Should the Catholic Church control governments? Some contemporary Catholic thinkers in the United States think it should. A movement known as Catholic integralism has been enjoying something of a revival in contemporary American political thought, especially among Catholic critics of liberalism and modernity. They are advocating a form of government in which the Catholic Church would provide leadership and direction to the state based on the authority and teaching of the church. Such a political system would create what might legitimately be called a theocracy.
Historically, integralism probably had its fullest expression as a religious and political movement in late 19th and early 20th-century France. However, the Catholic Church has had a much longer experience running a theocracy—its thousand-year rule over the Papal States.
Most Roman Catholics today would have no idea what or where the Papal States were. Yet at their greatest extent, they occupied fully one-third of the Italian peninsula. The last remnants of the Papal States went out of existence only in 1870, when the Kingdom of Italy seized the city of Rome from the pope and made it the capital of a new, unified Italian state.
Temporal rule
The history of the Papal States and what constituted their territories is complex. The papacy long claimed they were the gift of the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century. Actually, the origins of the Papal States as a territory over which the popes had political control dates from the eighth century. That is when the Carolingian kings, first Pepin and then Charlemagne, confirmed the pope as ruler of lands they had conquered in Italy—but for a price. In exchange, the pope had to support their dynastic ambitions to become kings of the Franks—and eventually Holy Roman Emperors.
It was not until the 18th century that the Papal States reached their full extent and the pope’s rule over his territory was undisputed by the European powers. This papal control was disrupted by the traumatic events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. At that time, the Papal States were seized, and popes were twice expelled from the city of Rome and taken prisoner. With the defeat of Napoleon, however, the Papal States were fully restored to the pope at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. The Papal States were governed as an absolute papal monarchy. There was no constitution and no representative government. The popes appointed governors of the various provinces; those governors were usually cardinals or bishops. Their administration of the Papal States was notoriously inefficient and often corrupt.
The most notorious instance of papal misgovernment, and indeed injustice, was the Mortara case in the 1850s. Edgardo Mortara, the child of a Jewish family in Bologna in the Papal States, had been clandestinely baptized by a Catholic housemaid in his family’s home who feared he was in danger of death. When this became known to the Catholic authorities in Bologna, the six-year-old Edgardo was removed from his family in order to be raised as a Catholic—as required by law. The affair created a furor throughout Europe, especially since Pius IX refused to intervene but instead effectively adopted the child, who ended up becoming a priest. Yet the Mortara case succeeded in placing what came to be known as the “Roman Question”—the misgovernment of the Papal States—high on the agenda of the European powers.
When the Risorgimento, the movement toward Italian unification under the leadership of the Kingdom of Sardinia, began to pick up steam in the late 1850s and 1860s and took aim at church territories, the pope found himself with few defenders of his temporal power. In 1861, Sardinia seized the bulk of the Papal States except for Rome and its immediate environs, which enjoyed the protection of French troops. The Italian Kingdom was then proclaimed, with Rome to become its capital.
The 1860s were marked by a standoff between the new Italian kingdom and the papacy. This interval gave Pope Pius IX the opportunity to conceive and plan an ecumenical council, the First Vatican Council. As is known from the history of the Council, at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870, French troops were withdrawn from Rome. This offered the Italian Kingdom the opportunity to seize the city, which it did less than two months later. The pope, refusing to recognize this seizure, withdrew into the Vatican, effectively as its prisoner. The Council, which had adjourned earlier in the summer after passing the decrees on papal primacy and papal infallibility, never convened again.
Theocracy
Why were the Papal States so important to the papacy, and why was their loss viewed with almost apocalyptic alarm? Of course, the States had been in the possession of the papacy in one form or another for 1,000 years. They were viewed by the popes, not least by Pius IX, as part of the patrimony of Peter, the gift not only of the emperor but of God himself for the security of the church. Their loss would be a great dereliction by the pope under whom it occurred.
It is most important, however, to realize that the Papal States were not a state like any other state, nor was the pope their sovereign in the manner of any other king. In international law, a state is usually understood to be a defined territory having a permanent population and a relatively stable form of government, capable of entering into relations with other states. Such a state has a finality that is proper to its secular nature: security, stability, prosperity, rights, etc. The Papal States had none of these finalities. It was the terrestrial expression and support, if you will, of the divine mission of the Holy See, which was religious, spiritual and moral. The finality of the Papal States was therefore transcendent.
It was the pope, in his role as Bishop of Rome, who held jurisdiction over the Papal States in the service of this divine mission. This was why the Papal States could never be anything other than an absolute papal monarchy. Only the pope could direct it to its supernatural end, not as a secular ruler but as Vicar of Christ, the successor of St. Peter and the personification of the Holy See. The Papal States were of necessity a theocracy.
The question that confronted Pius IX and his advisers in the Curia in the 1860s was, therefore, how the papacy could vindicate its authority and independent voice once it lost the very platform from which it spoke, i.e., the territory of the Papal States. What would be the context and setting from which the papacy could make itself heard and exercise its magisterial role in the world?
If the papacy was about to lose its territorial existence, Pius IX came to realize that it still possessed internal spiritual resources upon which it could draw to vindicate its authority. This, of course, was precisely what Vatican I intended and accomplished in its solemn decrees regarding papal primacy and papal infallibility in “Pastor Aeternus,” the one significant document that the Council produced.
A blessing in disguise
Pius IX and subsequent popes until Pius XI never reconciled themselves to the loss of the Papal States. They refused any accommodation offered by the Italian state. But in the decades after the Council, the papacy dramatically strengthened and consolidated its role as a spiritual authority in the church—and thus arguably found itself in a stronger position after the Council and the loss of the Papal States than it had ever enjoyed before.
Almost six decades later, in 1929, the papacy’s relationship with the Italian state was resolved by the Lateran Treaties. Vatican City was created, the sole purpose of which is to guarantee the papacy’s independence from Italy. With this, the papacy came to realize that it did not require a territorial base to exercise its mission in the world. It could be recognized as an independent international legal personality and actor absent that territory. It is in virtue of this status and personality as the Holy See, not in virtue of the pope’s sovereignty over the Vatican City, that the papacy enjoys international diplomatic recognition.
With this development, the papacy let go of the idea that a theocratic state was necessary for the exercise of its ministry. The loss of the Papal States came to be recognized as a blessing in disguise, and there has been no ambition on the part of the modern papacy to regain them.
Lessons
What does that all have to do with Catholic integralism? Given the religious and political agenda of Catholic integralism and in the face of existing theocratic states, both actual (Iran, Afghanistan) and aspirational (Israel, at least among some Israelis), what does the experience of the Catholic Church with the Papal States have to say?
First, it tells us that theocratic states tend to be inefficient, corrupt and often unjust. This is because they are absolutist and accountable to no one—except, in the eyes of their rulers, to God!
Second, it shows us that the spiritual finality of a church or a religion does not require a territorial or political expression. This was a very difficult lesson for the papacy to learn: The Papal States had existed for a millennium and were thought to be essential to the divine mission of the church. This turned out not to be the case.
Third, the story of the Papal States reveals that a church or a religion is better served by calling on its own spiritual resources to vindicate its authority rather than on political power. The papacy has become an immeasurably stronger institution in terms of influence and authority without the Papal States than it ever was with them.
