Pope Pius VII

• 1. Introduction

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  Pope Pius VII spent the final weeks of his life muttering the names of cities. Bedridden after fracturing his hip on the 6th of July 1823, the elderly pope drifted in and out of consciousness, his mind returning again and again to the places where French forces had taken him against his will. It was a strange kind of haunting for a man who had sat at the center of European history for more than two decades.

  Born Barnaba Niccolò Maria Luigi Chiaramonti in Cesena in 1742, he entered the Order of Saint Benedict as a fourteen-year-old boy and rose, step by cautious step, to lead the Catholic Church through some of the most turbulent years it had ever faced. He would sign treaties with Napoleon, be imprisoned by him, and outlast him. He would restore the Jesuits, denounce the slave trade, and commission the monument that still marks his tomb in St. Peter's Basilica.

  How did a Benedictine monk from a middle-class noble family in Cesena become the man Napoleon could neither break nor fully bend? And what kind of pope emerges from exile not diminished but beloved, greeted as a hero by the Italian people?

• 2. The Monk Who Rose

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  On the 2nd of October 1756, a fourteen-year-old boy from Cesena presented himself as a novice at the Abbey of Santa Maria del Monte. His family was of noble lineage but modest means. The Chiaramonti name carried a count's title; it did not carry wealth.

  Two years after entering the abbey, on the 20th of August 1758, Barnaba made his formal profession and took the religious name Gregorio. He went on to teach at Benedictine colleges in both Parma and Rome, and was ordained a priest on the 21st of September 1765.

  His fortunes shifted when a relative, Giovanni Angelo Braschi, was elected Pope Pius VI in 1775. Before that election, in 1773, Chiaramonti had become Braschi's personal confessor. Pius VI then appointed the thirty-four-year-old Dom Gregory as honorary abbot in commendam of the Monastery of Sant'Anselmo in Rome. The monks of the community objected, feeling the arrangement violated the Rule of St. Benedict, though the practice itself was ancient.

  He went on to serve as librarian at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls before Pius VI named him Bishop of Tivoli in December 1782. In February 1785, he was appointed Cardinal-Priest of San Callisto and Bishop of Imola, a position he would hold until 1816.

• 3. A Cardinal Faces Revolution

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  When the French Revolutionary Army swept into Italy in 1797, Cardinal Chiaramonti did not counsel resistance. He told the people of his diocese, in a letter addressed directly to them, to comply with the authority of the victorious French commander-in-chief given what he called "the current circumstances of change of government."

  In his Christmas homily that same year, he went further, arguing before his congregation that democratic government and Catholic faith were not in opposition. He stated plainly that "Christian virtue makes men good democrats" and declared that "equality is not an idea of philosophers but of Christ." He added his conviction that the Catholic religion was not against democracy.

  These were not the words of a reactionary. They were the words of a bishop navigating an impossible position with deliberate care, choosing survival and accommodation over confrontation.

  By 1798, the calculus of that accommodation had been tested to its limit. French troops under Louis-Alexandre Berthier invaded Rome and seized Pope Pius VI, dragging him to France, where he died in 1799. The conclave to choose his successor could not even meet in Rome. It gathered instead on the 30th of November 1799 at the Benedictine San Giorgio Monastery in Venice, and the stalemate that followed would last several months before Ercole Consalvi proposed Chiaramonti as a compromise.

• 4. The Papier-Mâché Tiara

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  On the 14th of March 1800, Chiaramonti was elected pope and took the name Pius VII in honor of his predecessor. The ceremony that followed was remarkable for what it lacked.

  Emperor Francis II was not pleased by the election and refused to allow the cardinal electors to use the Basilica of San Marco for the coronation. So on the 21st of March, the new pope was crowned instead in the adjacent monastery church, wearing a papier-mâché tiara. The French had confiscated the genuine tiaras of the Holy See when they occupied Rome and forced Pius VI into exile.

  The journey to Rome that followed was equally undignified for the head of the Catholic Church. Pius VII sailed on a barely seaworthy Austrian ship named the Bellona, a vessel that lacked even a galley. The twelve-day voyage ended at Pesaro, from which he traveled overland to Rome.

  His first major act on arriving was to reward the man who had navigated the conclave on his behalf. Ercole Consalvi, a minor cleric who had served as secretary to the conclave, was elevated to the College of Cardinals and appointed Cardinal Secretary of State. Consalvi immediately departed for France to negotiate what would become the Concordat of 1801.

• 5. Negotiating With Napoleon

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  The Concordat of 1801 did not restore the old Christian order in France. It was not designed to. What it secured was more practical: a formal acknowledgment that "Catholicism was the religion of the great majority of the French," paired with provisions that allowed the Church to function inside the French state.

  Under its terms, the pope gained the right to depose bishops. The state agreed to pay clerical salaries, and the clergy swore allegiance to the state. The Church surrendered all claims to church lands seized after 1790. Sunday was formally reestablished as a festival day, effective Easter Sunday, the 18th of April 1802.

  Three years later, Pius VII traveled to Paris for Napoleon's coronation as Emperor of the French, a ceremony that underscored just how entangled the papacy had become with France's new master.

  The entanglement soon turned coercive. When Pius VII refused to align the Papal States with Napoleon's Continental System, France occupied and annexed the Papal States in 1809. The papal bull Quum memoranda followed, excommunicating Napoleon. Within weeks, Pius VII was seized and transported first to Savona, where on the 15th of November 1809 he consecrated the church at La Voglina with the intention of making the Villa La Voglina his spiritual base in exile. Napoleon ended that plan as soon as he learned of it. The pope was moved to France.

• 6. Prisoner and Martyr

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  Even as a prisoner, Pius VII maintained a deliberate tone toward Napoleon. He continued to refer to the emperor as "my dear son," though he added the qualifier that he was "a somewhat stubborn son, but a son still."

  Cardinal Bartolomeo Pacca, who was kidnapped alongside the pope, took the role of Pro-Secretary of State in 1808 and kept detailed memoirs throughout the exile. Those memoirs, written first in Italian and later translated into English in two volumes, record the conditions of captivity and the circumstances of the eventual return to Rome.

  The exile ended when Pius VII signed the Concordat of Fontainebleau in 1813. Consalvi, freed as a result of that agreement, immediately persuaded the pope to revoke the concessions he had made. Pius VII began that process of revocation in March 1814. French authorities responded by re-arresting many of the opposing prelates, but their imprisonment lasted only weeks. Napoleon abdicated on the 11th of April 1814.

  When Pius VII returned to Rome in May 1814, the Italian people greeted him as a hero. The years of imprisonment had given him, in the view of those who witnessed his return, the aura of a living martyr. On the occasion of that return, he immediately revived the Inquisition and the Index of Condemned Books. He also sought the release of the thirteen "Black Cardinals," those who had refused to attend Napoleon's marriage to Marie Louise on the grounds that his previous marriage was still valid, and who had been exiled and impoverished as a result.

• 7. Beyond Napoleon

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  On the 31st of July 1814, Pius VII signed the papal bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum, restoring the Society of Jesus universally to its previous provinces. He appointed Tadeusz Brzozowski as the order's Superior General. This completed a process begun thirteen years earlier when, on the 7th of March 1801, he had issued the brief Catholicae fidei recognizing the Jesuits in the Russian Empire and naming Franciszek Kareu as their first superior general there.

  At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Cardinal Secretary Consalvi represented the Holy See in the declaration urging suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. Pius VII had already written to King Louis XVIII of France on the 20th of September 1814 calling for an end to the trade. He wrote again to King John VI of Portugal in 1823. In that letter, he expressed grief that the trade in enslaved people, which he had believed to have ceased, was still being practiced in some regions and, as he wrote, "in an even more cruel way." He defined the sale of people as an injustice to the dignity of the human person.

  For the United States, Pius VII established new dioceses in 1808 for Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Bardstown. In 1821, he added dioceses for Charleston, Richmond, and Cincinnati. A grateful government took note: when the United States suppressed the Barbary pirates along the Mediterranean coast, Pius VII declared that the Americans had "done more for the cause of Christianity than the most powerful nations of Christendom have done for ages."

  In Rome itself, the pope commissioned archaeological excavations in Ostia, restored the Arch of Titus, ordered new fountains and piazzas, and erected the obelisk on the Pincian Hill. He recruited the sculptor Antonio Canova and the painter Peter von Cornelius. It was also Pius VII who adopted the yellow and white flag of the Holy See, a direct response to the Napoleonic invasion of 1809.

• 8. Death and Afterlife

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  Pius VII died on the 20th of August 1823 at five in the morning, with Cardinal Secretary of State Ercole Consalvi at his side. He was eighty-one years old. He was first placed in the Vatican Grottoes, then given a permanent burial monument in St. Peter's Basilica after his funeral on the 25th of August.

  That monument, completed in 1831, was the work of the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen.

  The process toward beatification formally began on the 10th of July 2006, when an application was lodged with the Holy See and approved by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the Vicar of Rome. On the 15th of August 2007, Pope Benedict XVI declared nihil obstat, meaning nothing stood against the cause, and the diocesan process opened. Pius VII now holds the title Servant of God and has been elected patron of the Diocese of Savona and patron of prisoners.

  The formal diocesan investigation into his life was inaugurated at a Mass in the Savona diocese on the 31st of October 2021. The current postulator for the cause is Fr. Giovanni Margara, who took up the role in 2018.