THIS book is a history of the papacy, beginning with the abortive papal embassy to the Chinese Emperor in 1705 and ending with the election of Pope Pius X in 1903. As such, it covers much the same ground as the two magisterial volumes by Owen Chadwick in The Oxford History of the Christian Church. How does it measure up against them?
It is a fascinating story: a century of papal decline in the face of the ever growing assertiveness of the European monarchies, culminating in the suppression of the Jesuits; the cataclysm of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, which reduced two popes to friendless and impotent prisoners; the restoration and rise of a new papacy, buoyed up by harnessing a newly articulate popular piety, and exchanging its rather threadbare dominion over the papal state for the spiritual dominion of doctrinal infallibility.
It is disappointing, then, that Caiani seems to lack much empathy for his subject. His conclusion “The papacy simply did not realise that the true kingdom was to be found in the people of God” is a massive over-simplification, no doubt appealing if you think, as he states, that “Christ died the humiliating death of a slave because he was a social and political revolutionary,” but that really invites the question what Catholic Christianity actually is in the first place. It is both striking and baffling that John Henry Newman, the key intellect in interpreting the situation in which the 19th-century Catholic Church found itself, is mentioned only once and in passing.
Caiani seems to have a particular prejudice against the old papal court ceremonial and Baroque piety in general: we hear several times about the swaying papal chair making its occupants seasick, and about the French being made to give up their Gallican dress for Roman outfits after 1870, when, in fact, exactly the opposite happened. Even Holy Week is reduced to “a remarkable event when the entire panoply of Baroque Catholic ceremonies, mystical devotions and arcane rituals were fully deployed”.
Dislike of ceremonial combines with a shaky hold on doctrine: so Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes was well able to understand the Virgin say “I am the Immaculate Conception,” because “In a rural world where reproductive sex was omnipresent, it must have been remarkable to learn that God had procreated asexually with a perfect woman.” So also the definition of papal infallibility in 1870: apparently, “the idea of the church as a community of equals died on 18 July 1870” when the decree on papal infallibility was promulged.
Oddly, despite his evident prejudice against the result of the First Vatican Council, he makes no mention of the truly staggering scandal unearthed by Hubert Wolf about the character and conduct of Joseph Kleutgen, who drafted the infallibility decree Pastor Aeternus.
Villains are made to behave like villains: Pius IX is “incandescent with rage”, screams and hisses at Cardinal Guidi when he expresses some doubts about the infallibility doctrine, whereas the enlightened despot Joseph II of Austria is described in a wonderfully Pooterish way as a “tad over-zealous” in imposing medical inspections on brothels, and whose subjects were largely “backward and troglodytic bigots”.
I wish I could be more positive about this account of a fascinating and important period of papal history, which really merits an up-to-date account of the immense change in the part played by the papacy between 1700 and 1900. But, time and again, I felt that Caiani was writing much more to shore up the preconceptions of disappointed “Spirit of Vatican II” Catholics than really to elucidate the incredibly taxing problems with which the early-modern and 19th-century popes had to deal, many, indeed, of their own making. The book has some excellent illustrations and a thorough bibliography.
Canon Robin Ward is the Principal of St Stephen’s House, Oxford.
Losing a Kingdom, Gaining the World: The Catholic Church in the age of revolution and democracy
Ambrogio A. Caiani
Bloomsbury £30
(978-1-80024-046-9)
Church Times Bookshop £27