to unchanging principles. Indeed, Professor
Jemolo, writing in the 1940’s, admits that probably no
other journal had completed almost a century of
existence “always maintaining its characteristic ideas,
with relatively rare alterations”. (17)
The Editors
Who were the men
behind this enterprise? They certainly did not include
the Dutch General of the Society of Jesus, Johann
Philipp Roothan (1785-1853). Although Roothan had long
encouraged the creation of a scholarly Jesuit
periodical, published in Latin, the kind of vernacular
journal that La Civiltà Cattolica’s dramatic
advertising blitz portended could not but fill him with
dread. Father Roothan wanted no popular fanfare
accompanying Jesuit activities, fearful as he was of
stirring up the enemies of the Order.
The Society of Jesus had
been suppressed in the late eighteenth century under
pressure from the various dynasties of Europe. It was
gradually revived during the reign of Pope Pius VII
(1800-1823), and the Jesuits were looked upon by many,
both friendly and hostile, as the chief force fighting
revolutionary concepts. To Catholic activists, the
return of the Jesuits meant a powerful stimulus to the
rebuilding of Christendom. To liberals, it signified a
threat to “progress”. To secular counterrevolutionaries,
it meant criticism of the monarch’s freedom of action,
the very irritation that had led to dynastic calls for
the Society’s suppression in the first place. The
Jesuit, as portrayed in an influential work by Vincenzo
Gioberti (1802-1852), Il gesuita moderna (“The
Modern Jesuit”, 1848), was either an enemy of the State
or a servant of despots. Whatever the case, he was
always an agent of darkness. Mindful of such sentiments,
Roothan openly opposed an Italian-language journal and
was only silenced by the personal approval of the
project by the Pope. (18)
Who, then, were La
Civiltà Cattolica’s editors and writers? They were a
battery of Jesuits, some young, some old, all filled
with enthusiasm for what they believed to be a promising
and innovative venture. About many of them, including
Fathers Berardi, Brunengo, Oreglia, Parodi, and
Steccanella, little can be said. One learns that Fathers
Pianciani and Calvetti had traveled, the first to the
United States, the latter to Belgium; but further
information regarding them is scanty. Father Raffaele
Ballerini (1830-1907), who played an important role
later in the Civiltà’s history, had not yet
joined its staff in 1850. Father Antonio Bresciani
(1798-1862), a man of letters whose many works have been
translated into a variety of languages, is much better
known. Still, his published correspondence tells us
little of interest about him as a public figure; and his
biography, by Ballerini, is almost hagiographic in
character and equally non-instructive. (19)
Luckily, however, the
lives of the three most important members of the
editorial board of La Civiltà Cattolica are very
well documented indeed. One of these three, Father Carlo
Maria Curci (1809-1891), pursued his studies in
philosophy and theology first at Naples, his native
city, where he entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1826, and
later at the Roman College, where he completed them. His
labors as a member of the Society were manifold. Curci’s
greatest fame before 1850 came from his preaching and
his effectively giving the lie to the picture of the
scheming, obscurantist, and unnaturally submissive
Jesuit, painted by Vincenzo Gioberti in his widely read
critique. When Curci returned from the exile to Malta,
France, and Great Britain which he had endured owing to
the Revolution of 1848 in Italy, he suggested to Pope
Pius IX the possibility of an Italian-language Jesuit
periodical with a popular bent. It was Curci who,
receiving papal approval, did the organizational work
required to put it together. (20)
The career of Father
Matteo Liberatore (1810-1892) with the Civiltà
spanned the forty-two years from its inception to his
own death. Ordained in 1836, on the same day as Curci,
whose Neapolitan origins and schooling he shared,
Liberatore taught philosophy in Naples until the
upheavals of 1848. He then ventured into political
writing, a field of interest in which he would
thenceforth always remain active. In later years,
Liberatore was to contribute to the encyclical letters
Immortale Dei (1885) and Rerum novarum
(1891) of Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903). His correspondence
has been lost. (21)
Important though they
were, neither Father Liberatore nor Father Curci
exercised a dominant influence over the new periodical.
Liberatore, whose very mild and scholarly disposition is
noted by all commentators, never coveted such a role.
(22) Curci, a more forceful character, apparently did
seek a directing position, but ultimately without
success. Eventually, differences with practical papal
policy on the question of the loss of the States of the
Church after 1870 actually led to his suspension from
the Society of Jesus. He remained suspended until
shortly before his death. (23)
If anyone within the
religious community forming the editorial board of La
Civiltà Cattolica could be said to be the journal’s
guiding light, it would have to be Luigi Prospero
Taparelli d’Azeglio (1793-1862). Taparelli d’Azeglio was
born of an aristocratic Piedmontese family, another of
whose sons, Massimo (1796-1866), is well known to
Italians as a major liberal leader of the independence
movement, the so-called Risorgimento. A career as
both educator and administrator within the Society
preceded Taparelli’s participation in the foundation of
La Civiltà Cattolica. His fame primarily rested
on his tenure as Rector of the Roman College (1824-1829)
and, more importantly, on his widely used Saggio
teoretico di dritto naturale (“Theoretical Essay on
Natural Law”, 1840), published during a stay in Sicily.
(24)
Both Curci and Liberatore
had been students of Taparelli while the latter was
teaching in Naples. La Civiltà Cattolica
frequently testified to its belief in the enormous
significance of his philosophical, political, and
economic thought for its own development. It was
Taparelli’s Esame critico degli ordini
rappresentativi nella società moderna (“Critical
Examination of Representative Government in Modern
Society”, 1854), taken from articles printed in the
journal’s first series, that served as La Civiltà
Cattolica’s political manifesto. He exercised “a
kind of moral dictatorship” over the entire Catholic
camp through the journal (25) and “contributed much to
the salvation of the Catholic spirit” (26). In short, as
Aubert says, he was “one of the most notable Catholic
political philosophers of the last century”. (27) It
speaks volumes about the concerns of Catholic historical
writing that comments on his salvific role seem as
though extracted like a tooth from an unwilling patient,
while Aubert’s praise of his achievement is in one
limited passage on the apparently great man. It speaks
volumes about the failure of Catholic education that
Taparelli, so deeply respected by Pius IX, Leo XIII
(another former student), and Pius XI (1922-1939), is
almost entirely unknown today. (28)
The Civiltà’s Influence
La Civiltà Cattolica’s
efforts won for it much positive contemporary
recognition throughout the Catholic world. This was
especially true after 1851, at which time another eighty
thousand programs were circulated, along with a letter
of support from the once openly hostile Father Roothan.
(29)
The reaction of Pius IX
himself should first be mentioned. It is known that the
Pope met every fortnight with one of the editors to
discuss the contents of each new issue, and that in the
summer of 1851, he spoke with the entire board at his
residence in Castel Gandolfo. Moreover, although
admitting that he did not read every issue in order,
Pius did, periodically, publish letters praising the
review and urging its support. The Pope and his close
advisors appear to have appreciated the Civiltà
as a means to an end, and sought to use it to deal with
questions that they felt to be significant. La
Civiltà Cattolica, in turn, as Professor Jemolo
notes, tried to interpret the papal will before Pius
expressed it, and to translate this prescience into an
argument for further trust and approval from the Pope.
(30)
An active
influence was readily obtained in Italy as a whole,
particularly among members of the clergy. Suggestions
for new articles and clarifications of old ones poured
in. Agents and members of the editorial board touring
the peninsula wrote glowingly of the excitement
accompanying the appearance of each new issue.
Bresciani’s novelle were said to be especially
popular. Dom Margotti (1823-1879), the politically
active editor of the Torinese journal, l’Armonia,
was one of its earliest zealous supporters. Silvio
Pellico (1789-1854), author of Le mie prigioni
(“My Prisons”, 1842), an Italian nationalist “classic”,
qualified it as “remarkable”, and its enemies as
“foolish”. The Count Avogadro della Motta (1789-1865), a
Piedmontese writer and statesman, noted its presence in
the reading room of the liberal Sardinian Chamber of
Deputies, along with other journals to be feared. (31)
Perhaps the most
impressive index of the Civiltà’s influence is
the collection of letters published in the journal’s
official Memoirs of 1854. These letters reveal
the extent to which bishops encouraged the Civiltà’s
diffusion. A number of episcopal letters written in
response to a brief from Cardinal Orioli of the Sacred
Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, dated April 8,
1850, is included in the memoirs. Orioli’s brief
impressed upon the bishops of the Papal States the need
to “redirect false social theories and prepare a dike
against heretical invasion”, and pointed out the
usefulness of the Civiltà in this regard. Most of
the letters of response praised the review’s battle
against “sophism and demagoguery”, called attention to
its support of the Papacy and occasionally lauded the
Civiltà’s support for a Thomistic revival. (32)
Also impressive
is a later missive from the Archbishop of Perugia, the
future Leo XIII, dated January 15, 1857. This letter
singled out for praise Curci’s article on the benefits
and detriments of the press (1856) and vigorously
endorsed the periodical’s crusade against the distorted
ideas of the day. It concluded by urging members of the
Archdiocese to cooperate with the Civiltà to wipe
out the germs of heresy being scattered about Italy.
(33)
The Civiltà
spent much money printing a special brochure in French,
German, Spanish, and English, as well as contacting
alumni of foreign colleges in Rome, nuncios, and Jesuit
provincials for help in spreading the “good news”
abroad. Agents were empowered to receive new
subscriptions in 1851, and very shortly many foreign
readers were added to the fourteen thousand already
taking the journal within Italy at that date. (34)
Although the
influence of the Civiltà reached as far as the
Americas, and was exceedingly important in Belgium and
Germany, France was its special second home. French
subscriptions were indeed numerous. Henry V, the Bourbon
Pretender, received the review, as did Msgr. Pie
(1815-1880) of Poitiers and other French bishops. Pie,
the lion among the intelligent legitimist prelates in
France, wrote to the editors on many occasions,
especially with regard to the spread of his own
counterrevolutionary works. Msgr. Plantier (1813-1875),
Bishop of Nîmes, called not only on Father Beckx
(1795-1887), Father Roothan’s successor (1853-1887), on
his first visit to Italy in 1858, but also on the
editors of La Civiltà Cattolica. He praised this
review, which innumerable foreigners presumed to
represent “perfectly the thought of the Holy Father”, as
“a publication which is not only important, but
necessary to the Catholic cause”. (35)
Still, Louis
Veuillot, far above all others, was the Civiltà’s
chief foreign confrère. Louis Veuillot’s biography is,
in itself, as Thureau-Dungin has said, a guide to the
battles fought by the Church in mid-nineteenth century
Europe. Veuillot was born of a cooper’s family on 11
October, 1813. He advanced from apprenticeship as a
solicitor’s clerk in Paris to a career in the border
region between journalism and serious literature. His
early journalistic orientation, shaped and aided by his
support for the July Monarchy, soon changed drastically,
when a journey to Rome led him to a renewed public
profession of the Catholic Faith.
Veuillot’s active life was
thenceforward composed of two interrelated threads. One
was a literary career of immense accomplishment,
including novels, devotional works, and satirical social
commentary. Perhaps most important in this realm is his
attack on the polished skepticism of the day in
Libres penseurs (“Freethinkers”, 1846), and his
depictions of Catholic and modern Europe in Parfums
de Rome (“Perfumes of Rome”, 1861) and Odeurs de
Paris (“Odors of Paris”, 1866). The second thread
was entwined with the journal l’Univers, which,
as noted above, was the mouthpiece of the Committee for
the Defense of Religious Freedom, the so-called French
Catholic “party”. Veuillot continued his work until
illness silenced him in 1878-1879. His services to the
Catholic cause were rewarded by his being buried in the
national expiatory church of Sacre Coeur in 1883. Pope
Pius X (1903-1914) called him the model Catholic layman.
(36)
Veuillot had
corresponded with Taparelli since 1849. He quickly
developed a warm relationship with the Civiltà
editors as a whole. He was always welcome at the
headquarters of the journal whenever he visited Rome. As
early as 1850, Veuillot asked his agents in Italy to
obtain articles from this “remarkable” new journal. (37)
Melchior du Lac, one of Veuillot’s colleagues, wrote to
the Jesuit fathers saying that as far as the editors of
his paper were concerned, the first issue of La
Civiltà Cattolica was “l’Univers abroad”.
(38)
L’Univers did
indeed print and comment on the Civiltà’s
writings constantly, thereby promoting new subscriptions
to the Italian review. Its “pure and orthodox science”
was lauded by Roumain de la Rallaye, another contributor
to l’Univers, who, like others, called attention
to its publication “under the eyes and with the consent
of the Supreme Pontiff”. (39) Louis Veuillot considered
Curci, “who often sees the Pope”, as one of l’Univers’
warmest defenders. (40) In its turn, La Civiltà
Cattolica, in 1851, described the French newspaper
as the only Parisian daily with real influence in the
Catholic camp, and one that “does not take sides except
with the Catholic Church”. (41) Veuillot was seen as a
man who displayed “truly Catholic behavior” (42) If
l’Univers “let itself be carried away sometimes by
some exaggerations of concepts and some unpleasant lack
of politeness of form”---an accusation with which the
Civiltà editors tended to disagree, although their
own tone was more subtle than that of their Parisian
friends---this might be due to provocation from
“virulent adversaries who pushed it to pass beyond the
confines of the appropriate terms of civility”. (43)
La Civiltà Cattolica
and l’Univers, with Taparelli and Veuillot as
their main representatives, did, indeed, carry on an
intellectual love affair. They were true
comrades-in-arms in the effort to answer the questions
that had been underlined by the Revolutions of 1848.
Battle language is not inappropriate to describe their
joint actions. Both journals were engaged in combat with
enemies who thought them to be the spokesmen for a dark
obscurantism. And many of these enemies were Catholics
themselves.
“Intransigence”
Perhaps the most
constantly reiterated theme of the enemies of the
Catholic counterrevolution was that journals like La
Civiltà Cattolica espoused a blind, unintelligent,
“intransigence”, making civilized, rational discourse
with them an absolute impossibility. The editors of the
Jesuit periodical were castigated along these lines from
the moment their first issue appeared. They were labeled
“vile”, “impertinent”, “ignorant”, “police informers”,
“a fistful of pedants”, “absolutist opponents of every
principle of progress and liberty”, and, in effect,
proto-fascists. (44) Anyone whose understanding of La
Civiltà Cattolica derived from the judgment of its
critics alone must conclude that the best that might be
said of such inquisitorial mountebanks and villains was
that they represented another form of shallow reaction
to revolutionary developments, and that they were
dedicated to a narrow, self-interested defense of dying
privileges. As one enemy depicted them:
…with an intransigence
sometimes trembling with fanaticism {they
published}their bloc condemnations of the modern world,
which they saw as radically vitiated by liberal
ideology, and presented as the sole view compatible with
orthodoxy their political and religious conceptions of
privileges in the womb of an officially Catholic State
not subject to the pressure of public opinion.
Critiques of this nature
have usually been sufficient to convince
people that journals like
La Civiltà Cattolica are not worth studying.
There are, of course, two ways of regarding
intransigence. If one takes intransigence to mean
closed-mindedness, nothing less true could be said of
the men responsible for La Civiltà Cattolica. If,
however, one defines intransigence as holding
steadfastly and consistently to principles one considers
to be true, the Civiltà can, indeed, be assigned
this label, and with the greatest respect. The
Civiltà’s intransigence was inspired by an
intellectual certainty of its own position, a
non-hypocritical allegiance to that position once it had
been arrived at, and a keen sense of what was at stake
should truth be ignored. At the same time, the
Civiltà understood that the Revolution’s much
vaunted “dialogue” ultimately played no role in the
revolutionary program. Rather, the Revolution was itself
nourished by a set of absolute, intractable, and
contradictory dogmas, fideistic in nature but
masquerading as rational. And the liberals, on the
surface the most moderate soldiers in the revolutionary
camp, were the chief instruments for promoting this
disguised cult, and its principal inquisitors as well.
Everything we
know about the character of the man called the “moral
dictator” of the Civiltà clearly shows that
intransigence, in the negative sense, is the last crime
of which Taparelli d’Azeglio could be convicted.
Taparelli’s letters, his public writings, and the
testimony of his contemporaries reveal an unshakeable
faith and a thirst for sanctity combined with a powerful
intellect and an open, balanced mind.
Taparelli’s
openness to new ideas, his willingness to identify
acceptable features in them, and his subtlety in general
is demonstrable in any number of ways. He remained in
constant, intimate, though combative contact with his
beloved liberal brother, Massimo. (46) He regularly
corresponded with a kaleidoscope of foreign and Italian
scholars of all political viewpoints. Taparelli was so
ready to quote Gioberti when he thought this virulent
enemy of the Society to be correct that he found himself
explicitly exempted from Gioberti’s general attack upon
“Jesuitism”. (47) So many opponents of the Civiltà
lamented the “errors” of “even a man of such eminent
merit as Father Taparelli d’Azeglio”, and the Jesuits’
ability “to seduce the most elevated intellect” (48),
that one cannot ignore what they so clearly saw: that no
one was judged by him without a hearing. Moreover,
Taparelli, as an educator, had nothing against wide
reading. He, himself, was formed not only by
counterrevolutionary writers like de Maistre, Balmes,
and Cortes, but also by meditation on the works of such
liberals as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and Victor Cousin
(1792-1867). His only concern was for the hidden problem
of eclectic education; a problem best discussed in the
fifth chapter of this book. (49)
Catholic
dialogue with liberals was one of Taparelli’s main
interests in the years preceding the Revolutions of
1848. He urged Father Roothan to encourage “meeting them
halfway” (50), and expressed a conviction that liberal
reforms might indeed relax secularizing legitimist
controls on Church freedom. Although opposed to direct
Jesuit interference in party politics, Taparelli
nevertheless took part in conversations with liberals
regarding the formation of a “progressive” Jesuit
journal in those heady days of Pius IX’s early
pontificate. (51)
When revolution
broke out at the beginning of 1848 in Palermo, where
Taparelli was then stationed, he was one of the first to
accept it. His hope, again, was that it would ensure the
Church a more complete freedom of association than the
previous regime had accorded. Such revolutionary fervor,
followed by his defense of his actions later on, won him
the distrust of a number of his fellow Jesuits. As late
as 1849, Taparelli was still urging his own family
members to fight for the reconciliation of zealous
Catholics with moderate liberals. (52)
The Revolutionary
Blindfold
Little in the
behavior of the other editors of La Civiltà Cattolica
demonstrates intransigence in the negative sense of the
word. But if Taparelli and his colleagues could display
a skepticism about the value of dialogue, if they could
become harsh and sarcastic about their opponents, this
attitude, this tone, can be attributed to a recognition
that their enemies were themselves guilty of precisely
the crime they unjustly laid at the Civiltà’s
door.
In fact,
Taparelli had already become painfully aware of this
truth during the Revolution of 1848. Soon after the
moderate phase of that revolution was victorious in
Sicily, he realized that Catholics and liberals
fundamentally differed in their definitions of the most
important words and concepts under debate, and that
liberalism precisely forbade discussion of the points at
issue. The liberal presumed that by simply informing the
world that he was the defender of freedom, progress, and
civilization, he had indeed become just that. The one
unthinkable thought was that there might be something
erroneous about the meanings he gave to noble-sounding
phrases. Hence, he could blatantly suppress thoughts and
actions contrary to his own, in realms that he himself
claimed to be subject to the “free marketplace of
ideas”, and still justify his behavior as the height of
openness. So harsh was this awakening to the reality of
liberalism for a man who had committed himself to
finding a practical rapprochement with it that
Taparelli’s future assaults upon it were tinged with the
regret of “one who loved and who suffers at feeling
himself deceived”. (53)
Taparelli and
his colleagues on the Civiltà became convinced
that all revolutionaries suffered from this same disease
of mindless intransigence. Just as Tertullian had
demonstrated that the heretic stood self-condemned, his
plea written out of court as a self-confessed deviation,
the revolutionary wrote counterrevolutionary critiques
out of rational discourse simply because they were
counterrevolutionary. Consequently, everything a
revolutionary said had to be accepted, automatically,
without question. An act of faith in the revolutionary’s
disguised creed was required. But the peculiar sin of
the Revolution was that this was an act of faith that
demanded that it be recognized not as an act of faith,
but as an act of reason; an act of faith that so
constituted itself the infallible court of reason that
it allowed no opportunity for a rational discourse
concerning its fundamental pillars; an act of faith
completely different from that of the Catholic; one
which, in short, was fideistic rather than faithful.
All revolutionaries, the
Civiltà became convinced, were committed to
pitting this new fideism disguised as reason against the
older Catholic Faith which openly identified itself as a
faith and yet also respected reason. Once this act of
fideism as reason was made by the revolutionary, a
blindfold descended over his eyes that so weakened his
own rational apparatus as to make thinking himself out
of his blindness and into the elevated realms of
Catholic thought almost impossible. No truly rational
argument could be allowed to enter into the dialogue to
correct what was already fideistically defined as the
infallible dictates of reason.
It may be said
that La Civiltà Cattolica saw its first duty as
that of finding a way to remove the blindfold from the
eyes of its opponents. Unless this blindfold were
removed, revolutionary intransigence would make a real
discussion of the Catholic message a hopeless dream. But
to cure blindness, one must have a clear idea of what it
means to see. Hence, it is to the Civiltà’s
understanding of the source of sight, the means by which
one perceives, understands, and lives the truth, that
our study must first turn.
FOOTNOTES
All journal
articles are from La Civiltà Cattolica unless
otherwise indicated. When more than one quotation
appears under a given footnote, citations (again, unless
otherwise indicated) correspond to the order of the
text.
1)
On Lamennais,
see Abbé J. Meinvielle, De Lamennais à Maritain
(Paris, 1949).
2)
For de
Maistre, see On God and Society, ed. E. Griefer
(Chicago, 1967); also, R. Lebrun, Throne and Altar
(Ottowa, 1965).
3)
L. Veuillot,
Mélanges (Oeuvres Completes, iii series, Paris,
1933), xi, 120-121; xiii, 176,
4)
See the
unpublished doctoral dissertation of A. Gough, French
Legitimism and Catholicism from the Coup d’état of 1851
until 1865 (Oxford University, 1967).
5)
R. Aubert,
Le pontificat de Pie IX (Histoire de l’Eglise,
xxi, Paris, 1952), 463.
6)
G. Goyau,
L’Allemagne religieuse: Le Catholicisme (Four
Volumes, Paris, 1905), ii, 38-39.
7)
“Le
associazioni cattoliche per la diffusione dei buoni
libri in Italia”, I, 11 (1852), 682, 684; H. Schauf,
De corpore Christ mystico sive de Ecclesia Christi
theses. Die Ekklesiologie des Konzilstheologen Clemens
Schrader, S.J. (Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1959), pp.
11-12, 29n; Goyau, Op. cit., iv, 252-252; G.
Perrone, “Analisi della Simbola del sig. Prof. Möhler”,
Studi teologici spettante al cattolicesimo e al
protestantesimo (Milan, 1858), ii, 331, 344-345.
8)
Goyau,
Op. cit., I, 237, 248.
9)
Aubert,
Op. cit., 464-466; G. Perrone, “Tractatus de cultu
sanctorum. De devotione in erga sacratissimum cor Jesu”,
Theologiae. Cursus Completus, ed., J.P.M. (9th
ed., Paris, 1841), viii, 1478-1491.
10)
J. Balmes,
El protestantesimo comparado con el catolicesimo
(2nd edition, Barcelona, 1844); Cortes,
Obras Completas (Two Volumes, Madrid, 1945).
11)
Aubert,
Op. cit., 487-489, 495-496.
12)
See J.
Leflon, La crise révolutionnaire: 1789-1846
(Histoire de l’Eglise, xx, Paris, 1949); also, Gough,
Op. cit.
13)
See above;
also, Meinvielle, Op. cit., and Aubert, Op.
cit.
14)
See
Memorie della Civiltà Cattolica (Rome, 1855), pp.
xxvi, xxx-xxxv; R. Jacquin, Un frère de Massimo
d’Azeglio: le P. Taparelli d’Azeglio. 1793-1862
(Paris, 1943), p. 106.
15)
See Curci,
“Il fatto ed il da farsi della Civiltà Cattolica”,
i, 11 (1852), 21; “Il secondo volume della Civiltà
Cattolica”, i, 2 (1850), 5-19; “Il giornalismo
moderno”, i, 1 (1850), 17; “Il MDCCCLII”, i, 8 (1851),
23-24; “Le nostre cronache contemporanee”, ii, 3 (1853),
5-18; “Ragione delle nostre riviste”, ii, 2 (1853), 7-8.
16)
Curci, “Il
secondo volume della Civiltà Cattolica”, i, 2
(1850), 14.
17)
A.C. Jemolo,
Chiesa e Stato in Italia negli ultimi cento anni
(Turin, 1948), p. 140.
18)
“Il nostro
centenario”, ii (1949), 5-13; Jacquin, Op. cit.,
pp. 105-107; P. Pirri, S.J., P. Giovanni Roothan
(Isola del Liri, 1930), pp. 464-468; Leflon, Op. cit.,
452; V. Gioberti, Il gesuita moderno (Naples,
1848).
19)
Memorie della Civiltà Cattolica,
pp. xxiv-xxvi; Curci, Memorie (Florence, 1891),
pp. 55n, 232-234; P.A. Secchi, Intorno alla vita e
alle opere del P. Giambattista Pianciani
(Rome, 1862); Il R.P. Ballerini: 1830-1907 (Rome,
1907); R.P. Ballerini, “Del padre Antonio Bresciani”, v,
2 (1862), 68-75.
20)
Curci,
Memorie, pp. 38-50, 88-205; Memorie della Civiltà
Cattolica, pp. xix-xxiv; T. Mirabella, Il
pensiero politico di P. Matteo Liberatore ed il suo
contributo ai rapporti tra Chiesa e Stato (Milan,
1956), pp. 39, 70-73; C. Piccirillo, “Le ‘idee nuove’
del Padrre Curci”, Chiesa e Stato nell’Ottocento
(Italia sacra, iii-iv, 1964), iv, ii, 608-611.
21)
Mirabella,
Op. cit., pp. 3, 5n, 39-42, 45, 84-89, 223, 328,
350; P. Droulers, “Question sociale, état, église dans
la Civiltà Cattolica a ses débuts”, in Chiesa
e Stato nell’Ottocento, iii, i, 123, 123n.
22)
Mirabella,
Op. cit., p. 3; Droulers, Chiesa e Stato
nell’Ottocento, iii, i, 133-134.
23)
Mirabella,
Op. cit., pp. 42-44, 178-186, 178n, 370-372; Piccirillo,
Chiesa e Stato nell’Ottocento, iv, ii, 614-620.
24)
See Jacquin,
Op. cit., pp. 1-66.
25)
Taparelli
d’Azeglio, Carteggi, ed. P. Pirri (Biblioteca
della storia italiana recente, Rome, xiv, 1932), 7.
26)
P. Droulers,
Chiesa e Stato nell’Ottocento, iii, i, 146.
27)
Aubert,
Op. cit., 226; Jemolo, Op. cit., pp. 188,
199.
28)
Pirri, in
Taparelli, Carteggi, p. 7, 350; Mirabella, Op.
cit., pp. 20-21; Y. de la Brière, La conception
du droit international chez les théologiens catholiques
(Paris, 1930), p. 19; Jacquin, Op. cit., pp.
157-159; P. Pirri, “Taparelli e il rinnovamento della
scolastica”, I, 2 (1927), 408-409; Miscellanea
Taparelli (Rome, 1964), pp. vii-viii.
29)
See
Memorie della Civiltà Cattolica, pp. xxxiv-xxxviii,
xlii-xlvii, lv-lvii; Mirabella, Op. cit., p.
140n.
30)
Jemolo, Op.
cit., p. 190; Memorie della Civiltà Cattolica,
pp. xlii-xliii, 5; Calvetti, “Il quinto anno”, ii, 5
(1854), 5-14; Oreglia, “Un nuovo conforto alla stampa
cattolica”, vi, 6 (1866), 5-15; G. Margotti, Roma e
Londra confronti (Turin, 1858), pp. 343-344; R.
Aubert, “Monseigneur Dupanloup e le Syllabus”, Revue
d’histoire ecclésiastique, li (1956), 899-901, 900n;
P. Bresciani, Opere (Rome, 1869), xvi, 233; Curci,
Memorie, pp. 262-265; Aubert, Pie IX, 286;
L. Veuillot, Correspondance, ed., F. Veuillot
(Paris, 1931-1932), iv, 72, 110-111, 111n; Lettere
alla direzione (La Civiltà Cattolica, Rome),
Si, Ci; Sii, Cxvi, Cxix; G. Spadolini, Rassegna
storica toscana, iv, iii-iv (July-December, 1958).
31)
Memorie della Civiltà Cattolica,
p. 114; also, pp. 6, 7, 21-22, 51-52, 52-56, 74, 115.
32)
Ibid.; For Orioli, see p. 7.
33)
Lettere alla direzione, Svii,
Cxlix, 15 January, 1857.
34)
Memorie della Civiltà Cattolica,
pp. xxxiv-xxxviii, xlvii, lv-lvii;
Mirabella, Liberatore, p. 140n.
35)
A. Simon,
L’Hypothèse libérale en Belgique (Wettern, 1956), p.
267 (1st citation); Abbé J. Clastron, Vie
de Sa Grandeur Monseigneur Plantier, Eveque de Nîmes
(Nîmes, 1882), i, 350 (2nd citation); Gough,
Op. cit., I, 60, 173; Lettere alla direzione,
passim; Goyau, Op. cit., iv, 268-269.
36)
F. Veuillot,
Louis Veuillot (Paris, 1913), passim; L.
Veuillot, Mélanges, i, xiii.
37)
L. Veuillot,
Correspondance, iii, 140.
38)
Lettere alla direzione, SiCii,
25 May, 1850.
39)
L.
Roumain de la Rallaye, Le libéralisme jugé par la
Civiltà Cattolica (Paris, 1864), p. xiv.
40)
Veuillot, Correspondance, iv,
53, 78.
41)
“Cronaca
Contemporanea”, i, 4 (1850), 685.
42)
Ibid., i, 10 (1852), 327.
43)
Ibid., ii, 1 (1853), 712.
44)
See, for
example, Oreglia, “Quali sieno le RAGIONI INCONCUCSSE
del Signor Bianchi-Giovini?”, i, 7 (1851), 232;
Taparelli, “Lo Statuto del 21 agosto”, I, 2 (1850),
688n; Marco Minghetti, Miei ricordi (Three
Volumes, Turin, 1888-1892), iii, 17-18.
45)
Aubert,
Pie IX, p. 228; Also, p. 226.
46)
Taparelli,
Carteggi, passim.
47)
V. Gioberti,
Prolegomeni del primato morale e civile degli
italiani (Capolago, 1846), pp. 216-217; Il
gesuita moderno, pp. 1, lxxvi.
48)
“Epoca
seconda di Pio Nono”, Il Cimento, vi, 2 (1855),
110.
|
