1829. The news was received by the populace with unconcealed joy. He was succeeded by Pius VIII.
Authorities.—Artaud de Montor, Histoire du Pape Léon XII. (2 vols., 1843; by the secretary of the French embassy in Rome); Brück, “Leo XII.,” in Wetzer and Welte’s Kirchenlexikon, vol. vii. (Freiburg, 1891); F. Nippold, The Papacy in the 19th Century (New York, 1900), chap. 5; Benrath, “Leo XII.,” in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie, vol. xi. (Leipzig, 1902), 390-393, with bibliography; F. Nielsen, The History of the Papacy in the 19th century (1906), vol. ii. 1-30; Lady Blennerhassett, in the Cambridge Modern History, vol. x. (1907), 151-154. (W. W. R.*)
Leo XIII. (Gioacchino Pecci) (1810–1903), pope from 1878 to
1903, reckoned the 257th successor of St Peter, was born at
Carpineto on the 2nd of March 1810. His family was Sienese
in origin, and his father, Colonel Domenico Pecci, had served
in the army of Napoleon. His mother, Anna Prosperi, is said
to have been a descendant of Rienzi, and was a member of the
third order of St Francis. He and his elder brother Giuseppe
(known as Cardinal Pecci) received their earliest education
from the Jesuits at Viterbo, and completed their education in
Rome. In the jubilee year 1825 he was selected by his fellow-students
at the Collegium Romanum to head a deputation
to Pope Leo XII., whose memory he subsequently cherished
and whose name he assumed in 1878. Weak health, consequent
on over-study, prevented him from obtaining the highest
academical honours, but he graduated as doctor in theology
at the age of twenty-two, and then entered the Accademia dei
Nobili ecclesiastici, a college in which clergy of aristocratic
birth are trained for the diplomatic service of the Roman Church.
Two years later Gregory XVI. appointed him a domestic prelate,
and bestowed on him, by way of apprenticeship, various minor
administrative offices. He was ordained priest on the 31st of
December 1837, and a few weeks later was made apostolic
delegate of the small papal territory of Benevento, where he
had to deal with brigands and smugglers, who enjoyed the
protection of some of the noble families of the district. His
success here led to his appointment in 1841 as delegate of Perugia,
which was at that time a centre of anti-papal secret societies.
This post he held for eighteen months only, but in that brief
period he obtained a reputation as a social and municipal reformer.
In 1843 he was sent as nuncio to Brussels, being first consecrated
a bishop (19th February), with the title of archbishop of Damietta.
During his three years’ residence at the Belgian capital he found
ample scope for his gifts as a diplomatist in the education controversy
then raging, and as mediator between the Jesuits and
the Catholic university of Louvain. He gained the esteem of
Leopold I., and was presented to Queen Victoria of England
and the Prince Consort. He also made the acquaintance of many
Englishmen, Archbishop Whately among them. In January
1846, at the request of the magistrates and people of Perugia,
he was appointed bishop of that city with the rank of archbishop;
but before returning to Italy he spent February in London, and
March and April in Paris. On his arrival in Rome he would,
at the request of King Leopold, have been created cardinal
but for the death of Gregory XVI. Seven years later, 19th
December 1853, he received the red hat from Pius IX. Meanwhile,
and throughout his long episcopate of thirty-two years,
he foreshadowed the zeal and the enlightened policy later to be
displayed in the prolonged period of his pontificate, building
and restoring many churches, striving to elevate the intellectual
as well as the spiritual tone of his clergy, and showing in his
pastoral letters an unusual regard for learning and for social
reform. His position in Italy was similar to that of Bishop
Dupanloup in France; and, as but a moderate supporter of the
policy enunciated in the Syllabus, he was not altogether persona
grata to Pius IX. But he protested energetically against the
loss of the pope’s temporal power in 1870, against the confiscation
of the property of the religious orders, and against
the law of civil marriage established by the Italian government,
and he refused to welcome Victor Emmanuel in his diocese.
Nevertheless, he remained in the comparative obscurity of his
episcopal see until the death of Cardinal Antonelli; but in 1877,
when the important papal office of camerlengo became vacant,
Pius IX. appointed to it Cardinal Pecci, who thus returned
to reside in Rome, with the prospect of having shortly responsible
functions to perform during the vacancy of the Holy See, though
the camerlengo was traditionally regarded as disqualified by his
office from succeeding to the papal throne.
When Pius IX. died (7th February 1878) Cardinal Pecci was elected pope at the subsequent conclave with comparative unanimity, obtaining at the third scrutiny (20th February) forty-four out of sixty-one votes, or more than the requisite two-thirds majority. The conclave was remarkably free from political influences, the attention of Europe being at the time engrossed by the presence of a Russian army at the gates of Constantinople. It was said that the long pontificate of Pius IX. led some of the cardinals to vote for Pecci, since his age (within a few days of sixty-eight) and health warranted the expectation that his reign would be comparatively brief; but he had for years been known as one of the few “papable” cardinals; and although his long seclusion at Perugia had caused his name to be little known outside Italy, there was a general belief that the conclave had selected a man who was a prudent statesman as well as a devout churchman; and Newman (whom he created a cardinal in the year following) is reported to have said, “In the successor of Pius I recognize a depth of thought, a tenderness of heart, a winning simplicity, and a power answering to the name of Leo, which prevent me from lamenting that Pius is no longer here.”
The second day after his election Pope Leo XIII. crossed the Tiber incognito to his former residence in the Falconieri Palace to collect his papers, returning at once to the Vatican, where he continued to regard himself as “imprisoned” so long as the Italian government occupied the city of Rome. He was crowned in the Sistine Chapel 3rd March 1878, and at once began a reform of the papal household on austere and economic lines which found little favour with the entourage of the former pope. To fill posts near his own person he summoned certain of the Perugian clergy who had been trained under his own eye, and from the first he was less accessible than his predecessor had been, either in public or private audience. Externally uneventful as his life henceforth necessarily was, it was marked chiefly by the reception of distinguished personages and of numerous pilgrimages, often on a large scale, from all parts of the world, and by the issue of encyclical letters. The stricter theological training of the Roman Catholic clergy throughout the world on the lines laid down by St Thomas Aquinas was his first care, and to this end he founded in Rome and endowed an academy bearing the great schoolman’s name, further devoting about £12,000 to the publication of a new and splendid edition of his works, the idea being that on this basis the later teaching of Catholic theologians and many of the speculations of modern thinkers could best be harmonized and brought into line. The study of Church history was next encouraged, and in August 1883 the pope addressed a letter to Cardinals de Luca, Pitra and Hergenröther, in which he made the remarkable concession that the Vatican archives and library might be placed at the disposal of persons qualified to compile manuals of history. His belief was that the Church would not suffer by the publication of documents. A man of literary taste and culture, familiar with the classics, a facile writer of Latin verses[1] as well as of Ciceronian prose, he was as anxious that the Roman clergy should unite human science and literature with their theological studies as that the laity should be educated in the principles of religion; and to this end he established in Rome a kind of voluntary school board, with members both lay and clerical; and the rivalry of the schools thus founded ultimately obliged the state to include religious teaching in its curriculum. The numerous encyclicals by which the pontificate of Leo XIII. will always be distinguished were prepared and written by himself, but were submitted to the customary revision. The encyclical Aeterni Patris (4th August 1879) was
- ↑ Leonis XIII. Pont. Maximi carmina, ed. Brunelli (Udine, 1883); Leonis XIII. carmina, inscriptiones, numismata, ed. J. Bach (Cologne, 1903).
