The
temporal power of the
Popes is the political and governmental activity of the
Popes of the
Roman Catholic Church, as distinguished from their spiritual and pastoral activity, which is also called
eternal power, to contrast it with the Church's
secular power.
For centuries, its secular activities brought the
Papal States into a status as a country bearing some relation with other countries of the world. Some historians identify the crowning of
Charlemagne in 800 as the moment in which the Church started having an international importance in a modern sense, although the
temporal power can be traced to the earlier
Donation of Pepin in 756. In his
Pastoral Care,
Pope Gregory the Great (died 604) had discussed the extensive range of duties that bishops owed their flock as
huius saeculi potentes, "the powers of these ages"; hence some historians prefer to see the origins of secular powers in the age of the Byzantine suzerainty over the bishop of Rome. Yet "
Justinian I succeeded in imposing his ecclesiastical policies on the papacy and Pope Gregory the Great maintained an attitude of political loyalty to the empire."
Charlemagne's crowning, however, was perhaps the first moment in which the Church was generally granted a
power of control of the imperial dignity, thus demonstrating a sort of power of international
veto. Subsequently, the
Donation of Constantine was forged to provide a legal basis for the temporal power.
The temporal power has often been discussed in politics, in philosophy and in theology, mainly given that its practical effects were often very far from the official religious doctrine. The same story with the
inquisition, quite commonly considered as a mere instrument of the temporal power (therefore with no accepted religious meaning); it is perhaps the moment of the greatest distance between the
Gospel and the
Roman curia. The common reply to critics usually considers that the final goal of spreading the Good News (working for the diffusion of the Catholic faith), was so important that some "unavoidable" passages had to be crossed, practising at times some of
Machiavelli's political lessons.
The temporal power was abolished by Napoleon Bonaparte, who dissolved the Papal States and incorporated Rome and Latium into his French Empire. The temporal power was restored by the Great Powers at the 1815 Congress of Vienna. The Napoleonic civil laws were abolished, and most civil servants were removed from office. Popular opposition to the reconstituted corrupt clerical government led to numerous revolts, which were suppressed by the intervention of the Austrian army.
G. S. Godkin wrote the following about
Leo XII, who succeeded
Pius VII in 1823.
"He was a ferocious fanatic, whose object was to destroy all the improvements of modern times, and force society back to the government, customs, and ideas of mediaeval days. In his insensate rage against progress he stopped vaccination; consequently, small-pox devastated the Roman provinces during his reign, along with many other curses which his brutal ignorance brought upon the inhabitants of those beautiful and fertile regions. He curtailed the old privileges of the municipalities, granted new privileges to the religious communities, and enlarged the power of the clergy to the extent that bishops and cardinals had the power of life and death in their hands. He set the Inquisition to work with new vigour; and though torture had been nominally abolished in 1815, new kinds of torment were invented, quite as effectual as the cord, the thumbscrew, and the rack of old times. He renewed the persecution of the Jews; drove them back into the Ghetto from whence they had begun to emerge, rebuilt its walls, and had them locked in at night; and issued an edict ordering all Israelites to sell their goods within a given time on pain of confiscation." [G. S. Godkin, Life of Victor Emmanuel II, Macmillan, (1880), pp. xiii-xiv]
When Pius IX was elected pope in 1846, one of his first acts was to grant an amnesty to more than 2,000 political prisoners. In November 1848, following the assassination of his minister Pellegrino Rossi, Pius IX fled Rome. During a political rally in February 1849, a young Roman priest, the Abbé Arduini, described the temporal power of the popes as a "
historical lie, a political imposture, and a religious immorality." [Jasper Ridley,
Garibaldi, p. 268]. On 9 February 1849, the newly-elected Roman Assembly proclaimed the
Roman Republic (19th century). Subsequently, the Constitution of the Roman Republic abolished the temporal power, although the independence of the pope as head of the Catholic Church was guaranteed by article 8 of the "Principi fondamentali." Religious freedom was guaranteed by article 7, while the death penalty was abolished by article 5, and free public education was provided by article 8 of the "Titolo I".
At the end of June 1849, the Roman Republic was crushed by 40,000 French troops sent by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (later Napoleon III), at the urging of the rabid ultramontane French clerical party. The temporal power was restored and propped up by a French garrison.
For practical purposes, the temporal power of the popes ended on 20 September 1870, when the Italian Army breached the
Aurelian Walls at
Porta Pia and
entered Rome. This completed the
Risorgimento.
On 20 September 2000, there was an item in the Catholic publication
Avvenire, which stated:
Formally, the temporal power ended in 1929 with the treaty between the Vatican State and
Italy (
Concordat), when the
papacy accepted to have no more interests on Italy, its closest neighbour, and therefore on any other country. Of course, the influence of the Vatican still is relevant and evident, even now, and is mostly considered as a spiritual voice.
Some small degree of temporal power persists in the formal government of the
Vatican City as an independent state.
