Writings by Dr. John C. Rao

The Roman Question

(Verbo, Madrid, LVIII, November-December, 2020.)

I. A Tale of Two Syllabi

If I were forced to choose a single papal document representing everything that the friends of “modernity”---both those who also call themselves Catholic as well as men of purely naturalist convictions---have consistently chastised as being most regrettably obscurantist, I cannot imagine that they would fault me for placing the Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX, promulgated on December 8^th, 1864, at the top of their list. Pilloried down to our own day for its lamentable reactionary content, most contemporary critics of the Syllabus were also convinced that the Syllabus was nothing other than a politically motivated papal response to the latest attempt of Pius’ opponents to resolve the dilemma of the Temporal Power; to deal with “the Roman Question”¹

This “Roman Question” had gained ever greater importance since the 1790s due to three factors: the repeated violation of the Papal States as a result of the invasions of the peninsula accompanying the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars; the Restoration Era debates over Italian unity and what it would mean for the Papacy; and, finally, the further disruptions to the Church’s territories brought about by the violence of the so-called Risorgimento. Such disruptions, beginning with the Pope’s flight from the Eternal City and the establishment of the Roman Republic of 1848, were temporarily ended by French military intervention the following year. They became more threatening with Napoleon III’s sudden adoption of a pro-Risorgimento foreign policy and the Kingdom of Sardinia’s interpretation of its alliance with him against Austria in 1859-1860 as one giving permission to overrun papal lands outside the old Patrimony of St. Peter. It was---at least so the argument of the critics ran---the Emperor Napoleon’s September Convention with the new Kingdom of Italy in 1864, justifying removal of the French troops still remaining in the Eternal City in exchange for the rather dubious promise of the Italian government to fix its capital permanently in Florence rather than in what was supposedly to remain a papal governed Rome, that caused a suspicious Pius IX to vent his clearly political frustrations through the promulgation of the Syllabus.

Thankfully---Catholic friends of “modernity” and their moderate minded naturalist allies insist---there has been a happy ending to this sad nineteenth-century tale in our own times. For Catholicism in the present age is guided by the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, whose “spirit” they praise as having created a new and quite different kind of “Syllabus”; a “Counter Syllabus”. By means of this “Counter Syllabus” a disposition towards positive embrace of the good to be found in the modern worldview has replaced the negative obscurantism of Pius IX’s document. A major consequence of this change of spirit---encouraged by prophetic Catholics tragically crushed by the reactionary papal teachings of the nineteenth century--- has been the raising of hearts and minds from exaggeratedly earthly affairs to truly supernatural concerns. Hence, the assertion by Cardinal Angelo dell’Acqua, the representative of Pope Paul VI at the hundredth anniversary of the conquest of the Eternal City on September 20^th, 1970, that the end of the Temporal Power---the conclusion of the “Roman Question”---was an event of providential, positive significance for the life of the Catholic Church.²

The modern “Roman Question”, from 1798 down not just to 1870 or 1970 but to 2020 as well, is indeed a spiritual one. Nevertheless, an appreciation of its complexity and a proper judgment regarding the “providential” character of its supposedly more spiritual conclusion cannot be gained and made through the arguments provided by the ideologues of modernity. For the defense of the Temporal Power provided by the supposedly politically-inspired Syllabus of 1864 was actually shaped by a profound nineteenth century religious revival viewing all things natural in the light of the transformative, supernatural grace of the Incarnation, while the Counter Syllabus of the 1960s has actually guaranteed the burial of the spiritual realm under the dead weight of materialist temporal powers, creating a wrong-headed union of Church and State tighter than anything that ever existed in the past in the process. Moreover, commitment to that Counter Syllabus has placed a blindfold over the eyes of contemporary Catholic man, preventing him from doing what he needs to do to learn the truth regarding the Roman Question---a blindfold that we will now proceed to remove.

II. The First Syllabus and the Catholic Revival: Transformation of All Things in Christ

Far from being a document bound to the highly specific concerns of the September Convention of 1864, Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors had a universal spiritual purpose and had been in serious preparation since 1851. Among those thinkers and activists most significant to its genesis, completion, and interpretation were the editors of the Roman Jesuit journal, La Civiltà Cattolica. A really solid understanding of the Syllabus and what it meant for the Roman Question demands an exploration of the influences upon and character of this multi-disciplinary periodical, founded in 1850 with the express goal of providing a comprehensive Catholic critique of the revolutionary mentality based upon the fullness of the Faith. It appeared in hefty biweekly installments filled with theological, philosophical, historical, sociological, and literary articles.³

Along with many other contemporary critics of revolutionary change, the Civiltà editors realized that that fullness of Faith had been lost due to the enormous success that eighteenth century Enlightenment ideas had had in dragging religious thought and activity down to a depressingly naturalist level; a success that is generally unknown to most Catholics in our own day. This secularization of spirit had left the Church badly alienated from her rich, supernaturally rooted reality; her only true source of justification and serious effectiveness, both intellectually as well as on the practical level.

Such alienation prevented Catholics from understanding the central consequence of the Incarnation: its offer of an eternal participation of the individual person in the life of God made possible only by means of the Hypostatic Union. This “divinization”---the term used by the Greek Fathers of the Church to describe it---was to be obtained by life-long personal labor through the complex network of natural human societies and under their various visible authorities, all rooted firmly in the teaching and grace of Christ’s supernatural Mystical Body. Moreover, the obviously corporal message of the Incarnation showed that each and every one of these authoritative societies, the Church included, had to employ every tool that the physical world created by a loving and redeeming Creator had given them. The individual and society, the spiritual and the physical: all stood firmly together in the incarnational plan for man’s storming of Heaven.

Failure to understand this truth would thwart the whole mission of the God-Man at any time in history, but it had especially disastrous consequences in a world that was troubled by the ideas of the naturalist Enlightenment---the world of the Italian Risorgimento. For this world illicitly appropriated much Christian language regarding individual freedom, dignity, and perfection for its intrinsically anti-incarnational purposes, assuring not the “divinization” of the individual in Christ, but the triumph of the strongest, fallen, sinful, self-destructive human wills in the process.

All these themes reflect the Christocentric focus of the European-wide Catholic revival movement of the first half of the nineteenth century, both in thought as well as in piety, with study of the patristic doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ and devotion to the cult of the Sacred Heart central to our discussion here today.⁴ 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) avoided discussing the Church in the naturalist manner, 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.⁵ His influence extended to Italy, where men like Giovanni Perrone (1794-1876), the influential Roman Jesuit theologian, praised and defended him. Perrone was also a proponent of the cult of the Sacred Heart, which made the reality of God’s influence upon the natural order as a whole palpable to the average pious believer. In his theological writings on this devotion, Perrone insisted that society and the individuals composing it were meant to be elevated in union with Christ and Christ’s Church, analogous to the manner in which Christ’s human nature, represented by His Heart, was made sacred in union with the Word, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.⁶

Perrone’s friends and fellow Jesuit editors at La Civiltà Cattolica developed these specific ideas in impressive detail and variegated form.⁷ Three of them should especially be mentioned, given their importance to my discussion here today: Carlo Maria Curci (1809-1891), Matteo Liberatore (1810-1892), and Luigi Prospero Taparelli d’Azeglio (1793-1862). Both Curci and Liberatore had been students of Taparelli while the latter was teaching in Naples. Already well known for his Saggio teoretico di diritto naturale appoggiato sul fatto, published in the 1840s, their teacher exercised “a kind of moral dictatorship” over the entire Italian Catholic camp through the Civiltà.⁸ A step-by-step discussion of the central argument unifying all of the editors’ concerns leads us straight from the individual human person through the complex network of societies in which he perfects himself to the issue of the Temporal Power and the “Roman Question”. Once again, that unifying argument is the insistence that the Incarnation had had the effect of “shocking” Creation to its very depths, revealing to nature its mission of working in union with grace to join everything together in Christ’s Mystical Body for the sake of the adoration of the Creator God.⁹

God…has established one sole order composed of two parts: nature exalted by grace, and grace vivifying nature. He has not confused these two orders, but He has coordinated them. One force alone is the model and one thing alone the motive principle and ultimate end of divine creation: Christ….All the rest is subordinated to Him. The goal of human existence is to form the Mystical Body of this Christ, of this Head of the elect, of this Eternal Priest, of this King of the immortal Kingdom and the society of those who will eternally glorify Him.

III. The Incarnation and the Temporal Power

The Incarnation confirmed the importance of everything natural by showing that God so loved the world that He was ready to send His only begotten Son to die for it. It drove home the truth that nothing is superfluous to God; that the messages of nature all have something valuable to say and must be attended to if the full goal of life is to be known and fulfilled. All such natural messages must be preserved and cherished if man is to live life fully and gain perfection.

The highest of nature’s messages is the reality that human beings exist as individual creatures of flesh, blood, and soul, and not as abstract “human natures”. What effect does the Hypostatic Union have on individual human beings possessing only a human nature and only a human personality? Like Möhler and Perrone, the Civiltà editors insisted that participation in the life of Christ offered the believer a prize that “a person could scarcely conjecture in the abstract”; that of attaining “ a perfection that surpasses all that is innate in him”, ¹⁰ becoming “a participant in Christ”, ¹¹ “in a sense, initiated into his substance”, ¹² “the living image of the Nazarene”. ¹³

“Divinized” men thus see the whole of Creation from the transcendent position of God; from the very ground of Being Himself. Through the gift of supernatural grace bestowed by the one, true, transcendent God, men do more than gain divinity: they also come into the full possession of their humanity. “Divinized” individuals thus become the chief agents of passing the rest of the world through its purgation from sin, allowing nature in its entirety to “put on Christ”. As Bertrando Spaventa (1817-1883), an Italian Hegelian enemy of the Civiltà ironically—but correctly—commented: “in a theocracy, it is God Who dominates; in the system of the Jesuits, it is man considered as God who dominates”.¹⁴ There would be a true improvement of the world only as it was “transfigured vitally through individuals”, “by means of the individual operation of each member of the faithful”, “no longer by the finger of God, but {indirectly} by that of man, divinized by grace”.¹⁵ But this work continues unabated until the end of time due to the ever present danger of sin and the reality of man’s free will.

All of the other messages of nature, the Civiltà argued, are arranged hierarchically to serve the individual human person as he seeks to learn life’s meaning, and thereby have life more abundantly. But natural messages for natural creatures of flesh and blood as well as soul require bodies or societies with visible, effective natural authority to incarnate them. Each natural authoritative society does an immense service for men, pinpointing in a different, physically concrete way the meaning of virtue. Each makes it possible to “see” moral duties more vividly; each manifests the precise material and emotional assistance it offers the individual striving for perfection. The more thoroughly the natural truth in question is embodied by the society concerned, the greater the likelihood of the truth’s being understood, and the more perfect the imitation of God, Who taught “as one having authority” for “those who have eyes to see and ears to hear”.¹⁶

Membership in the “society” of Christ and subjection to His authority stands at the pinnacle of this hierarchy of authoritative social bodies. Christ’s first disciples encountered Him directly. We, their posterity, encounter Him through submission to what St. Augustine calls the “whole Christ”—the Christ encompassing the glorified God-Man in heaven and His visible Body on earth: the Church. She is, literally, Christ-alive-on-earth, acting for us here below, through human persons and with human as well as divine tools. The Church “is Jesus Christ, but Jesus Christ spread out and communicated by means of charity and faith in the totality of the Sons of God”; “a perpetual and universal sacrifice offered to God by the great Priest who offered Himself”; “a second Incarnation of the Son of God”. Hypostatically united with God, the Church in its simultaneous humanity and divinity confuses and enrages the world in the same way that Christ confused and enraged the Jews.¹⁷

Christ, then lives in the Church as the principle of the life of this Church, and as a principle so joined that it yields an image of the Hypostatic Union, producing, accordingly, a human-divine life, in imitation of the life that Christ Himself led on the earth, not withstanding the continued existence of the human elements in their entirety.

{The Incarnation} is a miracle repeated in a manner equally ineffable, although diverse, in the great body of the Church, divinized by the life that Jesus Christ lives in her, and still left with all the human characteristics, because composed of men. And thus, things are also true of her that seem contradictory, but are only opposites. In this way, it can be understood that Christ is united with His Church not like any other founder with respect to a society of men…but in the way the head is joined together with the body in a man, and thus blended as the vital principle with a living thing.

Not just individuals, therefore, but the authoritative social bodies that transmit nature’s messages to them must submit to the active “cleansing” guidance of the Church for their own perfection.¹⁸ This includes the State, which is purged of the false glory accorded it by men believing it to be a god holding the key to all truths, divine as well as human.¹⁹ It also includes that powerful and harder to define entity that we call our homeland, our patria, with all of its authoritative familial, linguistic, and customary influences upon us. So dreadful is its power when gone astray that those under its influence—as everyone certainly is under its influence with respect to the common language and prejudices of his homeland—will generally not even know how to phrase their complaints against it. The Church must show the patriot that his immediate homeland is good but flawed and not infallible; that it is only a partial homeland; that he has another, permanent homeland in the Mystical Body, in God, through Christ, in heaven; a homeland with its own language, customs, and affection in the form of divine love to guide it. The patriot must be taught that patriotic love and sacrifice for the glory of his nation has moral limits; that the spirit and authority of a specific place and time must bend to Christ.

And this also involves recognizing that each patria is part of the unity of all men in an international, worldwide fraternity, which the Church has the mission of solidifying and which may even exist politically--- as it did, at least in part, in the Middle Ages, guided by the Roman Pontiffs. The idea of a just international order—a just homeland for all mankind in which both his common nature and his true national differences are simultaneously respected—was far more than merely “helped” by Christianity. It was only within Catholic Christendom, headed by the Papacy, that it first became an effective natural force at all; an effective natural force designed for the benefit of individuals seeking divinization through submission to Christ.²⁰

It is this entire Incarnation-focused substructure that supported the Civiltà’s defense of the Temporal Power. The Mystical Body’s supernatural teaching and grace were meant for the benefit of the divinization of social individuals of flesh, blood, and soul. Her ineffable supernatural mission did not merely justify but actually required the use also of all natural, material tools available to her for fulfillment of her task. If it did not so require, she would be condemned to rule over nothing but inhuman, disembodied spirits, just as natural social authorities deprived of her spiritual guidance would rule over lifeless robots²¹. By giving flesh to spiritual principles with which even the supreme political authority, much less a given patria could not meddle she dealt illicit, degrading force “a mortal and irreparable blow”.²² She confirmed the value of all social authorities ready to rise up against a willful oppressor in defense of the specific truths they each incarnated. She gave the individual human person such a sense of his dignity and the path to its perfection that he would not readily accept his enslavement by any earthly force. And she backed all this up with the Church’s provision of supernatural grace, the chief antidote to the natural as well as the eternal wages of sin.²³

If the practical, historical development of this divinizing work, whose central physical authority was the Roman Pontiff, had proven to entail the possession of some small slice of territory in central Italy that appeared to allow him a basic independence of action, then this territory “is a right of Christ, whose Mystical Body is the Church, and it is to Him which rightly belongs all of her property”.²⁴ If one would only understand the Temporal Power in this incarnational perspective, Liberatore said, then everything, even “the very carriages of the cardinals, would change their appearance in your eyes”.²⁵ The divinization of the Christian individual of flesh, blood,and soul mandating authorities of flesh, blood, and soul amply justified it.

IV. The Roman Question & the Triumph of the Irrational Will

However justifiable it was, the editors of La Civiltà Cattolica never deemed the maintenance of the existing Papal States to be a Catholic dogma. Taparelli’s understanding of the many ways that authority is incarnated and becomes legitimate very much accommodated the reality of historical change and the need to accept and respond to it in a proper way. Liberatore insisted that even without the historical Papal States the Church would survive due to the strength of “the omnipotent Word of God mystically incorporated in her; her internal principle, which is Christ”.²⁶ , The dogmatic necessity, in their minds, lay in admitting a temporal, physical impact to the spiritual authority of the Papacy that definitely would permit the possibility of papal claims to authority over an earthly domain as well as outrage over its robbery. But this did not preclude a theoretical debate over just how useful possession of the older States of the Church actually had been to its central spiritual-temporal mission in the past, and a practical one regarding what good its retention would serve in a contemporary world of mega-states of vast military and economic power.

Both dogmatically and practically speaking, the loss of the temporal impact of the spiritual authority of the head of the Roman Church would be an unmitigated disaster, for the consequence would be that “il mondo ricadra nella prisca superstizione, nelle lurida corruttela del gentilesimo”. ²⁷ It was precisely this disaster that threatened the specific, historical, temporal subjects of the Pope at the hands first of the Sardinian and then of the new Italian Kingdom in the 1850s and1860s. Disaster threatened them due to the fact that both these kingdoms were guided by the ideology of naturalist modernity, with its refusal to treat supernatural truths with any respect whatsoever, and, most particularly, by a militantly naturalist, and ultimately self-contradictory nationalism. It was this dreadful threat that made the immediate answer to the “Roman Question” the unquestionable duty of the current pontiff to do his utmost to protect the individuals on the path to divinization living in the existing Papal States---however non-dogmatic in character the possession of a Temporal Power might be---from the ravages a naturalist victory would ensure.

For what would the “freedom” coming through this agent of the naturalist Enlightenment mean for his subjects but the replacement of a “participation in Christ” with a burial in the fallen, unredeemed, passionate, willful perversion of his true natural character alone? Naturalist man looks into a mirror that reflects a lower animal without wisdom; and from the distorted image he sees, he extrapolates a theory of nature and strikes out on the road of “progress”. In doing so, he must call evil good, encourage more evil when he does not achieve the particular wicked goal that he has attempted to reach, and constantly reject all medicines that might heal his sickness. He must relentlessly move from blindness to blindness, “curing” his lack of sight by tightening the bonds that hold the blindfold on him and prevent him from seeing his true state.²⁸

Starting with the words “I am free” and their newly found spirit of independence, men began to believe in the infallibility of whatever seemed natural to them, and then to call “nature” everything that is sickness and weakness; to want sickness and weakness to be encouraged instead of healed; to suppose that encouraging weakness makes men healthier and happy; to conclude, finally, that human nature {conceived of as sickness and weakness} possesses the means to render man and society blissful on earth, and this without faith, grace, authority, or supernatural community…since “nature” gives us the feeling that it must be so.

There was only one brief and highly instructive moment when Pius IX hesitated in his commitment to maintenance of the existing Papal States. This was just after the foundation of the Kingdom of Italy when Cavour, building his argument upon a memorandum from conciliatory Catholic sources within the country, offered to the pope the total renunciation of interference in ecclesiastical affairs: “a free Church in a free State” (March 27, 1861). “Cavour”, as E.E. Y. Hales notes, “understood that for the Pope the issue was entirely one of principle, a matter of conscience, and that he would never yield his standpoint on the inalienability of the Temporal Power unless he could be convinced that superior spiritual advantages would be won for the Church by sacrificing it.”²⁹

Why, then, did Pius IX reject the offer? Because, as the Count de Montalembert, himself a supporter of the principle of a “free Church in a free State”, said, what actually was being offered the pope was nothing better than “a despoiled Church in a spoliative State”,³⁰ and this, as we have seen, would erect a block to individual transformation in Christ. For Cavour and the Kingdom of Italy, brutally introducing anti-Catholic Sardinian legislation into newly annexed provinces at the very moment the offer of liberty was being made, quite clearly indicated what the word “free” actually was allowed to mean: whatever they willed.³¹ Arturo Jemolo underlines the madness of Cavour’s actions even when viewed from a purely pragmatic standpoint if he meant his theoretical offer to be taken seriously by Pius IX at all.³²

He could well have delayed the extension of the Piedmontese ecclesiastical legislation to the annexed province; there would have been no harm in the convents conserving their juridical personality for a few months longer; Pantaleoni {a liberal Catholic}, who is certainly not to be suspected of tenderness for the cause of the religious, gave warning on the 13^th March, how difficult it was to make it acceptable at Rome that no religious corporation should have a juridical personality. Nor can it be claimed that it was simply a matter of weakness on the part of the government in the face of the party of action {the more revolutionary Left}: was it not Cavour himself who, in the late autumn of ‘60 wrote to Pepoli, the commissioner in Umbria: ‘Put into force energetic measures against the friars. You have done well to occupy some of the convents to recover there the emigrants from Viterbo. Go on like that so as to heal the leprosy of monasticism which infects the territories remaining under the Roman domination’?

As far as the editors of the Civiltà were concerned, this was what was inevitably to be expected from the naturalist, liberal nationalist ideologues dominating the new Kingdom of Italy. They talked a wonderful talk about freedom, progress, and obedience to the will of the people. But what all these things actually meant in practice was whatever their naturalist, liberal nationalist “Party-State” said that they meant. Antonio Gallenga, writing in Il Cimento in 1855, had already made this crystal clear, insisting that everyone must be bound to the type of education determined by the powers in control of the State, regardless of whether they approved of that education or not. Why? Because men had not yet been given “the discernment of good from bad”. The population was still in thrall to Catholicism. Until national regeneration had been completed, Gallenga continued, “let us say it frankly”, there had to be a “tyranny of education”. Sardinia needed to have “united in one person the attribute of supreme magistrate and supreme pontiff”. Freedom in a country still subject to “evil Catholic influences” had to involve restraints. Restraints on liberty, one might ask? God forbid! These are merely restraints on Catholic slavishness. It is for the sake of “helping” people to be free that the Party-State conceived the need to become absolute teacher.³³

But among us, the citizen is the property of the State. The law of conscription binds him to the soil of the fatherland during the most florid period of life. The State has, therefore, the right and the duty of exercising over him an almost parental tutelage. It scarcely would be able to hold itself responsible to the laws of the country if it had been delinquent, or permitted that its moral or political education be perverted by others. It would only half understand the office of legislator, if it did not claim for itself the domination of education.

From the Inquisition of the Church, which was based on a firm belief in truth, one moves to the pseudo-Inquisition of the Party-State, which suppresses its enemies in the name of pseudo-truths it admits it could never really know nor define for each and every individual. The dominant faction crushes any supposed opposition of true popular will to its desires in the name of the very People in question. This the party does by claiming that an expression of popular will contrary to the actions of the State is a manifest absurdity. By definition, the State machinery already guarantees perfect representation of the people’s will. Any “apparent” expression of popular will contrary to the wishes of the Party-State is then easily explicable: it is merely an indication of the continuing influence of irrational and superstitious forces frightening the People into acting against its own real desires. Rather than giving in to this unpurged popular will, the forces manipulating it—Church and corporate institutions in all likelihood—must be chastised anew. In the name of the future educated population, it is necessary to oppose what amounts to a vulgar and ignorant mob. An enlightened populace a generation hence will thank the Party-State for what it has done.³⁴

‘Each people has the right to govern itself. The people is defined as that minority which thinks the way that I do; all the rest who wish to enjoy the fruits of peace must be illuminated as we are. Until they are illuminated, their vote has no value.’ Can he {Gallenga} express with more splendid candor the theory of a despotism of a small faction over a whole people? If the ‘obscurantists’ made this discourse, calling themselves alone the active and intelligent population, God knows with what invectives they would be excoriated.

The answer to the “Roman Question”, both in its broader meaning as well as in its more specific sense of defense of the remainder of the existing Papal States in the years between the first Sardinian assault on their territory and 1870, had to be one that clarified exactly what was at stake in the war of the Catholic and naturalist Enlightenment world views. Hence, on the one hand, the Syllabus of Errors, along with the manifold articles of La Civiltà Cattolica underlining its opponents’ willful, materialist destruction of the temporal freedom, progress, and civilization---historical Italian civilization included---that they claimed to be the sole defender.³⁵ Hence, on the other, an anti-nationalist emphasis on the worldwide international impact of a Christianity possessing Papal Rome as its universal capital; a project promoted through the great celebrations surrounding the canonization of the Japanese Martyrs in 1862, the calling of Vatican Council in 1870, and, perhaps in the most “fleshly” manner of all, by means of the strengthening of a globally-recruited Papal Army.³⁶

V. Response to the Historical Transformation of the Roman Question: Admirable Doctrinal Rigor Offset By a Problematic Praxis

Modernist critics of any union of Church and State have correctly pointed out how much officially Catholic monarchies abused that association for purely political ends through much of history. On the other hand, they are apparently ignorant of the fact that this was one of the primary complaints of practically every representative of the nineteenth century revival, the editors of La Civiltà Cattolica included. The constant threat of a political misuse of the Church-State connection to crush the spiritual independence of the Mystical Body and thereby thwart its attempts to effect temporal changes in sinful behavior was all too clear to them. So was the historical weakness of the Papacy in resisting such threats, even when in possession of the States of the Church. But the dangers of life in a fallen world in no way impaired their recognition of the inevitability of the very union that could be so distorted for the guidance of men of flesh and blood.

Fr. Carlo Curci, one of the most important editors of La Civiltà Cattolica figured among a number of prominent clerics and prelates who, over time, and especially after the death of Pius IX, became convinced that the “fact” if not the justice of the creation of the Kingdom of Italy had to be recognized and the answer to the “Roman Question” altered accordingly. Leo XIII (1878-1903), Pius’ successor, along with his most famous Cardinal Secretary of State, Mariano Rampolla di Tindaro (1843-1913), rejected their argument. From the very outset of his reign, the new pontiff proclaimed his determination to conduct a “grand politics”, maintaining the temporal influence of the Church’s spiritual authority in a myriad of ways that still involved commitment to the reestablishment of the stolen Papal States.³⁷

Occasional but quickly dispelled indications of a possible Italian-Papal détente aside, Leo repeatedly sought the help of one or the other of the Great Powers to achieve his temporal goal. Despite pronounced efforts to influence Bismarck, who kept papal hopes for support alive for quite some time, the new German Empire failed him. It was failure in Germany that brought Leo to pursue what proved to be another dead end: the enticement of France to aiding the cause of papal restoration through his encouragement of a Catholic Ralliement to maintenance of the Third Republic. Still, as Pope St. Pius X’s (1903-1914) Cardinal Secretary of State Merry del Val (1865-1930) later admitted to the Austro-Hungarian ambassador to the Holy See, even Leo openly said that his policy regarding the Roman Question was based not upon dogmatic commitment to the idea of a revived Papal States, but simply upon his inability to see any other pathway to maintaining some form of independence for the Holy See to pursue its spiritual-temporal mission.³⁸

Pius X, already long known to the government of Italy as “a man with whom one can work”, saw further insistence upon a return of the Papal States as being utterly pointless. “Se il Re mi mandasse a dire di riprendere possesso di Roma, perché egli se ne parte e me la lascia”, he said, “io gli farei rispondere: resti al Quirinale e se ne parlerà un’altra volta. Ci mancherebbe altro per la Santa Sede.” ³⁹ Even a miniscule Temporal Power would be a horror in his eyes. “What would we do if they would hand us over the administration of the Leonine City?” Merry del Val asked. “We would be very embarrassed as to how to administer it.”⁴⁰ Nevertheless, like his predecessor, he could not see the answer to the dilemma, and looked to Divine Providence for its solution.

Governments outside of the peninsula, while not necessarily interested in maintaining the Vatican’s temporal influence, were concerned that any attempt by the Holy See to solve the Roman Question through sole negotiation with the Kingdom of Italy would involve a further Italianization of the Papacy they wished to avoid. In German and Austrian minds in particular, only a European wide agreement could avoid this danger. World War One complicated the solution to the Roman Question enormously. Pope Benedict XV’s (1914-1922) efforts to exercise papal influence to bring the conflict to a conclusion found him battling Catholics in all of the belligerent countries who were convinced that their particular nation’s position was unquestionably the sole spiritually “just” one.⁴¹ Moreover, he had to try to bring his supernatural authority over temporal matters to bear from inside an Italy part of whose price for joining the Entente through the Treaty of London in 1915 was her partners’ agreement to allow the Holy See no participation whatsoever in any peace settlement.⁴²

Benedict’s experience in the War helped mightily to convince him that the future temporal influence of the Holy See and the Church in general lay in the cultivation of a new Christendom outside of a Europe dedicated to its self-destruction. Nevertheless, his last words included a hope that his successor might finally bring the immediate Roman Question concerning the political position of the pope in Italy to an end. Pius XI (1922-1939), who signaled his own desire to pursue this goal by giving the first external blessing to the City of Rome since 1870 upon his election in 1922, seemed to have fulfilled Benedict’s wish with the Lateran Accords of 1929, reconfirmed, with the end of the Kingdom of Italy, by the Republican Constitution of 1947. These Accords, as everyone well knows, reestablished the Temporal Power in the form of a City of the Vatican and its extraterritorial holdings, gave the Papacy certain financial satisfactions, and, most importantly from the standpoint of the argument of the editors of La Civiltà Cattolica, a serious temporal influence in daily life through its recognition of Roman Catholicism as the religion of the nation.

On both the doctrinal as well as the practical level, one might, at least at first glance, have considered the Roman Question thereby resolved. One could argue that reduction of the Papal States to Vatican City saved the principle of the moral validity of some Temporal Power as an independent base of practical action for the spiritual authority in a manner that made it clear that the Church was not putting any misplaced hopes in playing Great Power politics. A historian might also make the claim that the sovereignty of the Holy See was perhaps better respected in World War Two than it had been when the Roman Pontiffs were in possession of the fullness of the Papal States in the balance of power wars of the eighteenth century. And in that realm where the older Civiltà editors believed the real Roman Question truly coincided with doctrine, the Papacy seemed to be teaching exactly what it was supposed to teach: with Pius XI demanding recognition of the sovereignty of Christ as King over the entire universe, and both he and his successor, Pius XII (1939-1958), urging a Gramsci-like effort to dominate all cultural spheres as a means of gaining spiritual influence over physical nature as a whole.

Nevertheless, the response to the “Roman Question” on the level of actual clerical praxis brings up some serious grounds for concern. While admitting the nuances called for in a case-by-case discussion of the interaction of local temporal issues and ecclesiastical policy, I do not feel great alarm over the Vatican’s theoretical cold shoulder to political parties and movements that either openly or in an indirect manner claimed to be the “Catholic” agent for protecting the common good, both spiritual and temporal. Rome’s fear of identifying the Faith with the inevitably complex and potentially anti-Catholic demands of modern political forces in their search for popular support and utilization of state authority---especially when clerics were involved in leading and guiding them---was entirely understandable. In fact, this fear could be considered as simply a manifestation of the heightened awareness of dangers of this kind signaled by the nineteenth century revival, with potentially secularizing Catholic Parties serving as the modern equivalent of secularizing Kings of the past.

However, what is alarming is what appears to have been a “preferential option for compromise with existing authorities”, whatever these powers might be. In the twentieth century, this has resulted in a myriad of agreements with openly non-Catholic political parties and governments who have promised to protect the clergy, the cult, and the private teaching of the catechism in exchange for a practical ecclesiastical abandonment of the pursuit of the Social Kingship of Christ. But what I have been arguing here is that it is precisely in the open insistence upon the full temporal impact of the Church of Christ under the guidance of the Holy See that the real essence of the Roman Question reveals itself.

It seems to me that there is a world of difference between the action taken by Pope St. Pius X in totally rejecting the conditions accompanying the French Third Republic’s denunciation of the Concordat in 1905 and the active support given by him to Italian Liberals through the Gentiloni Pact of 1913. In this second category also lies Pius XI’s Arreglos with the Mexican Government ending the revolt of the Cristeros in 1929, and even much of the actual substance of the Vatican response to Mussolini’s violations of the Lateran Agreements throughout the 1930s. The first type of action, while indeed, in effect, accepting the consequences of the French Government’s unilateral separation of Church and State, in practice left the Holy See free to pursue her mission as she saw fit. The second set of examples all seem to share a willingness to accept the idea that the Roman Question is one of simply maintaining order in the sacristy, the church building, and the catechism classroom, while the world outside is left to endure its subjection continued secularization. And unfortunately it would prove not to take long for churchmen to demonstrate that the step turning prudential sacrifice of pursuit of the Social Kingship of Christ into its theoretical abandonment was an easy one to take.

VI. The Counter Syllabus and the Roman Question: Palingenesis and the Deformation of Transformation in Christ

Promoters of the “Counter Syllabus” dominating the Church since the time of the Second Vatican Council have given an answer to the “Roman Question” that the supporters of the Syllabus of Pius IX would have understood to be both theoretically unacceptable as well as practically disastrous. They have done so by means of the transformation of an officially “pragmatic” pastoral approach to dealing with contemporary conditions into a dogmatically rigid weapon effectively preventing the Roman Pontiff and any bishop, priest, or layman believing in the traditional Magisterium of the Church from exercising a real spiritual influence over the temporal order. The result has been exactly what the editors of La Civiltà Cattolica would have predicted it to be: a renewed surrender to the naturalist, secularizing temptations of the eighteenth century that the men of the Catholic revival of the 1800s fought so hard to overturn.

Collaboration with naturalist Enlightenment secularism has once again ensured---and in much more craven form---a replacement of the search for a true transformation in Christ with a commitment to the deformation of the individual, by depriving him of the authoritative guidance of spiritually enlightened social institutions necessary to his sanctification. Through this abandonment of the Roman mission to dedicate nature to the greater glory of God, Catholics are called upon to lower things spiritual to the level of the fallen temporal world the Savior came to redeem; to decline the invitation to a banquet nourishing a supernatural divinization and to dine, instead, upon an earthly “mess of pottage”.

Many critics of the revolutionary Counter Syllabus have noted a dramatic liturgical illustration of the change of emphasis. This is the movement of the Feast of Christ the King, designed by Pius XI to take place at the end of October, just before that of All Saints, to indicate the temporal labor required of each and every spiritually healthy Christian in our earthly realm as the pathway to his eternal reward, to the last Sunday of the ecclesiastical year---thereby identifying a Kingship of Christ that can only come at the end of time, in the supernatural world. And yet this “spiritualization” of Rome and the Roman Church has had precisely the opposite effect, uniting the Papacy with the fallen temporal realm under the latter’s own terms, more tightly and more perversely than Church and State have ever been united in the past.

This is not the place to outline all of the various influences bringing about the victory of a transformed and deformed answer to the Roman Question in full detail. Let us limit ourselves here briefly to indicating the central role that has been played in this sea change not by the atheism of the Enlightenment of Spinoza and Diderot, but through the much more effective and seemingly more religious minded Enlightenment of two otherwise contrasting means of burying redeeming grace under the muck of fallen nature: those provided by Jean Jacques Rousseau’s “democratic” general will and by the “individualist” pluralism of the Anglo-American world.

Although totally earth-bound in his approach, Rousseau’s emphasis on the overriding importance of non-rational feeling and passion in human life does give his “natural world” a certain intangible, mysterious glow. It has, therefore, since the very outset been seen even by some Catholics as open to sacred influences that a positivist, mathematical, scientific, experimental approach to understanding the universe cannot allow. Those enchanted by his position have even gone so far as actually to limit the very essence of the spiritual to the kind of “tingle” given by Rousseau’s vision, equating the presence of God and God’s blessings only with the existence of strong internal feelings and the vital, energetic, conquering kind of action that they release. This was ultimately the real point of the Abbé Felicité de Lamennais’(1782-1854) formative Essay on Indifference (1817), which was not a call for devotion to the external Deposit of Catholic Faith, but, rather, a condemnation of half-hearted or lazy commitment preventing the internal “felt” witnessing to the truth that alone could truly do God’s work.

Lamennais passed this ultimately Rousseau-steeped teaching to his Catholic descendents in union with the popular nineteenth century concept of palingenesis. Formed from the Greek words “again” and “birth”, palingenesis was the notion that a new age of humanity was emerging out of ancient and Christian traditions that modern men thought erroneously to be dead. Palingenesis was appealing to all defenders of modern ideas, such as the followers of Henri de Saint Simon (1760-1825), who still possessed a spiritual sense, did not want to jettison the entire Christian baggage of European civilization, and were therefore horrified by the violence of the French Revolution.

Sharing this vision and critiquing what he viewed to be the moribund Catholicism in his day, weighed down by a union of the Church with the time-bound State deadly to the internal spiritual enthusiasm needed for sanctity, Lamennais lamented “how far we still are from that religion of devotion, of self-forgetfulness for the good of all; in sum of that fraternity of which one speaks so much!”⁴³ But this death of the spirit could not last. A moribund Catholicism would be reborn in a new and better form that would place the existential choice of belief or nihilism before everyone. “There will be no more middle way between faith and nothingness”, Lamennais wrote to Joseph de Maistre with respect to the decision to be made in the world that was coming into being. “Everything is extreme today. There is no dwelling place in between.” ⁴⁴ Still, an elitist guide to this Promised Land would be necessary. Rousseau’s recognition that the democratic will of all “passionate, deeply feeling, natural men” that should guide society was prevented from exercising its beneficent impact due to the continued power of existing oppressive forces over ordinary folk led him to the conclusion that people’s real desires had to be interpreted though his own infallible, prophetic insight. Lamennais, following his path, felt that the spiritually “dumb”, contemporary Catholic episcopacy and papacy, all too dependent upon union with the temporally powerful State, had to be awakened to the true spiritual message of the Gospel through the imposition of his personal, prophetic Magisterium.

Unfortunately, Lamennais’ “separation” of Church and State, rooted in the convoluted reasoning of a Rousseau-like naturalism, guarantees the perpetration of the monstrous fraud that the editors of La Civiltà Cattolica so accurately identified. What it actually ensures is the placing of the authority of both institutions in exactly the same hands: those of the prophet. The prophetic individual---or, more generally, the party of disciples to which his vision gives birth---understands God as well as the believing People’s true character and desires. He (or it) can therefore answer the “Roman Question” properly. Should Lamennais’ advice be taken, the Church would no longer have to worry about clashes with the State on matters where their jurisdiction over creatures of body and soul might intersect, because in his system such a collision cannot possibly take place. How could there be any tension of authorities when all power was invested in the God-People-Prophetic agent, from whose judgments only an enemy of everything spiritual and temporal might think of making an appeal? In the final analysis, it is prophetic, energetic, passion and vital will which are the King in the land shaped by the new Christianity that this union represents. Moreover, that will is truly absolute---not bound by a Tradition enshrined in Scripture and decisions of the Magisterium throughout history like the individual will of a particular Roman Pontiff.

Despite his condemnation by Gregory XVI, Lamennais’ influence went underground, and has come back again and again to haunt the Catholic world. Its latest reemergence, since the 1920s and 1930s, has come through varied forms of Personalism, with their intangible, mystical adulation of the freedom either of the passionate, feeling individual or the passionate, feeling fraternal community, always, as usual, instructed regarding the true meaning of that feeling by a prophetic spiritual elite. Given “scientific” evolutionary support by Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), and expanded upon by in the writings of morally relativist, Liberation, and “Third World” theologians, it was this intellectual influence that “drafted” the palingenesist Counter Syllabus of the 1960s; the so-called “Spirit of Vatican Two”. Each time this vision returns it announces itself to be strikingly new, startlingly energetic, invincible, and yet, predictably, the humble victim of overpowering, earthly-minded, persecuting forces. Ever time it appears, it raises the banner of the primacy of the Holy Spirit over the wrong-headed, traditional, earthly concerns of the Roman Church, and then, in practice, proceeds to reduce the Christian mission to a set of pressing temporal imperatives. Over and over again, it insists that it is ushering in an age of Christian victory and Christian freedom, although the greater its successes the less there is anything distinctly Christian about it, the more that the very word Catholic tends to disappear entirely from its lexicon, and the more that the individual believer is reduced to becoming a helpless tool of the ideological prophet.

But this intellectual influence could not have provided its answer to the Roman Question without the aid of the individualist-pluralist Anglo-American domination that came through the power and influence gained by the United States as a result of its victory in the Second World War. By 1945, Catholic Europe, tired of the seemingly endless, bloody, spiritual and ideological wars that had characterized the past two hundred years, was ready to hear an answer to the Roman Question abandoning the difficult search for truth and real human greatness offered by the transformation of all things in Christ. Into the breach of post-war demoralization walked Moderate Enlightenment individualism, fathered by John Locke, nurtured by the British Whigs and the American Civil Religion, baptized at the end of the Second World War by Christian Democrats like Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), and now preached to the world through the praxis-as-dogma teaching called pluralism.⁴⁵

According to the pluralist Magisterium, people should accept the practical reality of diversity, and pragmatically tolerate one another’s incompatible beliefs and ways of life, allowing all of them their freedom so as to procure an end to a hatred and bloodshed that in no way can be pleasing to the Incarnate God. E pluribus unum is pluralism’s “common sense” motto: freedom and a temporal peace, prosperity, and unity are all to emerge from society’s practical embrace of diversity. Through this eminently peaceful and supposedly purely pragmatic approach, the Papacy would also finally be totally free to pursue its mission in a way that it had never really been free to do through the past union of Church and State. What could possibly be the objection to pluralism’s promise of the Golden Age?

The objection is that what it really promises in a political and social order and a fulfillment of individual human dignity through a total surrender to Original Sin. Rather than simply urging men pragmatically to accept the reality of human diversity, it presses them positively to multiply differences of belief and moral behavior to prove the validity of their pluralist credentials. It renders fallen nature the teacher of man and society and declares the redemptive transformation of all things in Christ unnecessary and unwanted; in fact, the cause of social evil and individual slavery. Through its subtle transformative influence over Catholics and the Church, the pluralist Blitzkrieg inspired the calling of a “pastoral” and “purely pragmatic” synod that, in practice, was utilized by the palingenesist, prophetic, dictatorial elites that have shaped and interpreted its guidance into the only truly dogmatic Council in the history of the Church; the only acceptable Council for the new Catholic man. But given that this prophetic elite is not actually united in what it deems most significant in life, and given that the multiplication of factions is ensured by the individualist pluralist mentality, the Counter Syllabus has made certain that the “Holy Spirit” shapes Catholicism according to the temporal wishes of whatever the strongest party in a given land wants the Paraclete to teach.

What the Counter Syllabus has done is, without officially changing doctrine, radically deformed the life of Catholics---the rhythm of their weeks and years, the nature of their feasts and fasts, their private devotions, their public worship, and the appearance of their churches---and in doing so taught them the new doctrine of surrender to the fallen natural world more subtly and effectively than might otherwise have done. It has changed everything while claiming to change nothing. All the ideas of the world have become acceptable, and the Catholic faithful have been taught to acquire the habit of being open to them. The only unacceptable thing is the ancient mode of life, the Catholic mode, which has been dismantled, its devotees condemned as semi-fascist at the very best. This modern answer to the Roman Question seems to me to have its symbolic ending in the tragic video seen by all of us in the midst of this dreadful worldwide virus: that showing a Roman Pontiff friendly to the Counter Syllabus preaching to an empty Piazza San Pietro.

---

Email Dr. John Rao.

Return to main page.