Pope Pius VII (1742-1823)

The election of Pius VII took place at the lowest point in the modern history of the papacy. The French Revolution had persecuted the Church, deported priests, profaned shrines, and then invaded Italy. In 1798, the troops of the Directory had proclaimed a Roman Republic and arrested Pius VI, dragged from city to city until he died, on 29 August 1799, in the citadel of Valence, France.^[11][12] Many then thought that the last pope had disappeared.

In this context, the monk Chiaramonti inherited an exhausted Church and an Apostolic See without state, army, or resources. Yet precisely this weak pope would become, against all expectation, the rock on which Napoleon's Caesarist ambition broke. Where the Emperor possessed the greatest military power in Europe, the pope possessed only moral resistance - and it was that resistance that prevailed.

The whole pontificate of Pius VII is dominated by his relations with Napoleon: the religious appeasement of the Concordat, then the struggle, the spoliation, the captivity, and finally the triumph of the weak over the strong.^[13]

This is what makes him a key figure in the history of the contemporary Church. With Pius VII, the papacy learned to survive in a world where it no longer had temporal force - and to ground its authority in spiritual witness alone. The details of the Revolution, the Concordat of 1801, or the Society of Jesus belong to their own articles; what belongs properly to Pius VII is that he embodied this resistance when everything seemed lost.

Before becoming the pope who resisted Napoleon, Barnaba Chiaramonti was for more than forty years a Benedictine monk, removed from courtly ambitions and formed by obedience, silence, and study. Nothing in this hidden life seemed to prepare him to confront the greatest conqueror of his age - except, perhaps, the inner solidity that a long life of prayer gives.

Modest Provincial Nobility

Barnaba Niccolo Maria Luigi Chiaramonti was born on 14 August 1742 in Cesena, a small city of Romagna belonging to the Papal States.^[15] He was the son of Count Scipione Chiaramonti and Giovanna Coronata Ghini, members of honorable but modest provincial nobility.^[16] The family's piety was deep: after becoming a widow, his mother withdrew to a Carmelite convent in Fano.^[17] The future pope thus grew up in a world where faith was not a social convention, but the heart of existence.

The Benedictine Monk: Dom Gregorio

At fourteen, on 2 October 1756, the young Barnaba entered the Benedictine abbey of Santa Maria del Monte, near Cesena.^[18] He made his vows on 20 August 1758 and received the religious name Dom Gregorio - Gregory.^[19] Ordained priest on 21 September 1765, he became professor of theology in the Benedictine colleges of Parma and then Rome.^[20][21] This monastic formation marked the whole man: Pius VII would keep, even on the papal throne, the gentleness, regularity, and humility of the cloister. Under the tiara, he remained a son of Saint Benedict.

Raised from childhood in the cloister, he kept throughout his life the monk's virtues: patience, meekness, and deep piety.^[22]

Bishop of Tivoli, Then Imola, Then Cardinal

Dom Gregorio's career changed course thanks to a distant relative who became pope: Pius VI, also from Cesena, noticed him and raised him up. He appointed him abbot, then bishop of Tivoli in December 1782.^[23][24] Three years later, on 14 February 1785, Pius VI created him cardinal-priest of San Callisto and transferred him to the more important see of Imola, which he would govern until 1816.^[25][26][27] Chiaramonti proved to be a pastoral bishop: close to the poor, attentive to the clergy, austere toward himself. It was in this diocese of Romagna that he first faced the shock of the Revolution.

The Christmas Homily of 1797: A Bishop before the Republic

The most famous episode of his episcopate is his Christmas homily of 1797, preached at Imola while the city was part of the Cisalpine Republic created by Bonaparte. In a climate in which many bishops anathematized the new ideas wholesale, Cardinal Chiaramonti gave a discourse of remarkable elevation: he invited his faithful to civil peace and maintained that there is no opposition between a democratic form of government and the constitution of the Catholic Church.^[28][29] Far from endorsing revolutionary excesses, he distinguished the political regime - variable and legitimate in several forms - from the Catholic faith, which is not identified with any party.

This discourse, bold for its time, already reveals the future pope: a man capable of dealing with the new world without yielding anything in faith. It was exactly this disposition that would make possible, four years later, the Concordat with France.

At the death of Pius VI, a prisoner at Valence on 29 August 1799, the Church was in an unprecedented situation: Rome was occupied, the Apostolic See vacant, and it was not even certain that a conclave could meet.^[30] It was Emperor Francis II of Austria who offered asylum: the cardinals gathered in the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, in Venice, beginning on 30 November 1799.^[31]

The conclave lasted more than three months, torn between Austrian pressure and party rivalries. The impasse was broken by a brilliant young prelate, Ercole Consalvi, secretary of the conclave, who succeeded in rallying votes around Cardinal Chiaramonti, a compromise candidate.^[32][33] The monk of Imola was elected on 14 March 1800 and took the name Pius VII, in homage to the martyr pope who had raised him. Lacking a tiara - all had been seized by the French - he was crowned on 21 March 1800 with a papier-mache tiara, since the papal tiaras had been seized by the French.^[34][35] The symbol was striking: the papacy was starting again from nothing.

Unable to return to a Rome still contested until after the French withdrawal, Pius VII made his solemn entry into the Eternal City on 3 July 1800.^[36] One of his first acts was to reward the architect of his election: he created Consalvi cardinal and named him Secretary of State on 11 August 1800.^[37] That choice decided the whole pontificate: for twenty-three years, in peace as in trial, Consalvi would be the political arm of Pius VII.

"Consalvi retained to the end the confidence of the pope."

• The Catholic Encyclopedia, article "Pope Pius VII"^[38]

The first great act of the pontificate was the restoration of religious peace in France, torn apart by ten years of revolutionary persecution. On 15 July 1801, after eight months of harsh negotiations led by Cardinal Consalvi against First Consul Bonaparte, a Concordat was signed.^[39][40] It was a historic compromise: the Church renounced the nationalized properties confiscated since 1790 and accepted the resignation of the entire French episcopate so that it could be completely reorganized; in exchange, the public exercise of Catholic worship was restored, and the State undertook to pay the clergy.^[41]

The text did not recognize Catholicism as the religion of the State, but as the "religion of the great majority of French citizens" - a cautious formula that Pius VII accepted at the price of a painful concession. By requiring the collective resignation of the bishops, the pope exercised a fullness of power over the episcopate without precedent, which paradoxically strengthened the authority of the Holy See.^[42]

By obtaining the resignation of all French bishops, both legitimate and constitutional, in order to rebuild the Church in France, Pius VII performed an act of papal authority whose scope went far beyond France.

• After napoleon.org's analyses of the Concordat^[43]

But Bonaparte immediately betrayed the spirit of the agreement. In 1802, he unilaterally appended to the Concordat seventy-seven "Organic Articles" that subjected the clergy to the State, in effect restored Gallicanism, and violated the freedom of the Church.^[44][45] Pius VII protested constantly against this violation, which he never accepted. The doctrinal and juridical detail of the Concordat belongs to a separate article; what matters here is that it sealed from the beginning the ambiguity of the relationship between the pope and the man who would soon become emperor.

The most spectacular - and most disputed - act of the pontificate was Pius VII's presence at the imperial coronation. In 1804, Napoleon, now Emperor of the French, wanted to give his throne the religious sanction that only the pope could offer. He obtained from Pius VII that he would come to Paris for the ceremony. The pope accepted, hoping in return for a softening of the Organic Articles and concessions for the Church in France.^[46]

On 2 December 1804, at Notre-Dame de Paris, a scene was played out that remains famous. At the decisive moment, Napoleon did not receive the crown from the pope's hands: he seized it and crowned himself, then crowned Empress Josephine.^[47][48] The gesture was a political manifesto: the Emperor meant that his power did not proceed from the Church, but from himself and from the people. Pius VII, present, blessed but did not crown in the strong sense. He returned from Paris disappointed: the concessions he had hoped for did not come, and the Emperor grew bold enough to want to enslave the papacy entirely.

The lesson of this journey was bitter for the pope: through goodwill, he had lent his prestige to a man who gave nothing back. From this disappointment would gradually arise the resistance of the following years.

From 1806 onward, Napoleon's demands became unbearable. The Emperor wanted to make the Papal States a cog in his Continental Blockade against England, to close the pope's ports, and to impose his enemies as the pope's friends. Pius VII refused to break the neutrality of the Apostolic See and consistently answered with a firm refusal.^[49] The rupture became inevitable.

The Invasion and Annexation of Rome (1808-1809)

In February 1808, French troops occupied Rome. On 17 May 1809, an imperial decree signed at Vienna simply annexed the Papal States to the Empire, ending more than a thousand years of the popes' temporal sovereignty.^[50][51] Napoleon sought to reduce the pope to the rank of a mere chaplain of the Empire, pensioned and submissive. Pius VII, stripped of every temporal power, opposed him with only one weapon: spiritual sanction.

The Bull Quum memoranda (10 June 1809)

On 10 June 1809, the pope had the bull Quum memoranda posted on the doors of the great Roman basilicas. It excommunicated all the authors, executors, and accomplices of the spoliation of the Papal States.^[52] Out of prudence and dignity, the text did not explicitly name Napoleon, but no one doubted that he was primarily intended.^[53][54] It was an act of courage by a disarmed man: the pope, who no longer had soldiers or a state, struck with anathema the master of Europe.

The bull excommunicates all those who ordered, executed, advised, or favored the spoliation of the temporal power of the Holy See.

• After the bull Quum memoranda, 10 June 1809^[55]

The Arrest at the Quirinal (6 July 1809)

Napoleon's response was immediate. During the night of 5-6 July 1809, General Etienne Radet scaled the walls of the Quirinal Palace with his men and arrested Pius VII.^[56][57] Ordered to abdicate his temporal sovereignty, the pope refused with quiet firmness. He was torn from Rome and carried northward, through Genoa and Grenoble, toward exile. The prisoner monk then began the longest and most glorious combat of his life.

For five years, Pius VII was held captive by Napoleon, cut off from his advisers and deprived of the means of government. The Emperor hoped, by isolation and attrition, to break his resistance and subject the Church. He failed.

Savona: Silent Resistance (1809-1812)

After short stages, the pope was installed at Savona, on the Ligurian coast, where he remained from 1809 to 1812.^[58] Material conditions were initially decent, but surveillance was strict and the spiritual isolation terrible: his advisers were removed, his letters intercepted, and all contact with the Curia forbidden. Napoleon wanted a mute pope.

Pius VII responded with an institutional strike: he refused to grant canonical institution to bishops appointed by the Emperor. Without this institution, the imperial bishops had no legitimate jurisdiction, and the Church of France gradually became paralyzed.^[59] The pope, stripped of everything, had discovered the only lever left to him: his power of the keys. Deprived of liberty, he still governed by refusal.

Fontainebleau: The Concordat Extracted (1812-1814)

In June 1812, Napoleon had the pope, sick and exhausted, transferred to the chateau of Fontainebleau, near Paris.^[60] The forced journey nearly killed him. At Fontainebleau, the Emperor, returning from the disastrous Russian campaign, came in person to press the old man.

On 25 January 1813, worn down and misled by advisers, Pius VII signed a humiliating project, the Concordat of Fontainebleau, by which he seemed to renounce his sovereignty and consent to reside in France.^[61] But the recovery came quickly. Supported by Cardinals Consalvi and Pacca, who finally rejoined him, the pope measured the extent of his temporary weakness. On 24 March 1813, he addressed to Napoleon a solemn letter of retraction, formally disavowing his signature as extracted under constraint.^[62] He was immediately treated again as a state prisoner. The lesson is immense: even conquered for a moment, the pope rose again and refused to betray.

Conquered by the Emperor's obstinacy, Pius VII had signed; but, recovering himself, he retracted his signature, declaring null an act extorted by violence.

• After the historical sources on the Concordat of Fontainebleau^[63]

Napoleon's fall freed the pope. At the beginning of 1814, as the Empire collapsed, the Emperor ordered Pius VII to be released and sent back to Italy. On 24 May 1814, the pope made his triumphal re-entry into Rome, amid great popular rejoicing.^[64][65] The humiliated monk returned as a confessor of the faith. This was his first return. Napoleon's return from the island of Elba, during the Hundred Days, drove the pope from Rome again — he took refuge at Savona on 22 March 1815 —, and only after Waterloo, on 7 July 1815, did he re-enter it definitively: his second return.^[66]

Mary Help of Christians, Feast of Deliverance

In gratitude for this deliverance, Pius VII instituted on 15 September 1815, for the Papal States first, the feast of Mary Help of Christians (Maria Auxilium Christianorum), fixed on 24 May, the anniversary of his first return to Rome (24 May 1814).^[67] The pope openly attributed his liberation to the protection of the Virgin Mary, whose help he had implored throughout his captivity. This Marian devotion, born of trial, would become one of the spiritual legacies of the pontificate - and Saint John Bosco would later make it the patronage of his whole work.

The Congress of Vienna and the Restoration of the Papal States

While the pope returned, his Secretary of State, Cardinal Consalvi, represented the Holy See at the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815). Through skillful diplomacy, he obtained from the powers the almost complete restoration of the Papal States.^[68] Consalvi also knew how to be moderate: once back in power, he avoided blind reaction, maintained some useful administrative reforms inherited from the French period, and gave the restored papal state an enlightened government. The papacy thus recovered its temporal base, which it would keep until 1870.

The most lasting act of the pontificate was neither a concordat nor a treaty, but a resurrection. Forty-one years earlier, in 1773, under pressure from European courts, Clement XIV had suppressed the Society of Jesus. On 7 August 1814, barely returned to Rome, Pius VII signed the bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum, which restored the Jesuit order for the universal Church.^[69]

The moment was highly symbolic. The pope who had just endured five years of captivity at the hands of a modern Caesar returned to the Church its most powerful missionary and educational order, at the very moment when Catholicism had to be rebuilt after the revolutionary storm. There Pius VII presents the Society as sturdy rowers that the Church, the barque of Peter assailed by the storm, cannot do without.^[70]

The pope writes that he would believe himself guilty before God if, amid the great dangers facing Christendom, he neglected the helps that Providence placed at his disposal.

• After the bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum, 7 August 1814^[71]

The detail of the suppression and restoration of the Jesuits belongs to a dedicated article; but it is to Pius VII that the honor belongs of having repaired one of the most contested acts of the previous century and of having restored to the Church an instrument of evangelization that would mark the whole nineteenth century.

After Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo (1815) and his exile to Saint Helena, Pius VII gave the finest proof of his greatness of soul. The man who had been arrested, deported, and humiliated by the Emperor opened the gates of Rome to his fallen family.^[72] Napoleon's mother, Letizia Bonaparte (Madame Mere), his uncle Cardinal Fesch, and several members of the imperial clan found asylum and protection on the very lands of the pope they had persecuted.^[73]

More still: informed of the harshness of Napoleon's detention on Saint Helena, Pius VII charged Cardinal Consalvi with pleading for clemency with the Prince Regent of England; and when the fallen Emperor asked for a Catholic priest, he sent him as chaplain Father Vignali.^[74] The contrast is striking and wholly evangelical: the persecuted man returns good for evil. This magnanimity, more than any speech, caused Pius VII to be recognized as a true disciple of Christ, and it deeply impressed contemporaries, even unbelievers.

The last years of the pontificate were devoted to rebuilding a Church devastated by a quarter century of revolutions and wars. Pius VII, assisted by Consalvi, multiplied concordats with states in order to reorganize dioceses, and defended the faith against new ideological threats.

The Condemnation of Freemasonry (1821)

In 1821, by the bull Ecclesiam a Jesu Christo, Pius VII condemned secret societies, and explicitly the Carbonari and Freemasonry, denouncing their hidden oaths and their hostility to the Church and legitimate order.^[75][76] He thereby confirmed and renewed the condemnations issued in the previous century by Clement XII and Benedict XIV. For the pope, these societies represented the underground legacy of the revolutionary spirit he had fought all his life.

Missions, Dioceses, and Worldwide Expansion

The pontificate was also marked by notable missionary expansion. Pius VII erected many new dioceses, especially in the United States - Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Bardstown in 1808^[77] - accompanying the growth of Catholicism in the New World.^[78] Against the slave trade, Pius VII wrote to Louis XVIII on 20 September 1814 (letter Inter tot ac tantas) to support the abolition carried to the Congress of Vienna, the Holy See adhered through Consalvi to the joint declaration of 8 February 1815, and the pope wrote again to John VI of Portugal in 1823.^[79][80] The Church, emerging from the Napoleonic catacombs, redeployed her universality.

The Patron: Rome, Canova, and the Arts

Faithful to the tradition of the popes, Pius VII was also a protector of the arts and sciences. He encouraged the archaeological excavations of Rome - clearing the ruins of Ostia, restoring the Arch of Titus - enriched the Vatican Museums, and supported the great sculptor Antonio Canova, whom he notably charged with recovering the Roman works of art taken to Paris by Napoleon.^[81] Under his reign, Rome again became the capital of the arts it had ceased to be. On the shadow side, one should also note the restoration of the Jewish ghetto after the papal restoration, a measure in keeping with the spirit of the time but not hidden by historiography.^[82]

Pius VII is sometimes reduced to the single role of Napoleon's adversary. That would forget the essential point: before being a political pope, he was a monk and a man of God, and it was his inner life that explains his resistance. The strength he opposed to the Emperor was not first diplomatic: it was spiritual.

The Strength of the Weak

All the greatness of Pius VII lies in an evangelical reversal: it is the unarmed who triumphs over the armed. Without soldiers, without state, without liberty, the pope conquered the most powerful man in Europe by the sole fidelity of his conscience. He literally embodied the word of Saint Paul.

"For when I am weak, then am I strong."

• Saint Paul, Second Epistle to the Corinthians (2 Cor 12:10)^[83]

This word sums up the mystery of Pius VII: his very weakness was his strength, because it rested not on weapons but on God. Napoleon, who had everything, could extract nothing from this old man who had nothing.

Gentleness and Forgiveness

The most constant trait of his holiness is meekness. Pius VII never cursed his persecutors; he prayed for them. His magnanimity toward the fallen Bonaparte family was not calculation, but the fruit of real charity. In this he belongs to the purest tradition of the holy pastors, who measure victory not by triumph over the enemy, but by forgiveness offered.

Trust in the Virgin Mary

Finally, captivity deepened in him an intense Marian devotion. It was to the Virgin that he attributed his deliverance, and in memory of her help he instituted in 1815, for the Papal States first, the feast of Mary Help of Christians, fixed on 24 May.^[84] His resistance was therefore, to the end, a matter of prayer as much as courage.

A Peaceful End (1823)

The last years were marked by fatigue and illness. On 6 July 1823 - the exact anniversary of his arrest in 1809 - the old pope suffered a fall in his apartments and fractured his femur.^[85] He would not rise again. Pius VII died in Rome on 20 August 1823, aged eighty-one, assisted by his faithful Consalvi, who would outlive him by only a few months.^[86][87] With him disappeared one of the longest and most tested pontificates in history.

Thorvaldsen's Tomb

Buried in St. Peter's, Pius VII received a unique honor: his funerary monument in the Vatican basilica was entrusted to the great Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (completed around 1831).^[88] Remarkably, Thorvaldsen was Protestant - his monument is the only work by a non-Catholic artist in St. Peter's Basilica.^[89][90] That the memorial of the pope of Catholic resistance was carved by a Lutheran says much about the universal esteem the man inspired, beyond confessional boundaries.

The Verdict of History

How should one judge Pius VII? History, believing or not, remembers a pontiff of exceptional moral stature. Politically, he saved the papacy from annihilation and restored its independence. Religiously, he restored worship in France, resurrected the Society of Jesus, relaunched missions, and defended the faith against Freemasonry. But his true greatness lies elsewhere: in the unarmed resistance of a monk to an emperor.

Pius VII was great not by force, which he did not possess, but by the constancy of a conscience that nothing could bend.

In 2007, the Holy See gave the nihil obstat opening the cause for the beatification of Pius VII, entrusted to the Diocese of Savona-Noli: Pius VII has since borne the title of Servant of God, the first step toward possible beatification.^[91] The Church thus considers officially recognizing as a saint the man who, by his invincible gentleness, opposed to the greatest conqueror of modern times the sole force of witness. Pius VII illustrates a deep law of Church history: empires pass, but the rock of Peter remains - and it remains all the firmer because it rests not on weapons, but on God.

• Pope Pius VI (1717-1799) - his predecessor and protector, who died a prisoner of the French Revolution at Valence.
• Pope Leo XII - his immediate successor, elected in 1823.
• The Concordat of 1801 - the agreement with Bonaparte that restored religious peace to France; the detail of its clauses.
• The Society of Jesus - the Jesuit order suppressed in 1773 and restored by Pius VII in 1814.
• Pope Clement XIV - the pope who had suppressed the Society of Jesus in 1773.
• Pope Clement XII and Benedict XIV - the first major condemnations of Freemasonry, renewed by Pius VII in 1821.
• Pope Gregory XVI - who would continue, after him, the defense of the Church against revolutionary ideas.