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236  Chapter 6 A Free Church in a Free State The Roman Question Frédéric Ozanam never wrote a critical word about Pius IX, although we know from Amélie’s correspondence that he lost sleep worrying about events in Italy and the pope’s abandonment of the reforming agenda that Ozanam had found so inspiring in 1847.1 The heady moment in which Ozanam called for his fellow Catholics to join Pius in welcoming the barbarians into the arms of the church did not last. Pius, forced into exile by revolution and the establishment of the Roman Republic in 1849, returned to govern the Papal States thanks to a French expeditionary force. The restored pope embodied clerical intransigence; he became the pope of the Syllabus of Errors and of papal infallibility, utterly rejecting any suggestion that the church might change with the times or accommodate modern liberal, nationalist, or democratic politics. Ozanam left journalism and retreated toward his historical research on the barbarians of the fifth century; the analogy he had drawn in 1848 between the Germanic tribes of the late Roman Empire and contemporary working classes had fallen on deaf ears. Ozanam died in 1853, before the conflict between Italian nationalism and papal sovereignty became acute. His fellow romantic Catholics of the postrevolutionary generation, however, had to confront the tension between 1. Amélie Ozanam to Zélie Soulacroix, Nov. 28, 1848, Archives Laporte-Ozanam. A FREE CHURCH IN A FREE STATE 237 2. Yves Bruley, “La Romanité catholique au XIXe siècle:Un itinéraire romain dans la littérature française,” Histoire, économie et société 21, no. 1 (2002): 59–70, and Emile Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy: An Essay in the History of Political Thought, trans. Richard Rex (Princeton, 2012), 22, 29, 51. Pauline Craven’s first published work was an account of the catacombs that the abbé Gerbet encouraged her to write and then included in his Esquisses de Rome chrétienne as the words of “a young Christian girl of twenty.” Maria Catherine Bishop,A Memoir of Mrs. Augustus Craven, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London,1895),1:16. See also Philippe Boutry, “Les Saints des catacombes:Itinéraires français d’une piété ultramontaine,” Mélanges de l’école française de Rome 91, no. 2 (1971): 875–930, and Wendel W. Meyer, “A Tale of Two Cities: John Henry Newman and the Church of the Catacombs,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61, no. 4 (2010): 746–63. 3. Papal Encyclicals Online, http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius09/p9syll.htm. their aspirations for a modern Catholicism and the increasing intransigence of the Roman Church. The question of the temporal sovereignty of the papacy in the era of the Italian Risorgimento provoked a crisis that threatened the ideological foundations of the romantic Catholics of Ozanam’s generation. Their Catholicism had always been ultramontane,looking to Rome for leadership and associating the Gallican church with nostalgia for the Old Regime throne and altar alliance. Their attachment to the city of Rome was profound and emotional; pilgrims like Ozanam, Pauline Craven, and Charles de Montalembert felt a deep affinity with the Christian landscape of the city, especially the catacombs, which reminded visitors of the unbroken history that linked them to the early Christian martyrs.2 Having abandoned the tradition of fealty to a long line of divinely ordained French kings,they turned instead to the Roman inheritance of Saint Peter and rooted their identity in the cosmopolitan embrace of Peter’s city. Although Gregory XVI’s condemnation of mennaisian ideas had disappointed them, they remained confident that Catholics could always look to Rome in their effort to establish alternatives to liberal political regimes that embraced anticlericalism and privileged individual rights over social obligations. After 1848,however,the papacy rejected not merely specific modern political ideas such as liberalism and socialism but the entire gamut of postrevolutionary political and social thought. The 1864 Syllabus of Errors suggested that there was no meaningful difference between romantic Catholics and their liberal or socialist contemporaries; their common willingness to come to terms with the nineteenth century relegated them all to the same pariah status. Instead of guiding Catholics through the confusing modern world and helping them to live in it as devout Christians,the Syllabus of Errors famously and bluntly asserted that the Roman pontiff need not and should not “reconcile himself . . . with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.”3 [52.14.8.34] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 04...

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