There was high drama and great intrigue at the conclave that elected the last pope to be canonised, writes Jim Cantwell
Two Polish cardinals made an impact on the papacy in the past century. One is Pope John Paul II. The other emerged briefly into the spotlight 100 years ago today, fiercely determined to ensure that the favourite to become pope would not be elected. OAugust 2nd 1903, Jan Puzyna, Cardinal-Archbishop of Kraków, took the floor during the conclave to elect a new pope. He was understandably nervous, for he was about to declare a veto against the Secretary of State, Cardinal Rampolla, favourite to succeed Leo XIII. Kraków had been annexed to Austria since 1846 and Puzyna was acting for Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, head of the Habsburg dynasty.
After the Reformation, Catholic powers - France, Spain and Austria - secured influence over conclaves by having a veto used if candidates considered hostile to their interests were likely to be elected. The veto had no legal basis but was tolerated as a preventive contrivance, since over 30 schisms had been caused by tensions between popes and princes.
It was used until the Church began to grow rapidly in the slipstream of 19th-century European colonial expansion. Increasingly, Catholics looked on the Pope as the symbol of their common identity in a culturally diverse world. The modern papacy was emerging and the veto had become what one curial cardinal called "a shocking anachronism". It had been stymied in 1846 when the conclave acted so swiftly that the cardinal carrying the Austrian veto arrived too late. No veto was attempted in 1878 when Leo XIII was elected.
Why did Francis Joseph revive it in 1903? A common assumption was that he couldn't forgive Rampolla for allegedly making difficulties over a Church burial for his son, Crown Prince Rudolph, who died with Marie Vetsera in the sensational Mayerling suicide pact in 1889. However, in his book on Mayerling (1971), Fritz Judtmann quoted archival records showing that Rampolla made no difficulties and that the Emperor actually wrote to thank him for his support. The motivation for the veto was political, not personal.
Mariano Rampolla, Marchese del Tindaro, came from western Sicily's aristocracy and had to overcome paternal opposition to become a priest. Fluent in five languages, with doctorates in four subjects, he was marked out for a career in diplomacy, becoming Nuncio to Spain at 39. Four years later, in 1887, Leo appointed him Secretary of State, the Vatican's top post.
Friedrich Gontard's history of the popes places him among "the great cardinal figures", but contemporary views were mixed. Puzyna was openly hostile, "frightening the whole world" with his frankness, according to Austria's Holy See envoy. Poland was partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria. In Kraków, its traditional intellectual and spiritual centre, Russia was seen as the prime oppressor of Poles. Rampolla's pursuit of friendly relations with St Petersburg infuriated Puzyna. He even claimed to have taken the initiative on the veto: "I used Austria; Austria did not use me."
Irish bishops thought Rampolla arrogant after Leo issued the decree in 1888 condemning the Plan of Campaign. Most of them thought the decree unwise. From Rome came a rocket from Rampolla, insisting they "fulfil the expectations of the Sovereign Pontiff in every respect" and denouncing priests for their "disrespectful, if not rebellious, reception of the Holy Father's decree". Archbishop Croke of Cashel resented being lectured on his episcopal duty by "a diplomatic official only partially acquainted with, if not wholly ignorant of, the Irish situation". Dublin's Archbishop Walsh demanded, as "an act of justice to my priests", that Rampolla submit any charges made against them, and "until the facts of the case are ascertained, no further defamatory letters be written".
Austria believed Rampolla wanted to be pope. "The more the Holy Father's hand trembles and his foot begins to falter, the more firmly does the State Secretary seize the reins, and he knows what he wants," the envoy reported in 1889. However, French cardinal Francois-Desiré Mathieu observed: "This man, whose critics represented him as being devoured with ambition, showed a profound indifference to his own success at the conclave."
An old Roman hand, Cardinal Moran of Sydney, told Walsh that Rampolla wanted to move to the Propaganda Fide congregation because of an enduring interest in the missions but Leo needed him at the Secretariat. Writer Carlo Prati, who knew Rampolla, said he lived "practically speaking like a pauper" and gave millions of lire to charity from his family inheritance.
The Habsburg empire, embracing most of central Europe and centred on Vienna, was a superpower in terminal decline. Edward Crankshaw characterised Emperor Francis Joseph's story as "a long stone-walling exercise" against the forces of disintegration. Since "Home Rule" had been conceded to Hungary in 1867, the Emperor struggled to restrain the contending "nationalities". Leo's warm endorsement of modern forms of government was unwelcome. Fearing pan-Slavic disorder, Francis Joseph resented Rampolla's keen interest in the condition of the empire's eastern Slavs.
Above all, he was alarmed by Leo's rapprochement with republican France, which regarded Catholics as disloyal since the more vocal of them hankered after the ancien regime and saw opposition to the republic as a religious imperative. When Leo declared that one could be a Catholic and a republican, les royalistes called him the anti-Christ and raged against Rampolla. But, Leo held firmly to Sapientiae Christianae (1890): It was not for the Church "to determine which is best among the many forms of government", and "to attempt to involve the Church in party strife is to abuse religion". Vienna became convinced Rome favoured republican democracy to the detriment of monarchies, but its aim was to rescue the French Church from impotent isolation.
Successive Austrian ambassadors found Rampolla exasperating. "Pious, hard on himself, suspicious, dissimulating and extremely violent in his sentiments, he represents, with all the faults of a native Sicilian, the ascetical characteristics of a prince of the Church," the envoy reported 1897. "With his hypocritical and violent character, he is always prepared to use his power in a manner contrary to our interests," he added - a pathetic echo of a more confident era when Chancellor Metternich could declare, as he did before of the conclave of 1823, that "a good pope, a truly enlightened pope, will always be an 'Austrian' pope". Four hours after Leo XIII's death, a coded dispatch informed the envoy: "The veto will be interposed in an extreme case," against Rampolla.
With 62 cardinals at the conclave - 36 Italians and only one non-European - the required two-thirds majority was 42. With 24 votes in the first ballot on August 1st, Rampolla took a commanding lead.
What happened next has never been satisfactorily explained. The Cardinal-Dean (Luigi Oreglia) decided to dispense with a standard procedure because it was "complicated". This was known as the accesso, a variant of the single transferable vote. After an indecisive ballot each cardinal could transfer his vote to another candidate - that is, "accede" to his election. If the original ballot, plus the accesso, gave a candidate two-thirds' of the votes he was elected. The complication arose because scrutineers could not always be certain no cardinal had voted for the same person twice.
Mathieu believed those most bothered about this were "the adversaries of the person who stood to gain most". The accesso usually favoured the leader in the original ballot because his momentum tended to influence the undecided. Indeed, a memoir of Rampolla in 1923 by a Sicilian monsignore, Pietro di Giunti, stated categorically that he would have been elected on the accesso.
The Vatican published the memoir, with a prefatory letter from the then Secretary of State, Cardinal Gasparri, even though di Giunti offered no evidence for this astonishing claim. Mathieu, a Rampolla supporter, felt the accesso would certainly have modified the voting, but by how much, "who can say"? His caution is justified since Rampolla got only five extra votes in the second ballot that evening. While this increased his tally to 29, it was still 13 short of election.
Nevertheless, Puzyna decided to act next day. So did the leading German cardinal, Georg Kopp. Not wishing the veto to be used, Kopp sought a compromise: if Rampolla agreed to withdraw, he could nominate a candidate of his choice. But, withdrawal effectively meant conceding a veto, which Rampolla regarded as "a serious attack on the Church's liberty". When Puzyna told Rampolla what he was about to do, he was advised to consult his conscience. Puzyna wanted officers of the conclave to announce the veto, but the secretary said he couldn't and the Dean said he wouldn't. So, Puzyna did it himself as the third ballot began.
The Dean declared the communication totally unacceptable. Rampolla again polled 29. In the fourth ballot this increased to 30 votes, but it was to go no higher.
It became a received wisdom that the veto determined the election. Without it, the Catholic Encyclopedia declared in 1922, Rampolla "would almost certainly have been given the tiara". The revised New Catholic Encyclopedia, published this year, is hardly less categorical, asserting that the veto "stifled all chance of Rampolla's election".
But, did it? Mathieu says cardinals were deeply split on Rampolla from the start. During Leo's 25-year reign the papacy's prestige had grown enormously. His "original attitude towards the new social forces will make this pontificate a memorable epoch", the Quarterly Review wrote. Rampolla's supporters felt his influence with the pope had been crucial. As the first pope in 11 centuries who did not inherit papal lands, Leo could contribute with confidence to key debates, with a dozen documents on the rights of workers and on the responsibilities of civil powers.
Rampolla's opponents were a loose coalition of those who considered Leo a political meddler given to disastrous diplomatic excursions, especially in France, and a large group who admired him but wanted a pope who had ministered among the people.
The conclave secretary, Archbishop Merry del Val, wrote of "my certain conviction" that, regardless of the veto, Rampolla would never have been elected. Mathieu agreed the veto "had no effect whatsoever on the result".
When Puzyna bragged about having caused the election of a good pope, Mathieu was dismissive: "His Eminence flatters himself; he was not the cause of anything." Puzyna telegraphed the Austrian foreign ministry with news that Cardinal Sarto, "a holy man, an exquisite choice in every respect", had been elected.
Giuseppi Sarto was a 68-year-old municipal messenger's son from the Venice region, with wide experience as curate, parish priest, spiritual director and diocesan bishop. As Patriarch of Venice, he was famous for his acute pastoral instincts and the severity of his theology, which were to become the twin peaks of his papacy.
Starting with only five votes, Sarto came within eight of Rampolla, 21-29, after the third ballot. He became alarmed when he took the lead, 27-24, on the fifth. The Guardian's Rome correspondent reported: "He thanked the cardinals for their goodwill but added that the responsibility was so tremendous that he could not undertake it. This came on the conclave like a thunderbolt."
American cardinal James Gibbons said Sarto was so adamant that many felt he could no longer be considered. Stalemate threatened. Gibbons asked a curial cardinal to get Sarto to say definitely "yes" or "no", because "I don't know what to do". After prolonged persuasion by friends, Sarto relented. The voting was 35-16 on the sixth ballot and election came on the seventh, on August 4th, with 50 votes (to Rampolla's 10). Sarto became Pius X.
His first encyclical began with these words: "It matters not to tell with what tears we sought to avoid the appalling burden of the pontifical office." He was canonised in 1954.
Ireland's Cardinal Michael Logue told Walsh in a note from Rome that the election "appeared to me to be a special intervention of Providence". Somewhat curiously, he added: "The factions and intrigues of which you read much in the papers I could see little of, though I took my meals with the Italian cardinals and was thrown very much among them."
The election was not a contest between conservative and liberal forces, but about perceived priorities. The main players were theologically like-minded and in 1908 Pius X appointed Rampolla head of the doctrinal congregation, the Cardinal Ratzinger of his day.
The decisive factor was what Owen Chadwick once called "the law of electoral constitutions", by which electors always look to fulfil a need not met under the previous regime. It would also determine the election following Pius X's death in 1914; world war placed a premium on papal diplomacy and, ironically, Rampolla's protégé and closest collaborator, the adroit Benedict XV, was chosen. Rampolla had died from angina eight months earlier, aged 70.
Pius X abolished the accesso, but decreed that procedural questions in conclave must be put to a vote.
He also banned the veto and his successors have done the same. At the next conclave, cardinals will solemnly promise never to support "any form of intervention whereby secular authorities . . . might wish to intervene in the election of the Roman Pontiff".
The author of that pledge was a more recent Cardinal-Archbishop of Kraków. He is now the Pope.
- Jim Cantwell is author of The Election of the Pope, published by St Paul's Publications at €7.95 (£4.95).