Ratification of the Lateran Treaty

The Parliament of Italy ratified the Lateran Treaty, which had been signed on February 11 at the Lateran Palace, on June 7, 1929. This Treaty created the Vatican City-State, the sovereignty of the Holy See, recognized buildings belonging to the Vatican outside the small territory pictured on the map at left, including the Lateran Basilica (the Cathedral of the Pope as the Bishop of Rome), other major basilicas, educational institutions, headquarters of several congregations, and the Bambino Gesu hospital. All these properties are in Rome; certain properties outside Rome, like Castel Gandolfo, were also included in the Treaty. The Pope was recognized as the head of the Vatican City-State.

D.D. Emmons explains the background to this treaty in an Our Sunday Visitor article from July last year:

Beginning in 1850, King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia started his quest to consolidate all of Italy under one government and become the king of a unified Italy. The largest of the many independent Italian states were those controlled by the pope, who at the time was Pius IX (r. 1846-78), a serious stumbling block to Italian unification. The king, either through negotiations or threat of force, began annexing areas of Italy under a new national government. Pope Pius refused to relinquish any of his holdings, but the king occupied one Papal State after another, until by 1860 he had seized all the papal holdings except for the city of Rome. The new central government wanted Rome as the nation’s capital city, but the pope would have none of it. Protected by a French garrison, Pius refused to recognize Victor Emmanuel’s government and decried what he considered to be the robbery of the Papal States: the seizure of Church property belonging to all Catholics. . . .

On September 20, 1870, after the French garrison protecting the pope departed to fight in the Franco-Prussian war, King Victor’s army forcibly occupied Rome. The papal domain, once over 16,000 square miles, was reduced to the Vatican’s one-sixth of a square mile. Victor, by now king of all of Italy, offered considerable concessions to Pope Pius IX if he would acknowledge the new government and the annexation of the Papal States. These concessions, called the Law of Guarantees, recognized the pope as the head of the Catholic Church in Italy, accorded the pope all the rights of a sovereign monarch and provided compensation to the Church for the Papal States. The pope adamantly declined, believing that such agreement would be tantamount to placing the papacy under the rule of and subject to the king of Italy. . . .

From 1870 to 1929, Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, Benedict XV, and Pius XI had considered themselves "Prisoners of the Vatican" until Pope Pius XI agreed to negotiations with the Italian Government, led by Benito Mussolini, Victor-Emmanuel's prime minister. Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, represented the Pope. 

Negotiations took a few years, starting in 1926.

D.D. Emmons outlines other matters agreed to in the Treaty:

Among the treaty agreements, the Holy See acknowledged the legitimacy of the Italian government and its right to the Papal States; the Vatican was, in turn, financially compensated; and Vatican City was created and designated a sovereign nation, independent of Italy, with the pope as head of state. Catholicism became the religion of Italy; marriage laws were placed under the rule of the Church, and Catholic religious training was included in every school. The Italian government provided Vatican City with a train station, a telephone and telegraph office, a post office and a radio station. The pope was once again ruler of a sovereign nation and in no way subject to an earthly potentate. . . .

Please read the rest there. 

When my late husband and I went to Rome in November 2002 with our former chaplain at the WSU Newman Center, Father Carr, we noted each time we left Italy and entered Vatican City, and vice versa, crossing the border with ease!

Image credit (public domain): Boundary map of Vatican City, taken from the annex of the Lateran Treaty

Music and Politics: Va Pensiero

On March 9, 1842, Giuseppe Verdi's Nabucco premiered in Milan, Italy. One of the highlights of the opera is the Hebrew Slaves' chorus, "Va pensiero". It is traditionally encored, as in this performance. This BBC website provides some background to explain its political significance:

When Nabucco had its premiere at La Scala in 1842, ‘Italy’ was simply a cluster of geographically contiguous kingdoms and principalities with little more to unite them than a common language.

So when Italians sang the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves at Verdi’s funeral procession, it wasn’t just because it was a catchy tune they knew the words to. Its subject – the Israelites giving poignant voice to their longing for the promised land – had become a powerful analogue for the long-frustrated desires of the Italian people. When they cried “Viva Verdi!” during the funeral procession, they were still acutely conscious of the slogan’s double meaning and its clandestine resonance for the agitators of ‘the Risorgimento’, as the cause of Italian nationalism was known. The letters VERDI also spelled out the name of the King of Sardinia who, in 1861, finally took the throne of a unified nation for the first time since the 6th Century – Victor Emmanuele Re D’Italia.

But this article from The Guardian argues that the political impact of the chorus is more complicated than that:

In spite of all this latter-day boosting, there is, alas, no evidence that the chorus excited patriotic fervour in its early years (a often-repeated tale about it being encored on opening night by enflamed patriots is a blatant invention), True, it was popular with choral societies from the very start, both in Italy and abroad; and it also featured in the repertoire of the barrel organs whose proliferation so annoyed the emerging middle-classes in so many European cities. Indeed, there very few signs that Verdi's music in general was particularly inflammatory.

The most remarkable negative evidence comes from revolutionary Milan, in which so much of Verdi's early activity was centred. In March 1848, for a few brief months, the Milanese drove the Austrians out of their city. Artistic events in the wake of this insurrection were surprisingly plentiful: several theatres started up with patriotic plays; operas appeared soon after; Verdi's publisher Ricordi advertised a long series of patriotic hymns, including one by Rossini. Milan experienced a period of heady freedom; artistic endeavours were for the most part geared unequivocally to the political situation. But during the entire time, there was virtually no mention of Verdi. The composer supposed to have inspired the masses to the barricades, the very artistic symbol of the Risorgimento, was somehow ignored in the press of events.

By August, the Austrians were back in Milan. La Scala re-opened at the end of the year. In the midst of an extreme clampdown on any behaviour that could lead to further civil unrest, the authorities staged revivals of three of Verdi's most popular operas; two others (one of them Nabucco!) followed soon after. It seems impossible that any of these works had been actively associated with the failed revolution or its build-up.

Alas, the choice comes again: the truth or the legend? "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." John Ford's movies (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Fort Apache) chose the latter, but let us entertain the former. Should opera companies stop encoring the chorus because the opening night encore is a deceptive legend?

The lyrics of "Va pensiero" are based on Psalm 136, which Phillipe De Monte and William Byrd set to music during the Recusant/Penal era in England, as this CD, The Word Unspoken explores:

Byrd was by no means the only major Catholic composer working in England during these years. Furthermore, there were English composers whose faith drove them to work abroad, as well as foreign composers who offered sympathy and encouragement to English catholics. Included in this latter category was the Flemish composer Phillipe De Monte who entered into a fascinating compositional correspondence with Byrd. Verses of Psalm 136 Super Flumina Babylonis (containing many allegorical references to the plight of catholics (sic) unable to practice their faith openly) were set to music and exchanged, in what is now seen as an encoded message of mutual support and friendship between brothers in faith.

The texts reveal the Catholic community’s sense of isolation (How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?—Quomodo Cantabimus) and bereavement (Jerusalem is wasted—Ne Irascaris), and the elaborate, poetic nature of the encoded messages distributed within it through music.

Book Review: Newman and Italy

I'm sorry that I have not posted since August 31, but we've had some laptop issues and things are working better now. I just finished the book I'd assigned myself last week: How Italy and Her People Shaped Cardinal Newman: Italian Influences on an English Mind by Jo Anne Cammarata Sylva, and here's my review:

As the book's introduction promises, the narrative of Newman's trips to Rome and Italy recounts the influences travel to Italy and interaction with various Italians (living and dead) had upon Blessed John Henry Newman's understanding of teaching authority and Tradition in the Catholic Church. His first trip to Italy took place before he launched on the great journey of the Oxford Movement. When he travelled with Richard Hurrell Froude he was anti-Catholic and much that he saw shocked him: his impressions of Catholics there coincided with his views of their religion as superstitious and unreasonable. But when he became so ill in Sicily and his Italian guide and assistant, Gennaro, nursed and aided him so much in his sickness and his recovery, Newman began to see another side of Catholicism in Italy, as he experienced charity in action.

Professor Sylva also demonstrates Italian influences of a kind on Newman as he was in the throes of the Oxford Movement, investigating the history of Tradition in the teaching of the Catholic Church during the early centuries of Church history--the Arian heresy. Studying the Church Fathers, trying to establish the Via Media of the Church of England in an unbroken line from the early centuries to the Anglican Church of the nineteenth century, Newman was even influenced by reading St. Aphonsus Liquori.

In the chapter recounting Blessed Dominic Barberi's influence on Newman's conversion to Catholicism, Sylva begins the analysis of Newman's relationships with living Italians. The Passionist missionary gave Newman the first glimpse of Catholic priestly holiness. Although he was in correspondence with a priest in Ireland, Father Charles Russell, most of his investigation of the Catholic Church as the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church was in books and in history: with Father Dominic, he began to see the holiness of life he sought in the True Church--and thus, Barberi received Newman into the Catholic Church at Littlemore on October 9, 1845.

Newman and his great friend Ambrose St. John then went to Rome to study for the priesthood in 1846, and Sylva describes the influences of three Italians active in religious and literary life at the time: Alessandro Manzoni, the historical novelist (Il Promessi Sposi/The Betrothed); Father Antonio Rosmini, founder of the Institute of Charity, and Father Giovanni Perrone, SJ, who guided Newman into a better understanding of his own theory of the development of doctrine. The curious thing about Newman's connections to the first two men is that he never met them--in spite of trying to catch up with them in Milan or Rome, the meetings never took place--and indeed it seems that Rosmini did not want to meet Newman.

Finally, of course, there is the great influence of St. Philip Neri on Newman's vocation as an Oratorian, and the spiritual guidance of the Oratory's founder in Newman's life. Newman's vision of the Oratory Movement in England of course, hit some rough patches, and he and Ambrose St. John returned to Italy and to Rome in 1856 to clear the course. They met with other Oratorians in northern Italy (Turin and Verona) and then had an audience with Pope Pius IX--all in the cause of establishing the independence of one Oratory from another, when Father Faber's London Oratory suggested that Newman's Birmingham Oratory should conform to the former's new mission of providing spiritual directions to religious communities. That third trip to Rome satisfied Newman's goals and he returned to England more secure in his relationship to Pope Pius IX.

The next pope, Leo XIII, would make Newman a Cardinal Deacon and allow him to remain in England as an Oratorian--not to take up residence in Rome at his titular church, St. Gregorio in Velabro--as an exception to the usual rule. Newman did travel to Rome to receive the red hat, but he was ill and could not receive friends and admirers as he hoped.

Professor Sylva drives this narrative of Italian influences on Blessed John Henry Newman forward with many quotations from Newman's letters and secondary sources, sometimes quoting long passages from biographies or other studies. The bibliography contains a long list of primary and secondary sources, representing the standard studies of Newman's life and works; all of the primary sources are published works (no archival sources), and there is no index, which is regrettable.

This Week's Reading Assignment

 

 

I'm almost to Italy in this book by Jo Anne Cammarata Sylva from Newman House Press--by that I mean that John Henry Newman is discussing that essential Mediterranean journey with Richard Hurrell Froude. Of course, Italy, including his visits to Rome and Sicily on that trip in 1833 are important sign posts on Newman's way to the Catholic Church. He would return to Rome as a seminarian preparing for the Catholic priesthood after his conversion in 1846, and then briefly on Oratory business in  1856, and finally in 1879 when he received his cardinal's hat. Sister and Dr. Brigitte Maria Hoegemann FSO wrote about Blessed John Henry Newman's visits to Rome particulary in the June 2008 Newsletter of the International Centre of Newman Friends:

 

Long before the Anglo-Catholic Oxford don actually saw the city, its name must have resonated with John Henry Newman, evoking not just images of the ancient city, kingdom, republic and empire, its history of three thousand years, its rise and the fall, but also its huge claim to power and its unique culture of antiquity both pagan and Christian. Rome was not only a subject of special interest to the young Oxford student, but also the visible centre of the Catholic Church from the time of the apostles. Yet the don still had the conviction, learned as a boy at Ealing, that the Christian faith in Rome had over time become so corrupt as to be the work of Antichrist. The mere name of the city aroused in Newman notions, emotions and convictions both happy and painful. He describes an Anglican looking down on the city, who remarked: “the Christian can never survey (it) without the bitterest, the most loving and the most melancholy thoughts.”[1]

 

In the course of time and his personal development, Newman’s attitude to Rome became simpler and more distinct. He visited the eternal city four times, in the early third, fourth, fifth and late seventh decade of his life. These are used as biographical stepping-stones to trace something of what “Rome” meant in Newman’s life, pointing out some of the main changes in his attitude to the city and the Church. When he visited Rome for the first time, in the spring of 1833, invited by friends to accompany them on a long voyage to Southern Europe, he was a young Oxford scholar, an already famous don of Oriel College, an ordained minister of the Church of England, whose preaching and teaching were influenced by his studies of the Early Christians.

Professor Sylva goes beyond Rome, of course, in this book, and looks at other crucial Italian influences in Newman's life--and pride of place must surely be Blessed Dominic Barberi, whose memorial we celebrate tomorrow! I'll let you know. Here is an interview with the author of How Italy and Her People Shaped Cardinal Newman: Italian Influences on An English Mind (a title I think should have been reversed!)