Is The Pope Catholic (or Confederate)? Pius IX’s Diplomatic Faux Pas

It was the salutation heard round the world. It encouraged the Confederacy, irritated the United States, and furnished a weapon used against American Catholics for years to come. “It” was the opening address of a letter from His Holiness, Pope Pius IX, leader of the Roman Catholic Church, to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America.

The incident originated with letters Pius IX sent in October 1862 to the archbishops of New York City (John Hughes) and New Orleans (Jean-Marie Odin). In each, the Pope expressed his sorrow over the suffering caused by the war in America and urged the clerics to use their upmost efforts to end the conflict. The pontiff did not express any opinion on the merits of the dispute nor take sides.[1] But the Pope’s interest in the overseas conflict was not a mere passing concern. Only weeks after his hortatory letters, the new U.S. Minister to Rome, Richard Blatchford, reported to Secretary of State William Seward that in his first meeting with the Pope, Pius IX had suggested (albeit obliquely) employing his good offices as a mediator.[2]

The Lincoln administration made no response to the tacit mediation offer nor reacted to the Pope’s letters when published. Davis, by contrast, recognized a diplomatic opportunity in the Pope’s correspondence.[3] Davis’s vision, cast toward a Catholic prelate from an overwhelmingly Protestant region, would bear fruit.

In fact, despite their small proportion of the Confederacy’s population (5.4 percent, vs 12.1 percent in the North in 1860),[4] Catholics, particularly clerics, were already playing important roles in support of the fledging nation.[5] For example, on February 16, 1862 Archbishop Odin, recipient of one of the Pope’s letters, authored a pastoral letter urging his flock to support the Confederacy. He recruited priests to serve as Confederate army chaplains. Odin even smuggled military intelligence out of New Orleans.[6]

Davis, who in his youth had spent a year in Catholic school,[7] was willing to leverage Catholic support in any way possible. One project adopted was sending an Irish-born Confederate army chaplain, Father John Bannon, to Ireland to discourage emigration to the U.S. for enlistment in the federal army.[8] Before leaving on his mission, Father Bannon met with Davis and Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin. Bannon suggested supporting his mission by opening correspondence with the Pope in an effort to gain diplomatic recognition. Such recognition also might influence the attitude towards the Confederacy in heavily Catholic European countries.[9] Indeed, the Lincoln administration already had seen the wisdom of cultivating European Catholic support, sending New York’s Archbishop Hughes on a semi-official diplomatic mission to France, Spain, and Italy in 1861-1862.[10]

Davis thought Fr. Bannon’s idea worth the ink and paper. On September 21, 1863, Davis wrote a letter expressing his gratitude for the pontiff’s effort to end the war. [11]

In his letter Davis cleverly included both Confederate propaganda and his own “spin” on the Pope’s original correspondence: “… I have read with emotion the terms in which you are pleased to express the deep sorrow with which you regard the slaughter, ruin and devastation consequent on the war now waged by the U. S. Government against the States and people over which I have been chosen to preside…” Davis piously intoned that “… we have offered at the footstool of our Father who is in Heaven prayers inspired by the same feelings which animate your Holiness; that we desire no evil to our enemies, nor do we covet any of their possessions; but are only struggling to the end that they shall cease to devastate our land and inflict useless and cruel slaughter upon our people, and that we be permitted to live at peace with all mankind, under our own laws and institutions, which protect every man in the enjoyment not only of his temporal rights, but of the freedom of worshiping God according to his own faith.”[12]

Davis appointed A. Dudley Mann special envoy to deliver Davis’s letter.[13] Mann secured meetings with the powerful Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, papal Secretary of State, who brought the Confederate envoy before Pius IX. [14] Mann was thrilled over this direct contact with the Catholic leaders, exclaiming in his report: “How strikingly majestic the conduct of the government of the Pontifical States in its bearing towards me, when contrasted with the sneaking subterfuges which some of the governments of Western Europe have had recourse in order to evade intercourse with our commissioners!”[15]

Mann shortly had even more reason for joy. On December 3, the Pope entrusted to Mann a warm response to Davis. Pius IX expressed his pleasure that Davis entertained the same desire for peace as the pontiff. The Pope added that he hoped that the United States would develop the same desire: “Would to God that the other inhabitants of those regions (the Northern people), and their rulers, seriously reflecting upon the fearful and mournful nature of intestine warfare, might, in a dispassionate mood, hearken to and adopt the counsels of peace!”[16]

But there was more. Not only was a European head of state deigning to communicate directly with the Confederacy’s leader after granting a personal audience to his representative, the salutation employed by the Pope in his correspondence to Davis was unprecedented. It read: “To the Illustrious and Honorable Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America.”[17]

There it was. Acknowledgment by the Pope that Jefferson Davis was the executive of an independent nation. The leader of the Catholic Church had formally recognized the Confederacy.

At least Mann thought so. Mann ecstatically wrote Davis that: “This letter will grace the archives of the executive office in all coming time. It will live, too, forever in story as the production of the first potentate who formally recognized your official position and accorded to one of the diplomatic representatives of the Confederate States an audience in an established Court Palace, like that of St. James or the Tuilleries.”[18]

Judah Benjamin disagreed. Benjamin thought that the use of Davis’s title was simply “a formula of politeness, not a political recognition of a fact.” Benjamin noted that there had been no follow-up by Rome to implement recognition, advising Mann that Confederate agent John Slidell had reported that the Papal Nuncio at Paris had not received any order to place his visa on Confederate passports. Benjamin also noted that the Pope had referred to the conflict as “civil” and “intestine” (i.e., internal), rather than a war between two sovereign nations.[19]

Benjamin did, however, observe that the exchange had produced a “good effect” at home. Moreover, he felt the Pope’s letter might be useful “in producing a check on the foreign enlistments made by the United States” and have other propaganda power.[20] And indeed, Confederate agent Bannon flooded Ireland with handbills trumpeting the Pope’s letter. In his “Address to the Catholic Clergy and People of Ireland,” Fr. Bannon announced that the Pope had ordered Catholics not to support the U.S. Bannon’s efforts were credited, by Southern diplomats at least, as causing a significant decline in Irish enlistments in the Union army.[21] Southern agents in Europe also trumpeted the supposed recognition in efforts to sway European powers. Secretary of State Seward took note, telling the U.S. Minister to Rome, “You are aware how ostentatiously it [the letter to Davis] has been paraded by the insurgents and their friends in Europe.”[22]

The Pope’s missive also was welcomed in the South. Southern newspapers eagerly spread word of the Pope’s warm reply, equating it to diplomatic recognition.[23] By contrast, the Northern press either rejected the pro-recognition interpretation or attacked the pontiff.[24]

The Lincoln administration was decidedly displeased with Pius IX’s pen-pal relationship with the rebel chieftain. Lincoln himself reportedly was concerned that American Catholics might now believe that it “is against Christ and His holy vicar, the Pope, that I am raising my sacrilegious hands.”[25]

Seward directed Rufus King, the new U.S. Minister to Rome, to obtain an explanation from the Vatican for the Pope’s correspondence. King confronted Cardinal Antonelli. Antonelli assured King “that the Pope’s letter … was a simple act of courtesy and devoid of any political design, or significance…”[26] Seward nevertheless remained wary towards the Vatican, even denying King’s request for a summer vacation over concern that Confederate agents in Rome might get up to more mischief in King’s absence.[27]

While the wartime diplomatic crisis passed, the Pope’s letter roiled U.S. politics post-war. It was repeatedly used to stoke anti-Catholic feeling. When in 1867 Congress broke off diplomatic relations with the Vatican after a (false) report that the Pope had forbidden American Protestants to worship in his domain, Harper’s Weekly referenced the letter in proclaiming “as it was the only Government in the world to recognize the Southern Confederacy, so now the Papal Government is the only one which denies the right of worship to American Protestants in Rome.”[28]

The letter was again spotlighted during an 1870s campaign against Catholic schools and periodically trotted out by newspapers and Protestant clerics seeking to condemn American Catholics for one reason or another.[29] Even as late as 1918, the letter was tied to a supposed spike in desertions of Irish immigrants from the Union army.[30]

The Pope’s true feelings towards the Confederate cause in fact were driven by a complex mixture of issues and events, an analysis beyond the scope of this post. Yet the Pope’s warm letter to the Confederate president, and especially its provocative salutation, gave rise at the time and for years later the belief that the Pope was not only Catholic, but Confederate.

 

[1] “Some Civil War Documents, A. D. 1862-1864, Pope Pius IX, J. P. Benjamin, A. Dudley Mann, Jefferson Davis,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, Vol. 14, No. 3 (September, 1903), pp. 264-266, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44207880. Each letter was dated October 18, 1862.

[2] Richard M. Blatchford to William H. Seward, No. 1, November 29, 1862, United States Ministers to the Papal States; Instructions and Despatches [sic], 1848-1868, edited with introduction by Leo Francis Stock, Ph.D., LL.D. (Catholic University Press, Washington, D.C., 1933), pgs. 261-263, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015074697114&seq=309 (hereafter “Instructions and Despatches”).

[3] “Pius IX and The Southern Confederacy,” The American Catholic Historical Researches, Vol. 21, No. 1 (January, 1904), pp. 26-28, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44374408.

[4] Robert Attilio Matteucci, Jr., “The Pope and the Presidents: The Italian Unification and the American Civil War,” (2015). LSU Master’s Theses.1176, p. 32, https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/1176.

[5] Philip Gerard Johnson, “The Catholic Church and The Confederate States Of America,” The Angelus Online, http://www.angelusonline.org/index.php?section=articles&subsection=print_article&article_id=2443 (listing prominent pro-Confederate clerics and their activities).

[6] Stephen J. Ochs, “A Patriot, a Priest and a Prelate: Black Catholic Activism in Civil War New Orleans,” U.S. Catholic Historian, Vol. 12, No. 1, African-American Catholics and Their Church (Winter, 1994), pp. 49, 61, 67-68 & n. 35, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25154011; The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of The Official Records of The Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. 48, pt. 1, p. 1, 412 (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1880 – 1901).

[7] William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour, A Biography (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., New York, NY 1991), pp. 13-14.

[8] Matteucci, p. 41.

[9] David J. Alvarez, “The Papacy in the Diplomacy of the American Civil War,” The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Apr., 1983), pp. 227, 241, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25021587; Matteucci, p. 41.

[10] Alvarez, pp. 231-232; “Archbishop John J. Hughes (1797-1863),” Mr. Lincoln and New York, The Lehrman Institute, https://www.mrlincolnandnewyork.org/new-yorkers/archbishop-john-j-hughes-1797-1863/index.html.

[11] Some Civil War Documents, pp. 268-269.

[12] Some Civil War Documents, pp. 268-269.

[13] Alvarez, p. 241; Some Civil War Documents, pp. 267-268.

[14] Leo Francis Stock, “The United States at the Court of Pius IX,” The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C., April 1923), pp. 103, 117-118, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25011937; Matteucci, pp. 28-29, 43.

[15] Matteucci, p. 43; Stock, p. 118; Alvarez, pp. 241-242. Fr. Bannon also had managed a direct meeting with the Pope (in October 1863) in connection with his mission to Ireland. In his papal audience, Bannon condemned the U.S. use of foreign soldiers, part of the Confederate strategy of arguing that the Union shamefully exploited immigrants for their wicked aims, which only served to prolong the war. Mann made the same argument in his meeting with the Pope. Matteucci, p. 42; Alvarez, p. 242.

[16] Some Civil War Documents, p. 270.

[17] Some Civil War Documents, p. 269 (emphasis supplied).

[18] Some Civil War Documents, pp. 273-274.

[19] Some Civil War Documents, pp. 271-272.

[20] Some Civil War Documents, p. 271; Alvarez, p. 243.

[21] Matteucci, pp. 53-57. One prominent historian observed that the Irish and German-Catholics were the most-underrepresented populations in Union ranks, although he attributes that deficiency to other reasons, including opposition to emancipation. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, New York, NY 1988), pp. 606-607.

[22] Matteucci, pp. 34-35; Alvarez, p. 245; Seward to King, February 9, 1864, Instructions and Despatches, p. 285.

[23] Matteucci, pp. 50-53, 60-62.

[24] Matteucci, pp. 52, 57-60, 62-66.

[25] Antony Shugaar, “Italy’s Own Lost Cause,” New York Times Opinionator, May 2, 2012, https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/italys-own-lost-cause/.

[26] Seward to King, February 9, 1864, King to Seward, March 19, 1864, Instructions and Despatches, pp. 285, 288-289.

[27] Seward to King, April 18, 1864, Instructions and Despatches, pp. 291-292.

[28] Matteucci, pp. 70, 71.

[29] The letter was hardly the only issue raised against Catholics, but it was often used in support of an anti-Catholic argument. Matteucci, pp. 68-78.

[30] Robert Joseph Murphy, “The Catholic Church In The United States During The Civil War Period (1852-1866),” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1928), pp. 271, 322-323, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44209034.