608 Chapter XXV
heads, and in between, where the civil authorities put “In the Name of the Cisal-
pine Republic,” he put “The Peace of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He gave up the Gre-
gorian calendar in his episcopal documents, and adopted the Republican, in which
more recent and more touchy American Catholics have seen a blasphemy against
the Incarnation. Late in 1797 the Cisalpine government requested of Chiara-
monti, or rather demanded of him, a public declaration that “the spirit of the Gos-
pel is founded on the maxims of liberty, equality and fraternity and in no way in
opposition to democracy.”
He complied, in his own way, in a Christmas sermon at Imola. His discourse
was really a sermon, not a political speech. It abounded in theological references, in
quotations from Jesus, St. Paul, and St. Augustine, and in warnings against reliance
on merely natural virtues and the dangers of human pride and presumption. Its
drift was to argue that democracy was perfectly Christian, but that it needed the
Church, since it depended, more than other forms of government, on an unselfish-
ness that only a true religion could instil. He accepted liberty and equality by de-
fining them in his own terms. “The democratic form of government adopted
among us, dear brethren, is not in opposition to the maxims I have set before you;
it is not contrary to the Gospel.... Civil equality, derived from natural law, refined
by moral considerations, brings harmony to the political body, when each person
co- operates for the good of all to the extent of his own moral and physical facul-
ties, receiving in turn from the protection of society all the advantages which he
has a right to expect.... Be good Christians and you will be excellent democrats.”^36
This Christmas sermon of 1797 has had a curious and significant history.
Bonaparte is supposed to have remarked, with approval, that the Citizen Cardinal
“preached like a Jacobin.” The event was well remembered for a short time. At the
conclave of Venice, during the winter of 1799–1800, when the election of a new
Pope was deadlocked for three months, and when Chiaramonti was finally chosen,
he was well known to have stood for the conciliation, or Christianization, of the
Revolution. Soon thereafter the printed copies of his famous sermon disappeared.
Bonaparte, after he turned into Napoleon, wanted no talk of a “Jacobin” pope. Still
less after 1814, as the doctrine of the Throne and the Altar came to prevail, or after
1848 and the quarrel between Pius IX and liberal civilization, did the partisans in
either camp, Catholic or anti- Catholic, wish it to be known that a Pope had once
praised the principles of the Revolution. Only in recent years, with the growth in
Europe of a Christian Democracy, and with the scholarly work of Giuntella in
Italy, and of the Abbé Leflon of the Catholic Institute in Paris, has the Christmas
sermon of 1797 been disinterred and expounded.
At the time of his sermon Chiaramonti was regarded as a moderate. There were
other Cisalpine bishops who, for whatever reason, accepted the new republic with
less reservation than he did, with less insistence on its need of the Church, and less
warning against what would now be called naturalism and religious indifferentism.
To neutralism in religion the Cisalpine was in fact committed. It did not officially
care whether its citizens were Catholic or Christian. Indeed, like the French Re-
public, it offered a world view that was a kind of alternative religion, with its own
36 Leflon, Pie VII, 434.