I

The American novelist Mary Flannery O'Connor once observed that the good Catholic often suffers as much from the Church, as for the Church. The case of the French lay activist Marc Sangnier would seem to bear out her point. Sangnier's Sillon movement was caught up in the whirlwind of the Modernist crisis afflicting the Catholic Church in the first decade of the twentieth century. Yet Sangnier was not a theologian. How then could he be implicated in a theological dispute? In truth, every crisis in theology is also in some sense a political crisis. Sangnier's social and democratic activism had been curtailed on account of Pope Pius x's fear of ‘social Modernism’. This case study, therefore, examines the relationship of Sangnier, as an influential lay figure, with Pius' successor, Pope Benedict xv (1914–22). The narrative of this relationship shows perfectly the interplay of doctrinal issues, ecclesiastical discipline and worldly politics. If the gradual rehabilitation of Sangnier between 1916 and 1920 formed part of Benedict xv's attempt to rein in the ‘white terror’ that had characterised the previous pontificate, the issue of Modernism was in turn overshadowed by the First World War. The new and glaring political differences that emerged over the meaning of the war between pope and penitent provide an insight into the delicacy of the pope's policy of neutrality towards the belligerents when the Church was split down the middle on nationalist lines. The mixture of theology and politics involved in the protracted process of Sangnier's rehabilitation between 1914 and 1920 casts new light both on the early Christian Democratic movement and on papal diplomacy towards France and the League of Nations during Benedict's pontificate. It highlights the emergence of a new, if hesitant, papal internationalism in European affairs in response to the Versailles settlement. However, before analysing in depth Sangnier's relationship with the Holy See after 1914, it is necessary to define the term ‘Modernist crisis’, clarify Benedict's attitude towards it and establish who exactly Marc Sangnier was.

The life of Marc Sangnier (1873–1950) is rich in the contradictions historians love. Born into a wealthy Parisian bourgeois family of lawyers and scholars, he inherited a family tradition of natural and gifted oratory.Footnote ¹ Yet, from an early age, social consciousness and republicanism caused him to drift away from the received world view of his class. Through parallel careers as journalist, politician and activist, Sangnier strove to reconcile French Catholics to the republic and the working classes to the Church. For some Catholics, his later conversion from soldier to patriotic pacifist was but another in a long line of betrayals. As a republican and a lay activist, Marc Sangnier cut a distinctive figure in the broad spectrum of French Catholicism. After all, the conflict between the secular values of the republic and the Catholic Church was at its peak at the turn of the century, culminating in the law on the separation of Church and State in 1905. Although the nineteenth century had seen several brave attempts to bridge the chasm between liberalism, socialism and Catholicism, these had left little but a stream of illustrious casualties, the greatest of whom was Félicité de Lamennais.Footnote ² The new, ultramontane Catholicism of Pius ix and the First Vatican Council (1870) made reconciliation even more remote. Buffeted by the secular republicanism of the Third Republic, especially by Jules Ferry's educational reforms of the 1880s, many Catholics had withdrawn into a fortress mentality, pining for monarchical restoration. Yet the consolidation of the republic and the growth of industrialisation meant that this was a political and pastoral dead end, making the Church into the enemy of the State and alienating the working class. Pope Leo xiii (1878–1903) saw this and sought instead ‘an accommodation of sorts with the modern world, but on Christian, Catholic and papal terms’.Footnote ³

In 1891, the year of Marc Sangnier's eighteenth birthday, Pope Leo inaugurated the Ralliement whereby he encouraged French Catholics to set aside their personal political preferences and give true allegiance to the republic as the legitimate government, the better to defend the Church. That same year, his seminal encyclical Rerum novarum condemned Marxism but also began to propose Catholic solutions to social problems, excoriating the egregious abuses of workers' dignity wrought by liberal capitalism.Footnote ⁴ This ‘magna carta of social Catholicism’ encouraged some Catholics to move beyond mere paternalism. Le Sillon (meaning ‘the Furrow’), the popular, lay-driven Catholic youth movement founded in 1898, placed Marc Sangnier in the avant-garde of an egalitarian social Catholicism.Footnote ⁵ At the core of the Sillon's beliefs was the conviction that democracy and Catholicism were not mutually exclusive and that the republic was the poorer for not being susceptible to religious influences. In the social realm, the Sillon was anti-capitalist but not Marxist, emphasising worker dignity and co-operativism. Though not strictly its founder, then, Sangnier fast became the incarnation of the Sillon, dominating through his gifted oratory at audacious public meetings and the creation of a Sillon network.Footnote ⁶ Sangnier's charisma went hand in hand with a liking for centralised control. This ultimately alienated some of those acolytes he had at first mesmerised.Footnote ⁷ Having spoken with him at a Sillon congress in Belfort in 1903, Jean Guiraud, the Catholic historian and future journalist on La Croix, wrote privately of Sangnier's dangerous ‘contempt … for all that is not Himself [sic]’. Young fans surrounded him with a ‘ridiculous idolatry’ that had already gone to his head while his dislike for sober study horrified the sceptical Guiraud.Footnote ⁸ François Mauriac painted a severe caricature of ‘Jérôme Servet’ in his early novel L'Enfant chargé de chaînes. There can be little doubt but that Sangnier, though loyal to Catholic authority, was propelled, in part by heightened self-belief, towards incautious formulations of his message that ultimately left ‘his’ movement open to the charge of heresy. That lay in the future, though, for, initially, Sangnier was the hierarchy's favourite son, offering a popular audience previously unimaginable. The Sillon pilgrimages to Rome of 1903 and 1904 marked triumphs for the movement and its charismatic head. On both occasions Marc Sangnier was warmly received by Pius x. He was accompanied to the Vatican by a 500-strong uniformed delegation from the Jeune Garde, the Sillon's youth wing, which was simultaneously participating in the French workers' pilgrimages organised by the pious, Social Catholic factory-owner Léon Harmel.Footnote ⁹ Small wonder that Mgr Henri Chapon, bishop of Nice, would retrospectively describe the Sillon as ‘the most beautiful élan of faith and apostolate amongst our French youth since the Revolution’.Footnote ¹⁰ However, Sangnier's radical brand of Christian democracy was going, sooner or later, to get him into trouble. Moreover, what did the movement mean by ‘Christian democracy’? Before 1914 this did not necessarily mean support for the democratic system per se, a key difference from the later Christian Democratic political movements.Footnote ¹¹ Instead, a narrow definition of the term, set down in Leo xiii's encyclical Graves de communi (1901), applied. ‘Christian democracy’ was merely Catholic popular action – under the bishops' guidance – theoretically compatible with any political regime, even an authoritarian one.Footnote ¹² Those who crossed these markers courted official censure. The excommunication of the proto-Christian democratic Italian Fr Romolo Murri in 1909 was a salutary example of this.Footnote ¹³ A critical ambiguity lay at the heart of the Sillon experiment, therefore, in that it was a lay movement situated in the temporal domain which, because it was Catholic, could not escape ecclesiastical authority.Footnote ¹⁴

Notwithstanding flaws in Sangnier's personality, this layman had no desire to be an ecclesiastical rebel but he was naïve if he did not see how the Sillon, in which lay and clerical members were equal, offended against the prevailing orthodoxy of a pyramidal and divinely ordained authority structure in the Church. Worse still, it was a movement that genuinely accepted the principles of the French Revolution. Diocese after diocese forbade seminarians to participate in a youth movement that they, the bishops, did not control. The Sillon gradually strayed more and more into conventional ‘democratic’ politics. In 1907 Sangnier embarked on an ecumenical endeavour called ‘the greater Sillon’ whereby the movement was to be broadened to include not just Catholics but all democrats, even Protestants and non-believers. Its leader genuinely, if naively, felt that ‘the greater Sillon’ was merely the exercise of civic independence in the temporal sphere rather than a religious act. Sangnier had not only miscalculated doctrinally but he had also underestimated the theological politics of the Modernist crisis, then at its height.

The anti-Modernist crusade that came to dominate the pontificate of Pius x (1903–10) was an attack on theologians, biblical scholars and ecclesiastical historians who sought to use modern scientific methods, including literary criticism, in their work. Many of them were Frenchmen, such as Alfred Loisy (1857–1940), whose books were placed on the Index and who was excommunicated in 1908. Famously, in his major anti-Modernist encyclical Pascendi (1907), Pius called Modernism the ‘synthesis of all heresies’.Footnote ¹⁵ It was, to an extent, a category created by its opponents, both in the Roman Curia and amongst the self-appointed intégristes who believed that they were defending an immutable ‘deposit of the faith’ against subtle, but serpentine, heretics. Modernism was conceived by its critics, moreover, as a general tendency towards a dangerous and unfiltered engagement with modernity. In this sense the ‘crisis’ soon overran the bounds of theology and exegesis and left open to the suspicion of heterodoxy those, like Sangnier, who attempted to find a via media between Catholicism, socialism and democracy. At this time democratic inclinations ‘tended to be seen as going hand in hand with Modernism’.Footnote ¹⁶ This was untrue in Sangnier's case. However, in as much as the pursuit of doctrinal purity under Pius x had degenerated into a witch-hunt, Sangnier's Christian democracy, with its openness to secular and liberal ideas, made him a social Modernist. Already, in Pascendi, Pius had reproved ‘democrats who ruin the authority of civil society by placing its source in the conscience of citizens, like Modernists ruin the authority of the Church by placing its source in the conscience of the Christian community’.Footnote ¹⁷

On 25 August 1910 the inevitable crisis broke. In a letter to the French bishops entitled Notre Charge apostolique, Pius x acknowledged the nobility of the Sillon's efforts without flinching in pointing out its errors.Footnote ¹⁸ In the words of Ernest Pezet, ‘their civic independence was considered culpable indiscipline, their social audacity taken for revolutionary error, their Republican fervour as fanaticism’.Footnote ¹⁹ Pius, engaged in a bitter diplomatic rift with the French government, saw danger in linking Catholicism to ‘a form of democracy whose doctrines are erroneous’.Footnote ²⁰ The letter was the result of months of lobbying by unsympathetic bishops such as Charles-François Turinaz, bishop of Nancy. While supporters of Sangnier such as Bishop Chapon (Nice), Bishop Charles-Henri Gibier (Versailles) and Archbishop Mignot (Albi) had failed to prevent a Roman reprimand, they were somewhat relieved that the Sillon was not the object of a full doctrinal condemnation by the Holy Office, but rather an official warning from the pope.Footnote ²¹ Be that as it may, Pius was certain ‘that the breath of the Revolution has passed this way, and we may conclude that if the social doctrines of the Sillon are erroneous, its spirit is dangerous and its education disastrous’.Footnote ²² Unlike Lamennais in the 1830s, Sangnier submitted to the papacy in a dignified reply stating his wish to remain ‘Catholic before all’. While it may appear surprising, Sangnier's meekness in response to the papal prohibition of Sillon activity had its own internal logic. Already, in his book Aux Sources de l'éloquence (1908), Sangnier had praised the rejection of schism by the Dominican preacher Lacordaire, contrasting it with the rebellion of his friend, the ‘unfortunate’ Lamennais.Footnote ²³ Imbued with a dolorist belief in the redemptive nature of suffering, and conditioned by his ultramontane world view, Sangnier is reputed to have read the papal letter on his knees. Linked to this psychological imperative was a political motive. For, just as Sangnier's letter expressed regret at his movement's unintentional errors, he took solace in the hope that their obedience to Rome would offset the calumny and attacks of fellow Catholics, taking refuge in the papacy ‘as in an inviolable sanctuary from which the wicked will not succeed in driving us out’.Footnote ²⁴ His comrades followed in filial obedience, either joining the depleted Sillon Catholique established under direct episcopal supervision or following Sangnier into pure politics through the Ligue de la Jeune-République founded in 1912.Footnote ²⁵ In striking contrast, Pius was indulgent towards the Sillon's arch-enemy, the royalist Action Française. The agnostic Charles Maurras might simply use Catholicism for political ends but his counter-revolutionary authoritarianism was blessed by Pius x.Footnote ²⁶ Soon, however, the war, and a new papacy, would supersede the condemnation of 1910 and change utterly the relationship between Sangnier and Catholicism.

II

Benedict xv's pre-papal career in the Roman Curia had also been marred by the Modernist crisis. Giaccomo Della Chiesa was no Modernist but he was aghast at the excesses of the purge which offended his cautious temperament and penchant for fair play. Della Chiesa was appointed papal under-secretary of state or sostituto in 1901, making him second in command in the Curia. The election of Pius x in 1903 altered the politics of the Curia, to Della Chiesa's disadvantage. The new secretary of state, Merry Del Val, marginalised him in favour of intégristes such as Mgr Umberto Benigni. Benigni was the head of a shadowy anti-Modernist thought police, the secretive Sodalitium Pianum, with agents and informants throughout Catholic Europe who were ever ready to ‘delate’ suspected Modernists to Rome. Mgr Pietro Gasparri, Secretary of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, head of the Vatican ‘foreign office’ and an ally of Della Chiesa's, wrote privately of La Sapinière, as it was known in French, as ‘an occult, espionage organization … a kind of Freemasonry unheard of in the history of the Church’.Footnote ²⁷ In this fevered atmosphere, Della Chiesa's ‘promotion’ as archbishop of Bologna in 1907 provided ‘a convenient exile for an uncomfortable subordinate’.Footnote ²⁸ Ever loyal, Della Chiesa none the less attempted to wield the axe sparingly in his new diocese. Small wonder he was denied the cardinal's red hat until the summer of 1914. The very fact of his election to the papacy in September 1914 was a blow to anti-Modernist zealots. Within months, Gasparri had become secretary of state, a post he would retain until 1929. Most significant of all was Benedict's first encyclical, Ad beatissimi, published on 1 November 1914, which deplored not just the European war but also called for concord within the Church. The condemnation of Modernism remained but name-calling should end. With the self-styled ‘integral’ Catholics in view, he decreed that the practice of ‘using distinctive names by which Catholics are marked off from Catholics should cease’.Footnote ²⁹

In France, meanwhile, Sangnier, trained in his youth as a military engineer at the Ecole Polytechnique, was recalled to the army in 1914. By 1919 he had served in various capacities – engineer, captain, unofficial chaplain, propaganda lecturer – in the rear of the Western Front.Footnote ³⁰ Between June 1916 and January 1917, however, he was spirited out of the war at the instigation of the French government and sent on a top-level political mission to Pope Benedict xv in the Vatican. In an army lecture in April 1918 Sangnier said of the national mobilisation: ‘Today's war resembles in no way previous war. It is no longer only armies that are fighting, it is, in truth, entire nations.’Footnote ³¹ According to Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, a ‘war culture’ emerged in 1914–18 as a system of beliefs and representations that gave the war its deep meaning.Footnote ³² In the French case, this consensus took the name of union sacrée or ‘sacred union’, defined by James McMillan as ‘the agreement to bury longstanding political and ideological animosities in response to President Poincaré's appeal to put national unity first’.Footnote ³³ ‘National Catholic’ patriotism cast France, the Church's eldest daughter, as the hereditary enemy of Lutheran Prussia. Clearly, the left-wing social and economic radicalism and unequivocal Catholic republicanism of Sangnier put him at odds with the mainstream conservative Catholic variant of the ‘war culture.’ Suspicion of the Sillon still abounded amongst anti-republican Catholics: ‘Some priests treat us as if we were outside the Church: I have met some on the front who thought I was excommunicated.’Footnote ³⁴ Sangnier was excluded from the Catholic Committee for French Propaganda Abroad brought together by Alfred Baudrillart, conservative Rector of the Institut Catholique de Paris, with Foreign Ministry aid, in 1915. This ‘sacred union’ was itself limited.

Marc Sangnier's departure for Rome in June 1916 represented an extraordinary hiatus in his military service. His son, Jean, has written of how his father ‘was sent on an official mission to the Italian Red Cross. In fact, this mission concerned contacts which the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Aristide Briand, wished to make with the Vatican’.Footnote ³⁵ (Briand was in fact premier as well as foreign minister at that time in 1916.) As part of the union sacrée, Briand and the republic wanted to achieve internal unity and the good opinion of neutral Catholics by holding out the hope of healing the diplomatic rift which had existed between France and the Vatican since 1904. This was delicate because anticlerical rumeurs infâmes propagated the belief that a reactionary clergy was conniving at the republic's defeat as God's punishment.Footnote ³⁶ ‘No one believes he will only be talking about the Red Cross’, wrote Mgr Jules Tiberghien, papal courtier, to Rome of Sangnier's unusual release from regular combatant duties.Footnote ³⁷ Baudrillart mocked what he saw as an odd waste of manpower, predicting that ‘his visit … will raise eyebrows’.Footnote ³⁸

Marc Sangnier's private account of his audience with Benedict xv on 19 August 1916 is highly revealing.Footnote ³⁹ First, there is Sangnier, the devout Catholic, eager to prove his obedience to the Holy See, defending himself against the charges of his Catholic detractors in order to gain papal approval for his renewed role as a lay Catholic activist. Second, in the context of the ‘sacred union’, there is Sangnier acting as Briand's emissary, discussing the prospects for better Church–State relations in France. Finally, there is Sangnier pleading his country's moral case before the ‘Holy Father’, thereby attempting to influence Vatican policy. He was but one of many supplicants in this regard, from both sides. The example of the German Catholic politician Matthias Erzberger springs to mind. During his own audience, Sangnier exhibited an almost Jansenist scrupulousness about the manner and wholeheartedness of his submission to the papacy. Benedict was emphatic: ‘“Your attitude was absolutely perfect … Yes! Absolutely perfect!” Then we spoke about the condemnation of the Sillon. “Everyone makes mistakes. Even Saint Augustine did.”’Footnote ⁴⁰ Benedict affirmed ‘vigorously the compatibility of republicanism and Catholicism. Ever the diplomat, he would pursue the fight against internal heresy more sensitively than his sainted predecessor.Footnote ⁴¹ Sangnier left the audience with a renewed mandate for religious activism. For as Tiberghien had written to the Vatican that July, ‘He is not alone a fine soul but a veritable force and it is to my mind of great utility not to lose him.’Footnote ⁴² Benedict acknowledged the ‘edifying’ nature of Sangnier's abstinence but felt that it was time for it to end and that Sangnier should involve himself in ‘Catholic action’, even organising retreats and religious meetings; he urged the Frenchman not to fear his critics in this regard.Footnote ⁴³ Sangnier thanked the pope and contended that a public papal reprimand of the Catholic anti-republican right would secure the union sacrée and conciliate the state.Footnote ⁴⁴

Sangnier reminded Benedict at the very outset, however, that he was also there on behalf of Briand, who felt that contact with the Holy See could be ‘useful’ for France. Sangnier, the exemplar of Catholic ‘cultural mobilisation’, had come to plead France's moral case before the pope. With equal tenacity, though, Benedict xv desired to remain the common father of warring Catholics and was not going to let himself be used in a propaganda war by either Cain or Abel. As the Allies saw it, there was the overriding moral imperative to take sides in the clash of civilisations. The papacy had unequivocally to condemn ‘German barbarism’. The use of such Manichean terms had crystallised, in 1914–15, around the issue of the German violation of Belgian neutrality and German military conduct in 1914. From 1914 the papacy adopted a policy of imparzialità towards the war in general and the atrocities issue in particular. This effectively meant that the Vatican saw no moral distinction between the belligerents.Footnote ⁴⁵ Unsurprisingly, such an apparently relativist position was ‘at loggerheads with the cultural mobilisation of each side’ but protests (and there were many) were to little or no avail. The papacy was willing only either to engage in charitable relief of human distress in wartime or to make a series of initially discreet attempts to bring about a negotiated peace. The first of these was in 1915, a precursor to the more celebrated papal peace note of August 1917 that would be greeted with a tone of respectful defiance by the French ecclesiastical establishment.Footnote ⁴⁶ The discussion between Benedict and Marc Sangnier of the moral issues at stake in the war fits perfectly into this schema. Belgium's patriotic hero, Cardinal Mercier, was engaged in similar efforts. The German bishops responded in kind. Sangnier also lobbied the Curia's rising star and future Pope Pius xii, Eugenio Pacelli on 14 August and Secretary of State Gasparri on 15 August.Footnote ⁴⁷ At the audience with Benedict on 16 August, Sangnier insisted that France was fighting a defensive war, forcing Benedict onto the defensive over the Belgian issue:

To Sangnier, this papal pronouncement must have been disconcerting. It seemed to acquiesce in the notion that might was right. He could not agree with the pontiff's wish that ‘one began to envisage a peace without fighting jusqu'au bout’, in other words, a negotiated peace, as suggested by the papacy in 1915 and again in 1917. As so often during the First World War, the ‘eldest daughter’ had to agree to disagree with her ‘Holy Father’.

Sangnier's visit to the Vatican did not go unnoticed at home. Baudrillart exemplified the suspicion of many when he noted crisply in his diary that ‘The pope has received Marc Sangnier … But the pope shall not go back on what Pius x did.’Footnote ⁴⁹ Mgr Chapon, as one of the few members of the episcopate who had spoken up for the Sillon in 1909–10, was well placed to remind Sangnier of how the Roman welcome given to him would ‘reawaken the malevolence’ of his enemies. Chapon informed Sangnier of at least one written protest from a bishop to Cardinal Gasparri.Footnote ⁵⁰ Bishop Joseph-Marie Tissier of Châlons had written to Rome for clarification of the audience's import, fearing an ‘impertinent’ exaggeration of the pope's receptivity to Sangnier's democratic social Catholicism. Union sacrée or not, Tissier was still using the language of the Modernist crisis when he stated forebodingly that ‘the Sillon is a subtle doctrine which insinuates itself by the least of open doors’.Footnote ⁵¹ In this case, Rome was not about to bolt the door. Pacelli, as head of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, refused to entertain such complaints in his response: ‘The August Pontiff wished to encourage him in popular and social action, for the especial benefit of the working class’ and in all particulars faithful to the Holy See and the bishops ‘which M. Marc Sangnier accepted perfectly’.Footnote ⁵² In December 1916 the pope also told Cardinal Amette, archbishop of Paris, of his ‘benevolent’ attitude towards Sangnier while retaining Pius x's censure. But what he did not want was ‘Sangnier and his friends to have their hands tied’ in the matter of social action.Footnote ⁵³

III

Chapon told Sangnier that he prayed God to ‘deliver you back soon, victorious and in peace, to the great work He destines for you … in the regeneration of our Christian France’.Footnote ⁵⁴ But despite Sangnier's visit ad limina apostolorum in 1916, the pope's private endorsement of his renewed public role failed to quieten conservative critics. In August 1918 Chapon was yet again taking up the cudgels on his behalf, writing to Jean Guiraud at La Croix to complain about that journalist's accusations in a recent article on Christian youth that Sangnier and his acolytes placed ‘the soul of the Sillon’ outside all constraints of authority, ‘even of the Church’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Of course, neither Chapon nor Sangnier were surprised by the bitterness of their enemies. The good of the 1916 audience had been undone by bishops' protests and, by May 1919, Chapon wrote to Rome that the putative politician was ‘no longer the apostle and it is a big loss’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Chapon added that the war had opened up a ‘new world’ to such lay apostles; ‘France does not leave the war converted but riper for conversion …We are tolerated and welcomed where, a few years ago, we were forbidden.’Footnote ⁵⁷Intégristes did not impress Chapon. ‘Preoccupied with hunting and finding heresy everywhere’, they had hounded out a succession of talented figures.Footnote ⁵⁸ For all the deference, it was a brave statement of the sad legacy of the anti-Modernist campaign. Chapon felt that Catholics had to embrace social concerns that will ‘be resolved against our interests if we were not in on their resolution’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The salvation of faith and fatherland lay not with the blasphemous monarchism of Maurras but in the patient apostolate of society, especially the working class. The election of Sangnier to parliament in November 1919 lent greater urgency to the question just as the elections themselves seemed to present a real opportunity for Church–State reconciliation. Sangnier had stood and been elected for the 3rd circonscription of Paris on the centre-right ticket of the Bloc National. The ‘blue horizon’ Chamber of 1919–24 was a broad Republican coalition that, like Sangnier, was anti-Bolshevik.Footnote ⁶⁰ However, his left-wing Catholicism and growing internationalism were the germs of a rapid disillusionment with the Bloc National over the following five years. In 1919 ‘religious pacification’ was his main priority.Footnote ⁶¹ The Bloc's programme reassured both Catholics and their new allies, anti-collectivist Radicals, on the issue of the Vatican embassy.Footnote ⁶² Chapon strongly approved of this Catholic alliance with moderate Republicanism. ‘Democracy is a fact’, he wrote to Pacelli. Catholic intransigence, ‘as la Croix would have had us do’, would have ‘given France over to the most terrible social revolution’.Footnote ⁶³

The restoration of diplomatic relations with France was one of Benedict's great achievements. The pope's efforts were made easier by the election of a moderate majority to parliament in 1919 and the occurrence of a ‘Second Ralliement’ in the early 1920s.Footnote ⁶⁴ This renewed reconciliation of Catholics and the republic grew out of the ‘sacred union’ of the home front and had been sealed in the blood of the soldier-priests and the Catholic laity at the front. In a rare collective letter from their bishops in May 1919, Catholics were called upon to partake fully in the task of national reconstruction as full citizens of the state.Footnote ⁶⁵ The canonisation of Joan of Arc in June 1920, which brought eighty French deputies to Rome (not including Sangnier), was highly symbolic in this context. The restoration of the Vatican embassy, in abeyance since 1904, was to be the acid test of reconciliation. Here Sangnier played a small, but not negligible, role in nudging on a compromise between Rome and Paris. In Marc Sangnier, the Vatican now saw a deputy and man of influence. The early months of 1920 saw a flurry of activity, therefore. On 8 January 1920 Sangnier, accompanied by Georges Hoog, his trusted secretary, was received in audience by the pope for the first time since 1916. Sangnier reportedly urged the pope and Cardinal Gasparri to make quick progress on the Vatican embassy.Footnote ⁶⁶ The rapid negotiations between Alexandre Millerand's administration and Gasparri actually alarmed many French bishops who felt that the Vatican was selling them out. Archbishop Dubois of Paris told the pope that it was impossible to go back on Pius x's stand as that would mean that the moderate supporters of separation of Church and State, like the abbé Lemire and Sangnier, would be seen to have been right all along.Footnote ⁶⁷ On 30 November the Chamber, Sangnier included, approved a new embassy to the Holy See. By this time Millerand had been elevated from premier to president so it fell to a new prime minister, Aristide Briand, to face down opponents in the Senate in mid-1921 by nominating a republican, Charles Jonnart, as French ambassador, allowing the Vatican in turn to appoint Mgr Bonaventure Cerretti as nuncio to Paris.Footnote ⁶⁸

The 1919 election, then, had seemed to promise much in terms of bringing Catholics in from the cold. Yet it was a false dawn for France's embryonic Christian Democratic parties. Sangnier was not totally alone in the new Chamber with roughly thirty members of democratic Catholic orientation elected.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet their efforts to form a cohesive group and party structure were undermined by internal divisions, external perceptions of them and by Sangnier himself. The Ligue Nationale de la Démocratie, a loose Christian Democratic grouping formed in 1920, continued the wartime alliance of Sangnier's Jeune-République with the more centrist Christian Democrats of the Fédération des Républicains-Démocrates whose organ was the Pétit Démocrate newspaper. Though one of its leaders, Ernest Pezet, had convinced a reluctant Sangnier to bring his own party onto the Bloc National ticket in 1919, alongside the Fédération, within a year Sangnier was fearful of the Jeune-République's leftist identity being swamped by the mainstream conservative Social Catholic movement. Accordingly, he declined the leadership of any prospective broad Christian Democratic party.Footnote ⁷⁰ Disappointing many admirers thus, Sangnier further isolated himself by his radical foreign policy so that, by 1922, his break with the Ligue National de la Démocratie was complete, leaving the latter to evolve into the Parti Démocrate Populaire founded in 1924. Sangnier's apparent obduracy, while certainly unhelpful, was far from being Christian Democracy's main obstacle to political success in France though. In the interwar period, French Christian Democrats failed to resolve the dilemma of being too democratic for many of the hierarchy and too clericalist for much of the electorate.

Since the war, Sangnier had been increasingly preoccupied with the moral bases of a lasting peace in Europe. So was the Vatican, even if it had been excluded from Versailles. While, in the event, all neutrals were excluded from the Paris negotiations, the exclusion of the Vatican had been agreed as far back as the Italian intervention on the Allied side in 1915. Article 15 of the Treaty of London stipulated this. As events turned out, non-signature of the eventual Treaty of Versailles saved the pope a lot of embarrassment. As John Pollard rightly states, ‘Much of the Vatican's post-war diplomatic prestige was based on its distance from the peace settlement.’Footnote ⁷¹ Anxious that Germany should not be humiliated and become the seedbed of future conflict, the Vatican objected to the idea of war guilt, the size of reparations and attempts to try the Kaiser as a war criminal. What practical advice did the pontiff offer Sangnier on international affairs at the 1920 audience? Little beyond general markers but he did implicitly endorse ‘engaged’ faith, ‘understanding that the civilising action of Christianity should correspond to an effort to reform human institutions’.Footnote ⁷² Feeling, however, that a settlement not based on the papacy's definition of Christian charity was like a house built on sand, Benedict xv, like Pius xi after him, failed to provide an explicit endorsement of the ‘Anglo-Protestant’ League of Nations that emerged in 1920.Footnote ⁷³ The encyclical Pacem of May 1920 would call on nations to put aside ‘mutual suspicion’ and join a league or ‘a sort of family of peoples … to safeguard the order of human society’.Footnote ⁷⁴ But the Vatican, unlike Sangnier, did not see Woodrow Wilson as a secular saint. After all, Harry Kessler, the German diplomat (and Sangnier admirer), visiting Rome in June 1921, found Gasparri ‘scornful’ of this victors' club though Kessler could not help ascribing some of the Vatican's scepticism towards the League to feelings of ‘irritation, “our-toes-have-been-trodden-on,” and possibly a helping of Church venom against the invention of the Devil in the shape of that Calvinist pastor and president Wilson’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Nor were the pope's prescriptions likely to enamour the practitioners of Realpolitik. Benedict told Sangnier and Hoog that the right to make war should be removed from heads of state. Even if parliament agreed, this tactic would buy time and, perhaps, peace. With ‘weary gestures’, he spoke about disarmament and the end of military service: ‘He smiled sadly and said “That will be hard”.’Footnote ⁷⁶ Worse still was ‘the spectacle of Christians … so stubborn in their hatred as to refuse succour to hungry children’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Benedict's humanitarian efforts and expenditure during and after the war were widely acknowledged. He gave very strong support to the Save the Children Fund set up in 1919.Footnote ⁷⁸ Yet Simone de Beauvoir recalls her mother's apoplexy at his collections for famished Austria at the door of Saint-Sulpice.Footnote ⁷⁹ The pope's moderate ‘foreign policy’ needed friends and, in that context, the time was right, in early 1920, for Sangnier's internationalist activism to get Church approval. Accordingly, when Sangnier's mother died in early February 1920, Gasparri deemed a telegram ‘opportune’.Footnote ⁸⁰ A full public rehabilitation was at hand.

The war, meanwhile, had decimated Catholic youth clubs and study circles. The bishops of Nice, Digne and Fréjus wished to revive them, calling a meeting for Tuesday 24 February aimed not just at niçois but at fashionable Catholic vacationers wintering on the Riviera. Sangnier had ‘willingly accepted’ the role of keynote speaker.Footnote ⁸¹ Chapon's request for a papal blessing on this initiative brought to a head, once and for all, the issue of Sangnier's fitness to act as a lay Catholic tribune with a social apostolate sanctioned by the institutional Church. Chapon's request was well-timed, coming soon after Sangnier's papal audience, the telegram of condolences for his mother and Chapon's own appeal for more openness to lay witness within the French Church. At the last moment, however, it seemed as if an inept slip by Sangnier might jeopardise the whole choreography of rehabilitation. With one hand, Rome gave succour, with the other, it reproved. Gasparri wrote back to Chapon conveying the pope's pleasure at the initiative and at the choice of a speaker whose ‘personal renewal’ of loyalty was so recent. Sangnier was (once more) a man to ‘present and eloquently emphasise, in accordance with the teaching and the spirit of the Church, the zeal which should fill Catholic youth in the task of the material and moral revival of France’.Footnote ⁸² But, simultaneously, Mgr Frédéric Tedeschini, sostituto to the secretary of state, wrote to Chapon ‘to inform His Lordship confidentially that it is rumoured in Rome that M. Marc Sangnier had said that HH Benedict xv “is a Pope of the left”’.Footnote ⁸³ The consternation that this notion caused in the corridors of the Vatican can only be guessed at. Tedeschini's letter, carefully re-drafted to convey just the right measure of disapproval, concluded that ‘in the interests of M. Marc Sangnier himself’, Chapon should urge him ‘to abstain from all language which could damage the good cause’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Reporting back to Tedeschini on Sangnier's time in Nice, Chapon reassured Rome that the ‘unfortunate words’ were due to journalistic inaccuracy, Sangnier having merely said that renewed diplomatic relations between the republic and the Vatican would annoy Action Française.Footnote ⁸⁵

The main news from Nice, however, was positive. The meeting had filled the city's largest hall with ‘a great number, pelted with rain … unable even to get in’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The great and the good of the Riviera had come and the pope's message of support had been cheered to the rafters as ‘an act of justice and for many it was a relief to see rehabilitated Marc Sangnier’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Benedict had kept his undertaking to Sangnier in August 1916 to undercut his critics publicly. As for Sangnier, ‘his speech was perfect, Christian and courageous and I could congratulate him that it would be the best Lenten sermon in Nice! Not a word astray’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Of course not everyone was relieved at such rehabilitation. As in 1916, some bishops reached for the inkwell. A joint letter was sent by the four bishops of the ecclesiastical province of Tours to the pope in April 1920. Would the pope please confirm ‘that nothing has changed in the attitude of the Holy See’ with regard to the Sillon?Footnote ⁸⁹ Gasparri, replying to Mgr Nègre, archbishop of Tours, wrote back that ‘as far as the doctrine of the Sillon, condemned by Pope Pius x, of blessed memory, is concerned, nothing, evidently, has changed’.Footnote ⁹⁰ But ‘as for M. Sangnier the person’, after a period of ‘prudent reserve and legitimate distrust’, his iniquity was pardoned. His ‘filial and entire submission’ meant that nothing stood in the way of the Church, ‘like a good mother, welcoming and treating with benevolence a repentant son and putting to work the great influence he exerts on French youth’.Footnote ⁹¹

So the prophet Marc had had his lips unsealed. Sangnier was now free to act out anew a religious mission. By 1920 it was clear that the peace movement would be Sangnier's new field of ‘Catholic action’. Clearly, Benedict was anxious to legitimise Sangnier's efforts for peace and Franco-German reconciliation. The pope desired to ‘count on us’ just as Sangnier and his supporters wished to support Benedict's peace efforts.Footnote ⁹² While Sangnier accepted the moral basis of reparations – German responsibility for the war – he felt that an excessively punitive policy would backfire on France and undermine democratic and anti-militarist elements in the new Weimar Republic. By the time of Prime Minister Poincaré's occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, Sangnier the deputy had made a complete break with hardline government policy towards Germany. As early as January 1921 Sangnier called publicly for ‘the disarmament of hatred’, a type of cultural demobilisation to undo the enmity of wartime that had not evaporated with the Armistice.Footnote ⁹³ Inspired by this Catholic and Christian imperative, Sangnier organised twelve international democratic peace congresses between 1921 and 1932 that brought together Christian Democrats, secular democrats and pacifists of various hues, including the Quakers, in a brave attempt to mobilise civil society across Europe for peace. The first such congress, held in December 1921 and at which twenty-one countries were represented, was remarkable because it was the first time since the war that German or Austrian speakers had been allowed access to a public rostrum in Paris.Footnote ⁹⁴ A telegram of papal blessing was sent to the congress by Gasparri. This was especially sweet for Sangnier. Hoog later wrote how Benedict ‘was happy, we are sure, that France was first to welcome, on her soil, Christians and democrats of all countries without exception … serving together the great cause of peace’.Footnote ⁹⁵ During the congress, Sangnier led a number of Catholic and Protestant delegates to a reception at the residence of the newly-arrived apostolic nuncio, Mgr Cerretti. The nuncio returned the compliment the following month, in January 1922, when he visited Sangnier's offices at La Démocratie and stated the pope's explicit approval of Sangnier's Christian pacifism. ‘The war is over’, Cerretti declared, ‘[and] hatred ought to disappear to make way for reconciliation of peoples and love.’Footnote ⁹⁶

Within a week of this most public papal endorsement of Sangnier, Benedict xv died unexpectedly. Sangnier felt that he had lost a friend. In 1904 Della Chiesa had heard Sangnier's speeches in Rome. As pope and ‘loving father’, Benedict flattered the layman with his vivid memories of this.Footnote ⁹⁷ Placing ‘a humble flower on an august tomb’, Sangnier wrote of how Benedict had ‘supported, comforted and defended’ him.Footnote ⁹⁸ Defended him from his enemies, no doubt. For Sangnier, the deceased pontiff was not only a humanitarian but a man of political wisdom and of ‘audacious’ pacifism.Footnote ⁹⁹ With his death, Sangnier had lost his papal best friend, the man who had gradually restored his religious mandate. Though many Catholics disliked his Christian Democracy, at least he was accepted by the papacy once again.

Under the new pope, Pius xi, there was a certain continuity in Vatican foreign policy. Sangnier met both Secretary of State Gasparri and the new pope in May 1922. Sangnier's peace congresses continued to receive papal encouragement and blessing right to the end. In spite of the papacy's preference for a Thomistic universal commonweal over the ‘secular league’ in Geneva, Pius pursued a policy of European pacification opposed to the conceit of idolatrous nationalism.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ When European statesmen gathered in Genoa in April 1922 to address the vexed issue of reparations, Pius pointedly sent a highly publicised letter to the archbishop of Genoa calling for a spirit of reconciliation rather than vengeance. Delegates to Sangnier's Vienna peace congress in September 1922 echoed it, declaring that ‘with Your Holiness, they proclaim aloud that “the best guarantee of tranquillity comes not from a forest of bayonets but from mutual confidence and friendship”’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In parliament, in 1923, Sangnier also came to the defence of the pope's oblique criticism of the Ruhr occupation. Given the fact that the Vatican and the republic reached a compromise on the legal framework of church property and administration in 1924, there were those in the Action Française who saw the pope's approval of democrats such as Sangnier as ‘a sop to please the royalists’ great enemy Briand, forming a part of Vatican foreign policy and affirming a new political line against the old integrist guard’.Footnote ¹⁰² Certainly, Sangnier and the pope fully supported Aristide Briand's Locarno policy of rapprochement with Germany from 1925, to the fury of the extreme right. In 1926 Rome called upon Catholics to withdraw from Action Française. In fifteen years the roles had been reversed with the Christian Democrats receiving succour not censure from Rome. The heretics were new, but the heresy was the same: subordinating revealed religion to an exogenous political philosophy.

IV

What, then, does the Sangnier case tell us about the pontificate of Benedict xv and the implications of the Modernist crisis for Catholic activism? Bishop Chapon had written to Rome in 1919 that Sangnier and his supporters needed to be defended against fellow Catholics who had ‘never accepted the social directions of Leo xiii, no more than his political ones’. In this arena, then, the papacy was the focus of the moderates' hopes. These men, spiritual heirs of Leo xiii, looked to Rome for liberation: ‘They are counting on Benedict xv to protect and defend them.’Footnote ¹⁰³ Pierre Pierrard has written of the paradoxical relationship of engagé or advanced social Catholics with the ultramontane papacy in the early twentieth century. Their ‘Romanism’ was not merely passive allegiance to the pope but an actual driving force for their comparatively progressive social doctrines.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Social Catholicism had been brought into the open by Leo xiii in 1891. Pius xi (1922–39), the pope of ‘Catholic Action,’ would develop it, with the encyclical Quadragesimo anno (1931). Therefore, French social Catholics constantly sought solace from Rome in the 1920s and 1930s when faced with suspicion from coreligionists, be they industrialists or intégristes. Sangnier's acolyte, Francisque Gay, would even found papal scouts, the Volontaires du Pape, 6,000 of whom went on pilgrimage to Rome in for the Jubilee Year of 1929. The enthusiasm of democrats such as Sangnier and Gay for the papacy stands in contrast with the ‘anti-Roman complex’ that would mark a good number of Catholic radicals in the second half of the century.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Was Benedict a pope of the left, though, as Sangnier's alleged gaffe of 1920 had implied? Hardly. Benedict, by his gentler and more pastoral enforcement of orthodoxy, was, in Eamon Duffy's words, ‘as conciliatory as his predecessor had been confrontational’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It is interesting that at the same time as the audience with Sangnier in 1916, Benedict had succeeded in bringing about the reconciliation with the papacy of the ‘democratic priest’ and deputy Jules Lemire (1853–1928). One of the original abbés démocrates who had accepted the Third Republic, Lemire sat as a deputy for Hazebrouck (Flanders) from 1893 to 1928. Lemire had resisted attempts by the bishop of Cambrai to prevent his candidature in 1914. For this insubordination, the bishop imposed upon the priest a Vatican-approved ban on saying mass. The new pope, however, restored this errant Christian Democrat to full ministry in March 1916. Ever an acute observer, Baudrillart had correctly assumed the audience with Sangnier to be of a similar order.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The pope himself made an explicit link between the Lemire and Sangnier reconciliations in private remarks to Mgr Mignot, archbishop of Albi.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ While pleading Sangnier's case, Chapon had congratulated the pope on restoring full priestly rights to Lemire.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ But reductionist political labels of ‘left’ and ‘right,’ however convenient, are rarely less appropriate than when applied to an institution of such longevity as the papacy. Benedict's international ideas, his invocation of the heritage of Rerum novarum and guarded benevolence towards Christian Democrats indicated a policy of moderation. This is not enough though to qualify him as left-wing. The rehabilitation of Marc Sangnier should be read, therefore, as a retreat from anti-Modernist zealotry inside the Church and a desire to conciliate France and encourage Franco-German reconciliation in the foreign policy realm, not as a lurch to the left.

Nor, finally, can the Sangnier case be isolated from the Vatican's Italian policy in the immediate post-war period. The pope's new openness to Sangnier in 1920 mirrors the willingness of the Vatican to tolerate and indeed encourage the emergence of a reformist and predominantly lay Catholic political party in Italy, namely the Partito Popolare Italiano, formed in 1919. Because of the ‘Non Expedit’, a rule in force since 1864, Catholics were generally forbidden from participating in Italian national elections either as candidates or voters, so as not to lend legitimacy to an Italian state that was the enemy of the Church. Any Catholic political movement, therefore, needed papal assent. The democratic priest Don Luigi Sturzo had gained Cardinal Gasparri's de facto approval for a democratic party of Catholic inspiration in 1918. As with Sangnier, Benedict had immense faith in Sturzo. In 1905, in his capacity as sostituto, he personally sanctioned Sturzo's entry into local politics in Sicily. The programme of the Popolari in 1919 had the tacit backing of the pope. Most Catholics read the signs and gave their allegiance to the new party. Finally, five days before the Italian elections of November 1919, the Vatican formally withdrew the Non Expedit, declaring it licit to vote for the Popolari in order ‘to save society from an anti-Christian and anarchic threat’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The elections were a triumph for the Popolari who won a hundred seats. Of course, the polarisation of Italian politics and growing Vatican disenchantment with the independent-minded Popolari, even before the accession of Pius xi, meant that Italian Christian Democracy was ultimately sacrificed after 1922 for the sake of a compromise between Mussolini and the Church. However, none of that could have been foretold in 1919. In both the French and the Italian cases, the immediate aftermath of war and the apparently imminent prospect of Catholic reintegration into the national political community prompted a cautious but real opening on the part of Benedict xv to lay public witness and Christian Democratic politics, be it Sangnier's in France or that of the Popolari in Italy. The issues raised by the Sangnier case – such as ‘social Modernism’ and international peace – and, more particularly, the manner in which Benedict xv resolved them substantially confirms Duffy's assessment that this pope returned to the policies of Leo xiii.Footnote ¹¹¹ However, it is possible to go further and find that, in light of the new circumstances brought about by the war, the pontificate of Benedict xv marked not so much a ‘resumption’ of the course drawn out for the papacy by Leo xiii as its development and fulfilment.