Before America’s pope-fever subsides, we should take a moment to wish a happy 250th birthday to Pope Gregory XVI — a pope to remember.
Two hundred fifty years ago, in September 1765, Gregory XVI-to-be was born to an aristocratic Italian family and christened Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari. At 18, he entered the Benedictine monastery of San Michele on Murano, an island in the Venetian Lagoon. In 1786, after three strict years as a novice, he took his Benedictine vows. A year later, he was ordained a priest.
Cappellari is reported to have been extremely bright; he studied science and spent some years teaching philosophy at the Murano college. He first became known in the Church for publishing a philosophical and widely circulated defense of orthodoxy and papal infallibility called “The Triumph of the Holy See and the Church Against the Attacks of the Innovators.” The paper won him an appointment as abbot of San Gregorio in Rome. As his paper circulated through Europe, his star continued to rise — but he twice refused an appointment as bishop, preferring to hold on to his abbacy. He was, evidently, a humble man.
Nonetheless, in 1825, Pope Leo XII named him a cardinal. As a cardinal, Cappellari negotiated agreements between Belgian Catholics and the Dutch Crown and between Armenian Catholics and the Ottoman Porte, work that put him at the center not only of the Church, but of continental politics. When Pope Leo died in 1829, Cappellari was seriously considered for the papacy; when Leo’s successor, Pius VIII, died two years later, Cappellari was elected to replace him. He took the name Gregory in honor of the Benedictine Pope Gregory VII. Gregory XVI would, incidentally, be the last pope to have been a monk, and the last not to have been a bishop.
As you might guess from the title “Against the Attacks of the Innovators,” Cappellari was a very conservative man, and Gregory was a very conservative pope. In the mid-19th century, a liberal revolution was sweeping Europe; Gregory opposed it, vigorously — going so far as to support non-Catholic monarchists against Catholic rebellion. He opposed an Austrian initiative to let Jews live outside ghettos. He opposed the proliferation of gas lighting, and prohibited the construction of railways in the Papal States. But in one important respect, he was intensely liberal, and he ought to be remembered for it:
In 1839, Gregory XVI issued an encyclical banning Catholic participation in any part of the slave trade.
“We have judged,” wrote Gregory, in the majestic plural, “that it belonged to our pastoral solicitude to exert ourselves to turn away the faithful from the inhuman slave trade in negroes and all other men. . . . Desiring to remove such a shame from all the Christian nations . . . we warn and adjure earnestly . . . that no one in the future dare to vex anyone, despoil him of his possessions, reduce him to servitude, or lend aid and favor to those who give themselves up to these practices, or exercise that inhuman traffic by which the Blacks, as if they were not men but rather animals, having been brought into servitude, in no matter what way, are, without any distinction, in contempt of the rights of justice and humanity, bought, sold, and devoted sometimes to the hardest labor. We reprove, then, by virtue of our apostolic authority, all the practices above mentioned as absolutely unworthy of the Christian name. By the same authority, we prohibit and strictly forbid any ecclesiastic or layperson from presuming to defend as permissible this traffic in Blacks under no matter what pretext or excuse, or from publishing or teaching in any manner whatsoever, in public or privately, opinions contrary to what we have set forth in this apostolic letter.”
This is the sort of thing that makes non-Christians like me so respect Catholicism.
#share#An encyclical on global warming is not. A refusal to meet with the Dalai Lama for fear of offending Communist China’s dictators — as Pope Francis did last year — is not. Pope John Paul II went to Warsaw and, under the eyes of its Communist, atheist dictators, told Poland that “Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude . . . the exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man!” The Polish crowd began to roar, “We want God! We want God!” and European Communism began to crumble. Pope Francis helped negotiate the Obama–Castro deal that has thrown Caribbean Communism a lifeline. He lent the regime legitimacy by cordially meeting with Fidel Castro, by exchanging gifts with him, and by attacking “theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world” (as Francis put it in 2013).
Perhaps Pope Francis has a secret, pro-freedom master plan. Christian that he is, he will forgive some of us for having doubts. John Paul II was a great man and a great pope because he didn’t shrink from fighting difficult fights. Francis should remind himself that the people of Cuba, of China, of North Korea are slaves to their tyrant leaders. And he should remember Gregory XVI’s strict prohibition against “presuming to defend [slavery] as permissible . . . no matter what pretext or excuse.”