(Editor’s note: The last four articles in this series (found here, here, here, and here) concerned aspects of a message that Father Nicholas Deissbach sent to the newly crowned Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II around 1790. During this time, the disastrous French Revolution was in progress, although it had not yet reached the phase known today as the “Reign of Terror.”)
At about the same time, Father Nicholas Diessbach sent his message to Leopold II, an unnamed Amicizia member from Turin published another document on the revolutionary process. It was titled “Amicizia Christiana’s Role During the Revolution.” While its author is neither Father (now Saint) Pio Brunone Lanteri nor Father Diessbach, it does reveal the ideas of the association’s members and how those ideas circulated.
This second document is much weaker than Father Deissbach’s message. It also contains exaggerations demonstrating its author’s enthusiasm for Amicizia’s apostolate. Thus, we will summarize it when possible.
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It was written when hopes for a hasty defeat of the French Revolution were rising. The presence of the Count of Artois and the Prince of Condé in Turin generated enthusiasm for the Ancien Régime and provided locals with a broader knowledge of events in France. Hence, the anonymous author possessed considerable insights into the dangers posed to other countries. He used the article to draw the readers’ attention to those hazards.
The document’s author demonstrates an unfortunate ignorance of the Revolution in human tendencies.1 This led him to a false perspective concerning the revolutionary process, which also contributed to superficial and somewhat naïve conclusions.
The author aptly described the penetration of revolutionary ideas in all peoples and demonstrated how they resulted from crafty maneuvers by perverse politicians and literati. He concluded that even a coalition of all sovereigns could not have uprooted those errors from society at that point. He warned Catholics against assuming that only extraordinary divine intervention could stop the spread of so many errors.
When attempting to explain methods to defeat that great evil, he deems some of the means the Church used as “inadequate.” Among these were “majestic worship, the sacraments, preaching, and partly religious orders.” These failed, he explained, “because of widespread prejudices against them.”
From our modern vantage point, we ask: how can one not hope for extraordinary means if the means the Church has consistently employed to sanctify men are deemed insufficient?
Our author proposed strategies that reveal his ignorance of the Revolution in tendencies. He wrote that it was sufficient simply to spread the truth through a massive diffusion of good books. He believed this plan would work because the truth “is beautiful enough to attract all well-formed minds, without the aid of extraneous beauties.” Consequently, he thought that Amicizia’s apostolate alone could contain the Revolution, provided that its members realized the importance of their work. The author considered the Revolution’s ideas as the levers of the whole revolutionary process. Such an analysis overestimated the Amicizia’s apostolate’s effectiveness.
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That view was at variance with the thinking of Father Lanteri and Father Diessbach. Both men were committed to popularizing frequent reception of the sacraments, spiritual exercises, missions, Catholic worship, etc. In Father Deissbach’s message to Leopold II, one of the measures he proposed was having missions preached throughout the Empire. This would, he argued, dispose souls to welcome the apostolate’s recommendations of good books. Be it as it may, Amicizia lacked an explicit understanding of the role of tendencies in the Revolution. This gap weakened its fight against the Revolution as a whole.
We do not wish in any way to belittle Amicizia’s apostolate. Indeed, it was one of the most important works of the nineteenth century. We are only researching ideas then current among its members to show they lacked explicit knowledge of the essence of the Revolution. This lack, in turn, prevented the apostolate’s remarkable results obtained with so much zeal and fearlessness from being even greater.
As we saw, political events hindered Amicizia’s progress in Turin in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Bordering France, Piedmont (now Northern Italy) faced serious risks. Its territory, invaded by revolutionary troops, was under the protection of Austria. It saw intense political and military clashes between counter-revolutionary and revolutionary forces. One can understand people’s agitation facing this permanent threat and immediate danger. That unrest caused dedication to Amicizia to diminish, and its fruits were not as great as its members expected.
The sodality was in crisis, not only in Turin. In Austria, the French Revolution greatly accelerated the gradual deterioration of the entire society, and Father Diessbach’s work suffered from it. As is well known, many future counter-revolutionaries in Austria initially welcomed the French events with sympathy. They only gradually opened their eyes as the violence mounted. Many who did not join the Counter-Revolution lost their old prejudices against the Church. They began to look at it with relative unconcern.
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This change of mentality opened the way to restoring the Society of Jesus. This had been one of Father Diessbach’s greatest desires. He seized this opportunity and worked hard to clear the way for the resurrection of his old order. An extraordinarily active man, his actions in this regard did not harm Amicizia. He continued to direct the sodality as efficiently as ever. Unfortunately, this was not typical of his followers, who saw new directions for their lives with the prospect of the Society’s reestablishment.
Among the various religious associations created by former Jesuits, the Society of the Fathers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus maintained the closest relations with Amicizia. Fathers Léonor François de Tournély and Charles de Broglie founded it. Both associations helped each other. Father Giuseppe Sineo de la Torre, head of Vienna’s Amicizia, drew closer to the Fathers of the Sacred Heart and eventually joined their guild. As a result, his interest in Amicizia waned, causing severe disagreements between the leaders of the two associations. This unfortunate development posed yet another obstacle to the full development of Father Diessbach’s work.
As these events unfolded, Father Luigi Virginio was in Paris. Political events there made those ten years of Amicizia’s life very difficult. It seemed that its apostolate, which had begun with such promising perspectives, would fail, swept away by the revolutionary whirlwind. However, God sends crosses to all good undertakings, and Father Lanteri and his companions knew they were genuine stimulants to good works. They did what they could and trusted Providence, all the while hoping for better days and more effective outcomes.
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Footnotes
- In his landmark book, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira describes the Revolution in the tendencies as the first stage in the Revolutionary process. “These disorderly tendencies, by their very nature, struggle to make themselves a reality. Since they no longer accept a whole order of things contrary to them, they begin by modifying mentalities, ways of being, artistic expressions, and customs without immediately touching directly—at least habitually—ideas.