Italy’s Assurances to the Governments

Abstract

The fate of the Pope’s envoys in Rome depended on the policy of Italy. What were the intentions of the men who had cannonaded their way into the Eternal City and accomplished by that deed the long-sought national unification? Were they come to arrest the Pope and his principal assistants and through their possession of the Head of the Catholic Church put his great religious power at the service of the political power? Napoleon had taken the first step and was in a fair way to accomplish the second when disaster overtook him in the snows of Russia. Cavour’s plans were far more prudent and realistic than Napoleon’s. In his mind and in the minds of his school after him, the unification of Italy need not signify any threat to the independence and dignity of the Holy Father even if this unification was accomplished by force and against the will of the Pontiff. Free-thinkers as most of Cavour’s school were, they were also Italians with a keen appreciation of the role exercised by the Holy Father, not only on the peninsula but in the world. They found it to their purpose to proclaim and develop the distinction between the two sovereignties of the Pope, the one temporal, the other spiritual. Italy, they insisted, had no designs upon the person or the office of the Pope. What they hoped to accomplish in Italy was only what other nations elsewhere were already accomplishing with the applause of progressive opinion. The religious authority of the Roman Pontiffs would remain intact, even if the temporal sovereignty gave way before the aspirations of the Italian people.