Cardinal Giuseppe Garampi (1725-1792): An Enlightened Ultramontane by Dries Vanysacker (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 255 flict that raged in Paris over the Roman Catholic Church's denial of the Eucharist and Extreme Unction to Jansenists. Urged on by Conti's advisor, Adrien Le Paige, and other Jansenist jurists, the religious issue meshed with the Parlement of Paris' constitutional challenge to Louis XV, and toleration of dissent within the Church advanced a step. As the sacraments ceased symbolizing the unity of France in faith, law, and king, there was less reason to exclude loyal Huguenots from citizenship. A coalition of enlightened royal ministers, Jansenists, and Huguenots brought about the royal edict oftoleration of 1787. With the Revolution came a new definition of citizenship free from sacramental association. The book's impeccable scholarly apparatus includes an up-to-date bibliography and careful endnotes. Charles H. O'Brien Williamstown, Massachusetts Cardinal Giuseppe Garampi (1725-1792): An Enlightened Ultramontane. By Dries Vanysacker. [Institut Historique Belge de Rome, Bibliothèque, XXXIII.] (Brussels and Rome: Institut Historique Belge de Rome. Distributed by Brepols Publishers,Turnhout, Belgium. 1995. Pp. 336.) The true flavor ofcurial policy is often best gleaned through the biography of influential prelates. This work by DriesVanysacker is a good example of this approach . While there has been no shortage of works and articles on the Riminiborn Garampi, the author claims that "we are still lacking an adequate full-length portrait of this figure." Therefore he set out on a five-year research project, which took him from archives in Copenhagen through Utrecht, Mechelen , Verona, Pesaro, Rimini to those in Rome, particularly the Archivio Segreto Vaticano. Of primary interest to him were Garampi's exchanges of letters preserved in the Biblioteca Gambalunga in Rimini and the Biblioteca Oliveriana in Pesaro. In designing his study, the author intentionally omitted the "official papers " of Garampi and concentrated on the treasure trove of the personal correspondence he unearthed, perusing altogether some 15,000 letters in the process, in the hope of getting at the prelate's authentic personality. The book is the result ofVanysacker's labors. As the subtitle proclaims, his purpose was to portray Garampi simultaneously as a proponent of the Italian Catholic Enlightenment of the Muratorian sort and as the director of an ultramontane "internationale." Indeed, we learn that Garampi had been responsible for reorganizing and cataloguing theVatican Archives for use of scholars;he was a bibliophile with a very large library, which included works hostile to the Catholic Church in general and papal supremacy in particular, among them those by French philosophes and English deists; he was interested in Etruscology and exchanged ideas with a few Protestant savants. But the author treats much of that side of his subject only cursorily near the beginning and the end 256 BOOK REVIEWS of the book, which is very regrettable. The bulk of the work is dedicated to Garampi's diplomatic missions north of the Alps, in the Austrian Netherlands and the ecclesiastical Electorates on the Rhine in 1761-1763 and 1764, and his tenure as nuncio in Warsaw (1772-1776) andVienna (1776-1785). ThereVanysacker traces in some detail Garampi's evolution until he became the very heart and soul of the ultramontane opposition to any challenge to papal supremacy from whatever direction it came,be it Gallicanism, the Jansenism ofthe Utrecht churchj. N. Hontheim's De Statu Ecclesiae, or the Austrian state church principle that emerged subtly under Maria Theresa and more crassly underJoseph II. In following the author's account of this transformation, the reader finds it difficult to detect the enlightened cleric. Admittedly Garampi's major weapons were those books and pamphlets which defended papal primacy, such as Jean Pey's De l'autorité des deux Puissances, the circulation of which he subsidized , rather than physical force or spiritual sanctions. To that degree he can still be situated within the Muratorian cosmos, albeit along the periphery. But his diplomatic intrigues hardly measure up to those standards. We are left to wonder whether the label "enlightened" is appropriate. Garampi's last years confirm the view that the papacy was so preoccupied with the threat from the Catholic monarchs, be it in the form of Gallicanism or Josephism, that it grossly underestimated the impact of the French Revolution. Hanns...