I have often been the victim of SWOT analysis – away-days with colleagues where we are forced to reflect on Strengths and Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It often leads to lots of self-congratulatory wishful thinking but occasionally unearths something more profound. As I prepared for a recent conference on non-Catholics in Rome after 1870 I found myself using a kind of SWOT analysis: France stood defeated and Germany was united; Rome had fallen, the Pope was a prisoner in the Vatican and had lost his temporal power. But he had also been declared infallible by the First Vatican Council.
This meant the Catholic Church had to rethink its priorities: a changed political situation meant new opportunities and new threats. But such SWOT analysis was not restricted to Catholics. The new Italian Kingdom had introduced a code of religious toleration. Non-Catholics could build churches and proselytise: Rome was a potential mission field. The small Protestant congregations associated with diplomatic missions that had already begun to attract numbers of well-to-do tourists who flocked to the city in search of a warmer climate and a ready supply of cheap medieval and renaissance art suddenly saw new opportunities and very few threats. The old privileges for Catholics had been abolished and Protestants were given free rein.
Some Protestants started asking questions – could there be some sort of alliance between the Italian intelligentsia who were disaffected by the papal reforms and the Protestants? Could this lead to a realignment of Christianity in the very centre of Western Christendom? There were, after all, many Catholics across Europe who had criticised the Syllabus of Errors of 1864 with its perceived attacks on free thought. Some of them thought the declaration of infallibility the last straw. In Switzerland and Germany there were some who formed new churches – the “Old Catholics”. Things had simply gone too far, and national churches wanted to assert their independence.
It was in such a situation that the energetic American Robert Jenkins Nevin was to arrive in Rome: in 1869 he had been appointed Rector of the Protestant Episcopal Church, which had been formed a few years beforehand, but which had no permanent base. As a seminarian in New York, Jenkins had come under the influence of Anglo-Catholics and ritualists but he remained resolutely anti-Catholic – his Church of England counterpart in Rome described his hatred of the Vatican as “rabid”. When he heard news of the fall of Rome, Nevin was in Switzerland waiting to serve with the American Ambulance team in France, but he hurried back to Rome where he quickly set up a fundraising committee to build a new Protestant church building there. But his church was not to be a preaching hall like some reformed conventicle. Instead it would be a church dedicated to St Paul himself – but within the ancient walls, unlike his historic basilica without.
It was Paul’s message of salvation that Nevin would proclaim to rally Romans to the cause of American liberty and what he saw as his “primitive” brand of Catholicism. It was this form of faith, untainted by what he regarded as the horrors of the baroque Counter-Reformation, that he felt offered true hope for the future. No longer was the American church there simply to serve a few expats or diplomats; instead it was to be something far more audacious which “represented the church at large, both to Roman Catholic and to Protestant Europe, reformed from the corruptions of the Papacy”. At the same time, Nevin felt that since the Italian bishops were now little more than “lieutenants” of the papacy, other bishops (ie Anglican ones) needed to intervene to help establish what he thought would be a “true” Italian Catholic Church.
It was quite an ambition, but Nevin was not a man without influence. Rome was full of the great and the good – the treasurer of his church council was none other than JP Morgan, whom Nevin reminded that although the banker might be a better financier he, Nevin, was a better shot. He was also able to cajole money out of William Waldorf Astor and the Peabodys. St Paul’s Within-the-Walls was begun in 1873 and dedicated three years later: it was built in an Italian Gothic style as a deliberate alternative to the lavish baroque of Rome by the English architect GE Street, who had built many churches in England.
St Paul’s is an extraordinary building, with the most lavish modern mosaics in all of Rome. With designs by the great pre-Raphaelite artist Burne-Jones, they are an artistic combination of American Liberty, Primitive Christianity and capitalism: St Andrew has the face of Abraham Lincoln and St James is modelled on none other than Garibaldi. St Cecilia assumed the appearance of Astor’s wife, Mary, and St Ambrose that of JP Morgan’s father. There are also portraits of Ignaz von Döllinger, the leader of the German “Old Catholics” (as St Ambrose), and Fr Hyacinthe Loyson who established the “Gallican Church” in Paris (and was even married in Westminster Abbey).
This was all part of a conscious Protestant effort to re-evangelise Italy – and to finance it with American money. Where some had tried translating the Book of Common Prayer as a way of Making Italy Anglican – as Steffano Villani puts it in his new book of that title (OUP, 2022) – Nevin was far more ambitious. He even managed to find a potential leader for the new church. This was Count Enrico Campello, a former canon of St Peter’s, who had left the Catholic Church in 1881 and quickly joined Nevin’s denomination. Soon afterwards Nevin gathered around himself a number of other disaffected Catholic clergy and for a moment it looked as if there might be the potential for an Italian form of national religion shorn of the pope. Some Anglican bishops in England grew excited and even thought that Christianity might be reuniting around them.
But, of course, it was all a fantasy: it was little more than an expression of that Anglo-American hubris which assumed that people everywhere would want to be a bit more like the two great nations which were in the vanguard of sharing their ideals across the world. England along with its national church so often believed itself to be the bearer of civilisation – like the Roman Empire of old – and America thought itself even better, since it had managed to liberate its national Protestant Church from ties to the state. Anglicans liked to think of themselves as representing the true, primitive Catholic Church; and at the same time they thought the Roman Church had completely corrupted this primitive Christian ideal.
Fifty years after the fall of Rome, in the so-called Lambeth Appeal of 1920, Anglicans invited other Protestant denominations to take on their bishops to provide an alternative to Rome across the world. Those bishops were almost all white Anglo-Americans and almost all shared a sense of effortless superiority which believed Anglicanism to be the closest form of Christianity to that of the apostles. Nevin’s church in Rome offers a beautiful example of the ultimately doomed project of Anglo-American imperialism, even if it still does sterling work with refugees and visiting Americans. In the end, the opportunities offered in 1870 proved to be little more than self-congratulatory wishful thinking.
The Revd Dr Mark Chapman is Professor of the History of Modern Theology at the University of Oxford
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