Since today is the anniversary of the death of Pope St Leo I in 461, and his feast day in the post-Conciliar Rite, it seems like a good day for the seventh and final installment of this series on the thirteen papal namesakes of our new Holy Father Leo XIV; click these links to read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. and part 6.
Before the reign of Bl. Pius IX (1846-78), nine among the successors of St Peter (numbering 254 at that point) had reigned for more than 20 years, but none had ever reached the 25 years traditionally ascribed to Peter himself. For many centuries, therefore, it had been part of the papal coronation ritual that as soon as the cardinal archbishop of Ostia placed the crown on a new Pope’s head, he would say to him, “Numquam videbis annos Petri. – Thou shalt never see the years of Peter”: a way of reminding him, amid the glories of the Church’s highest office, that like all Popes, he is the steward of Another.
He was born Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci on March 2, 1810, the sixth of seven children, in a small town called Carpineto, about 40 miles to the southeast of Rome. He was usually called by his middle name, which is Italian for “Joachim”. His mother’s name was Anna; as Pope, Leo would raise the grade of the feasts of both of Our Lady’s parents. When he was eight, he and the brother right before him, Giuseppe, were sent to the Jesuit school in Viterbo, where he excelled especially in Latin; throughout his life, he was known for the high quality of his compositions in both prose and poetry in that language. Like most educated Italians of his era, he was also deeply interested in the works of Dante Alighieri. Giuseppe would go on to enter the Jesuit order, and become a well-respected theology professor; at his brother’s first consistory, in May of 1879, he was elevated to the cardinalate, the last man to receive that honor from a member of his immediate family.
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| A photograph of Cardinal Giuseppe Pecci taken in 1887. |
Gioacchino completed a doctorate in theology in 1832, after which he entered the diplomatic academy, and studied canon and civil law at the University of Rome. His evident talents brought him to the attention of officials in the Curia, leading to his appointment in 1837 to various offices. Now on the track for greater promotions still, he was ordained at the very end of the year to the subdeaconate, deaconate and priesthood, all with a fortnight.
Fr Pecci’s first major responsibility was as delegate to Benevento, an exclave of the Papal State within the territory of the kingdom of Naples. The Napoleonic wars had left the south of Italy in a very disturbed state, but Fr Pecci proved himself a skilled administrator, particularly in dealing with the problem of the gangs of brigands, many of them former soldiers, who plagued the area. In the wake of this success, he was transferred to Perugia, and he did equally well there, despite strong revolutionary sentiment against the papal government. In January of 1843, he was made nuncio to Belgium, then a very new state, (founded in 1830, but only generally recognized since 1839; Pecci was only the third nuncio), where the Catholic majority was ruled by a Lutheran monarch who strongly favored the policies of the anti-Catholic Liberal party. After receiving episcopal consecration, he went to Brussels, and over the following three years, was highly effective in defending the Catholic interest, even earning the king’s good will, despite their strong political differences.
Three years later, however, on the death of the bishop of Perugia, Pope Gregory XVI, at the request of the populace, decided to appoint Mgr. Pecci as his successor. He arrived in Rome very shortly before the pope’s death on June 1, 1846, and took possession of his see, where he would remain for the next 32 years, about two months later.
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| The church of St Constantius (‘Costanzo’ in Italian), the first bishop of Perugia, traditionally said to have died as a martyr in the persecution of Marcus Aurelius, ca. 170. The construction was begun by Bp Pecci, but the decoration was not concluded until some time after his papal election. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Lumen roma, CC BY-SA 3.0) |
The diocese of Perugia flourished under his long episcopacy, despite the many difficulties visited upon it by the anti-clericalism and thievery of the Italian government during the so-called Risorgimento. He took close personal interest in his seminary, occasionally teaching and examining there in person, and in the other educational institutions under his jurisdiction, and built more than fifty new churches. Although he did not waver in his support of the Holy See and the Papal State, he managed to do so with great tact, and was not disturbed in the possession of his see by the government, even after Perugia was occupied in 1859. (For comparison, the much more important see of Bologna, once the second city of the Papal State, remained vacant for three years after the city was occupied by the anticlerical government.)
Pius IX had made Pecci a cardinal in 1853; in 1877, he appointed him chamberlain of the Apostolic See, a position which required him to live in Rome. Pius died less than five months later, on February 7, and Cardinal Pecci, now close to 68, was elected Pope on February 20, and took the name Leo XIII partly in honor of Leo XII, who had been pope when he was beginning his ecclesiastical career.
The cheaper and more facile sorts of histories that abound in our era, and especially within the Church, have been wont to cast Pius IX as a hopeless reactionary, determined to keep the Church stuck in a world that had passed away, and Leo XIII as the forward-thinking progressive who finally embraced the modern world in all its glory. Even Italian Wikipedia, which is generally quite good on Church history, says that Leo’s choice of name was intended as a deliberate sign of change, without mentioning that it had long been customary for popes to not repeat the name of their predecessors (only six have done so in the last 1000 years), and that if there was ever a modern pope who deserved the title of reactionary, it was Leo XII.
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| A contemporary engraving of the moment of Leo XIII’s papal coronation. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.) |
One of my teachers, the late Fr Reginald Foster OCD, who worked as a Latin secretary in the Vatican for 41 years, was a great admirer of his fellow Latinist Leo XIII, and one of his favorite anecdotes about him perfectly illustrates this classic misrepresentation of him. The title of Leo’s famous encyclical on the condition of laborers, “Rerum novarum”, seems to mean “of new things”, until, as Fr Foster would say, “you look in your dictionary and see that ‘res novae’ means ‘revolution’. Then you need to look at the words that follow, ‘semel excitata cupidine’, and what you have there means, ‘Once the lust for revolution has been stirred up...’ He wasn’t in favor of it, my friends!”
Despite the many successes of Pius’ reign, when Leo XIII took the throne, anti-clericalism was very much on the ascendant throughout the formerly Catholic world, not just in Italy. In 1870, the kingdom of Italy had seized the remains of Papal State, where it continued its policy of stealing from the Church as much as it dared. Pius IX had withdrawn into the Vatican and refused to cooperate with the existence of this government of brigands by setting foot on the soil which it illegally occupied. Like him, Leo XIII would remain a “prisoner in the Vatican” for the rest of his life, as would Pius X and Benedict XV after him. He is buried in the Lateran basilica, in fact, because he was the first pope in centuries who was never able to visit the building, his own cathedral, as pope.
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| The tomb of Pope Leo XIII in the Lateran basilica. Image from Wikimedia Commons, © Marie-Lan Nguyen, CC-BY 2.5. |
He also continued Pius IX’s policy of prohibiting Catholics from participating in the political life of the Italian state, an extension of this standing protest. This policy ultimately failed, and was gradually walked back by his successors; I make note of it here because it gives the lie to the overly simplistic view of his papacy as a drastic volte face from that of Pius.
The heart of European anti-clericalism was in France; Leo’s attempts to persuade the Catholic monarchists to accept the Republic fell flat, but the crisis which led to yet another wave of persecution, and concomitant massive theft of the Church’s property, did not hit until early in the reign of Pius X. In Germany, the ludicrous spectacle of Bismark’s Kulturkampf fell apart under its own weight, the position of Catholics became much more favorable, and the pope received the Lutheran Kaiser Wilhelm II in the Vatican three times, on very cordial terms. Concordats were established with various states that protected the interests of Catholics and the Church.
Leo took great interest in the Eastern Catholic Churches, and is remembered as a good friend to them, and as the Pope who initiated the process by which their rites and customs were purged of Romanizations. A schism among the Armenian Catholics was ended, and a college for them was established in Rome, along with another for the Ruthenians. Unfortunately, if there was ever a monarch who could be called a reactionary, it was the Russian Tsar Alexander III, who came to the throne in the third year of Leo reign. The barbaric persecution of Ruthenian Catholics in the Russian Empire worsened, and diplomatic relations with the Holy See were not restored until shortly before the Alexander’s death in 1894. The first impetus towards the foundation of a Russian Catholic Church began in Leo’s reign, led by the philosopher Volodymyr Soloviov.
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| The famous portrait of Cardinal Newman made in 1881 by Sir John Everett Millais. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons) |
Catholicism continued to grow during Leo’s papacy in both England and the United States, both of which also were of special interest to him. As Pius IX had restored the Catholic hierarchy in England, so Leo did in Scotland in the very first year of his reign, and established it in British India in 1886. At his very first consistory, held in 1879, he made St John Henry Newman, the most prominent convert in England, a cardinal. The building of Westminster Cathedral was begun, and the church was opened for services very shortly before his death. Leo also issued the encyclical Apostolic Curae, recognizing the non-validity of Anglican sacramental orders.
In 1886, he made the archbishop of Baltimore, James Gibbons, a cardinal, only the second American to receive that honor. (Over 25 years and four month, Leo held 27 consistories, at which a total of 147 cardinals were appointed. The total number of cardinals was then fixed at 70, which means he fully remade the College twice.) Cardinal Gibbons would later receive the letter Testem Benevolentiae against “Americanism”, one expression among many of the idea that the conditions of modern life required changes to the deposit of Faith, anticipating the general condemnation of modernism later made by Pius X.
Over the course of his 25-year papacy, he issued 85 encyclicals. Comparing this to Pius IX’s 36, issued over 31 years, it is fair to see here an overinflation, and consequent devalution, of the papal magisterium, not the first in its long history. This is balanced somewhat by their comparative brevity; all 11 of his encyclicals on the Rosary together are shorter than St John Paul II’s one. Among the most notable of these, apart from those previously mentioned, are Aeterni Patris, which reestablished the preeminence of Scholastic and Thomistic philosophy, and Providentissimus Deus, on Biblical studies.
There are many anecdotes one could tell about such a long pontificate; I include here one which I had the pleasure of sharing with the late Fr John Hunwicke, himself also a great scholar of classical languages and literature. On one occasion, Pope Leo woke up in the middle of the night, and began ringing the bell for his servants, shouting “Il piede! Il piede!”, Italian for “foot.” They assumed he had hurt his foot and wanted a doctor, but what he wanted was pen and paper. He had just solved, in his sleep ... as one does ... the problem of a metrical foot in a poem he was working on, and waking up with the solution in his head, he wanted to jot it down before he forgot it.
He also has the interesting distinction of being not just the first pope to be filmed, but the earliest born person to be filmed, and the first pope to have his voice recorded. In this video, the sound recording, made in 1903, of the Pope singing the Ave, Maria, is imposed on the film made in 1896.
At the time of his election, he was a month shy of 68 years old, and seem to many to be in rather poor health. Like Leo XII, he predicted at the time of his election that his own reign would be brief; unlike Leo XII’s, his prediction proved false. Not only did he become the second pope in a row to surpass the years of Peter, as noted at the beginning of this article; at 93, he died as the oldest pope in all of history. (This should be qualified by noting that Pope St Agatho, who died in 681, is traditionally said to have been 107 at the time of his decease, but this cannot be verified. Benedict XVI was 95 at the time of his death, but, of course, not pope.) In the later years of his papacy, there was a popular joke in Italy that the cardinals had tried to elect a Holy Father, but had elected an Eternal Father instead.
