No. 292.
Mr. Marsh
to Mr. Evarts.
Rome, February 20, 1878. (Received March 11.)
Sir: Out of the sixty-four ecclesiastics who at present compose the college of cardinals, fifty-eight met in conclave at the Vatican on the evening of Monday, the 18th instant; and to-day at half past one p.m. it was announced by proclamation from the grand balcony over the central door of St. Peter’s that a large majority of the college (forty-five, it is said) had agreed to elect Cardinal Gioacchino Pecci, chamberlain of the Papal court, as successor to Pius IX.
The proclamation was made by a cardinal in the established formula: “Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum; habemus Papam Eminentissimum et Reverendissimum Dominum Yoachim Pecci qui sibi nomen imposuit Leo XIII.”
The chamberlain of the curia has been generally understood not to be in the line of preferment, and the reputation of Cardinal Pecci for moderation was thought to form a still stronger objection to his choice by the college, but great efforts had been made by the Catholic governments of Europe, strengthened by a powerful public opinion among [Page 471] political men, to induce the cardinals to agree in the selection of a man of the temper which is ascribed to Cardinal Pecci. The Osservatore Romano, the leading clerical journal at Rome, had predicted that the new Pope would take the name of Pius X and thus indicate his purpose of following out the ecclesiastical policy of his predecessor. Some importance is attached to his assumption of the name of Leo, as an expression of his views of the proper character of the head of the Papal Church. Leo XII, who reigned from 1823 to 1829, was very firm in maintaining the privileges and prerogatives of the Papacy, but neither encouraged fanaticism in the lower clergy or the faithful, nor favored the pretensions of the order of Jesuits. Certain minor arrangements of Cardinal Pecci, during his regency as chamberlain after the death of the late Pope, are construed by many as indicative of comparatively liberal intentions, and particularly of the purpose of abandoning the farce of a pretended restriction of the liberty of the Pope by the Italian Government, which was kept up by Pius IX from the entry of the royal troops into Rome on the 20th of September, 1870, to the day of his death.
I do not attach much consequence to any of these demonstrations, nor shall I to any initial professions of liberalism which may be made on behalf of the new Pontiff, who will feel as little bound by such professions as did Pius IX by those which accompanied the commencement of his reign, and who in the long run must shape the policy of the Papacy by the rule, “Sit ut est aut non sit.”
In the previous history of Cardinal Pecci there is nothing to justify the expectations of a conciliatory course of action on his part which have been so generally expressed since, by the death of Pius IX, he became a conspicuous candidate for the throne. He is said to have shown, in the suppression of brigandage in the southern provinces of the States of the Church, a severity, firmness, and energy quite unexampled in the treatment of brigands in the recent history of the Papacy, and on the other hand he appears to have been equally unyielding in sustaining the brutal and sanguinary action of General Kansler and the Papal troops in putting down the liberal movement at Perugia in 1859, and in general hostility to the national aspirations of the Italian people.
The tone of European journalism in regard to the importance of this election may seem to conflict with the views exposed by me in my dispatch No. 736, dated February 8, 1878.
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I have, &c.,