Angelus News | September 23, 2022 | Vol. 7 No. 19

tion is decidedly mixed, with many
nationalists blaming him for essentially
surrendering the Soviet empire.
In the West, where Gorbachev’s stock
always was higher — he even won the
ultimate secular symbol of soft power,
the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1990 —
historians and politicians still give
him mixed reviews.
Relatively little such ambivalence
runs through the tributes now flowing
in for Queen Elizabeth, because
her legacy is largely unsullied by the
inevitably compromised, and divisive,
application of hard power.
Of course, this lesson also applies to
the Vatican.
While English monarchs had become
largely paper tigers by the 19th
century, popes were still wielding
absolute authority over their own dominion
in the Papal States. There was
a lay administration that took care of
the nuts and bolts, but in practice life
in the Papal States was determined by
what disgruntled denizens referred to
as “government by the priests.”
(As a footnote, it was the policy of
the British government in the 19th
century to support Italy’s unification
drive, which would mean the collapse
of the Papal States, but to do so only
indirectly for fear of antagonizing the
Catholic subjects of the United Kingdom.
Including the populations of
Ireland, Canada, Australia and Malta,
Queen Victoria actually reigned over
a Catholic empire far larger than the
pope’s own.)
All that ended on Sept. 20, 1870,
when Republican forces under King
Emmanuel II poured through the
Porta Pia, one of Rome’s traditional
gates, and seized the city. When the
dust settled, 49 Republican soldiers
and 19 papal troops died that day, but
the biggest casualty was the temporal
power of the papacy.
Yet the truth is that the popes of the
152 years since have never been more
internationally relevant, or popularly
beloved. Despite possessing no real
hard power, St. Pope John Paul II, for
example, still managed to tower over
his times — certainly the late Mikhail
Gorbachev could have attested to the
point.
Today, Pope Francis is a global icon
and perhaps the world’s premier
voice of conscience, for Catholics
and non-Catholics alike, especially
in defense of the poor, migrants, and
refugees, and other marginalized
groups.
In 1970, on the 100th anniversary of
the breach of Porta Pia, St. Pope Paul
VI gave a talk marking the occasion
in which he called the loss of the
papacy’s hard power “providential,”
because it freed every pope since to
play a more universal and humanitarian
role in global affairs.
Indeed, a sure source of heartburn
for any pope now is whenever they’re
perceived to be trying to raise the
ghosts of the Papal States.
Part of why the Vatican’s current
“trial of the century” for financial
corruption has proved so controversial,
for example, is precisely because
it seems a strange vestigial hangover
from the past. In the Vatican’s system
of civil justice even today, the pontiff
exercises both supreme executive and
judicial authority, in ways seemingly
incompatible with modern standards
of due process — not to mention, of
course, the Catholic Church’s own
social teaching.
Queen Elizabeth rarely made that
mistake, exercising supreme discretion
about anything that could
be read as a political stance. When
she did make
St. Pope John Paul II
greets Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev at
the Vatican on Nov. 18,
1990. | CNS/LUCIANO
MELLACE, REUTERS
statements, it
was generally by
example, such
as the famous
occasion in 1998
when Elizabeth
unexpectedly
drove Saudi
Crown Prince
Abdulla around her Scottish estate at
a time when women weren’t allowed
to drive in his own country.
One enduring lesson from Queen
Elizabeth, therefore, is perhaps that
the less hard power you possess, the
more soft power you can amass. It’s
a point the modern papacy began to
assimilate a century and a half ago —
even if it learned that lesson the hard
way, literally down the barrel of a
gun, and even if, in some particulars,
it remains a work in progress.
John L. Allen Jr. is the editor of Crux.
September 23, 2022 • ANGELUS • 21