Sometimes when bored during work meetings I check out online maps. One of those times I decided to figure out where St. John Lateran, the cathedral church of Rome, is. I was shocked to find that it’s 4 miles from the Vatican, on the other side of the Tiber.
Because that would mean that the popes were absent from their cathedral for almost 60 years. When the Italian nationalists took over Rome in September 1870, Pope Pius IX responded by declaring himself a prisoner of the Vatican. Thereafter, popes refused to leave the Vatican, not even appearing in St. Peter’s Square or giving the Urbi et Orbi blessing from the balcony facing the square. This continued until Pius IX and the Italian government signed a concordat in 1929 to resolve “The Roman Question.”
No papal cathedral Holy Week liturgy, or papal cathedral liturgy of any kind for 59 years. No act of popes formally taking possession of the Lateran cathedral.
The stated reasons for this self-imposed imprisonment vary. The popes did not want to appear to accept the illegal, violent seizure of the City of Rome by the Italian army. They also did not want to give the appearance of submission to a secular government, which could be seen to bias their spiritual leadership of the Church.
These seem like weak reasons. It’s not like the legal status of the pope was any different within the Vatican, since that also was not recognized by the Italian government as a sovereign state. And the Italian government was offering significant financial reimbursement and privileges to the popes in the 1871 Law of Guarantees.
The liturgy, both the Mass and the Roman Office, is the lifeblood of the Church. This is shown immediately in the Gospels, where Christ celebrated the first Mass at the Last Supper followed by the singing of psalms en route to Gethsemane. In Acts, the early Church devoted herself to the breaking of the bread and the prayers.
The center of the liturgical life of the diocese is the cathedral, beginning with the Upper Room. The Pope, as Bishop of Rome, is expected to celebrate sacred liturgy in his cathedral regularly. There may have been some limited times where prudence would suggest keeping a low profile in the face of anticlerical mobs, as with Leo XIII’s coronation in 1878.
But one also remembers Pope Gregory VII, who was kidnapped by assassins during a Christmas midnight Mass, only to be freed in short order, returning to the church and completing the Mass. Why not set out for St. John Lateran with the swiss guards and the toughest of the faithful and dare the government or the mobs to intervene? One senses an overweening aversion to physical danger on the part of the modern popes. Are the modern popes who live in pagan times greater than the martyr popes who lived in pagan times?
Pius IX’s bitterness at losing the papal states and grudge against the Italian government created a toxic prisoner mentality throughout the whole Church and set the precedent for placing personal politics above the duties of sacred liturgy.
While there has been much debate about the whats, whys, and whens the current crisis in the Church started, it’s fair to say some of the first visible aspects came under Pius IX. It was he who spawned the modern cult of personality around the Pope, pushed through a much misunderstood declaration of papal infallibility, and cheapened the spiritual leadership and liturgical life of the papacy with political showmanship and bitterness.
Not for nothing did John Henry Newman write the following in a letter in 1870, which many Catholics might echo today:
“But we must hope, for one is obliged to hope it, that the Pope will be driven from Rome, and will not continue the Council, or that there will be another Pope. It is sad he should force us to such wishes.”
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