September 8, 1847
Most Holy Father,
Permit an Italian, who has studied your every step for some months with great hope, to address to you . . . some free and profoundly sincere words. . . . From a simple individual animated by holy intentions may come, sometimes, a great counsel; and I write to you with so much love, with so much emotion of my whole soul, with so much faith in the destiny of my country, which may be revived by your means, that my thoughts ought to speak truth. . . .
First, Most Holy Father, it is necessary for me to clarify something about myself. My name has probably reached your ears, but accompanied by all sorts of calumnies, errors and foolish conjectures which the police and many men of my party—through want of knowledge or poverty of intellect—have systematically heaped upon it. I am not a subversive, nor a communist, nor a man of blood, nor a hater, nor intolerant, nor an exclusive worshiper of a system or a form imagined by my mind. I worship God, and an idea which seems to me to come from God: the idea of One Italy, the angel of moral unity and of progressive civilization for the nations of Europe.
Here and everywhere I have written the best I know how against the vices of materialism, selfishness, reaction, and against the destructive tendencies which contaminate many in our party. If the people should rise in violent attack against the selfishness and bad government of their rulers, I, while rendering homage to the right of the people, shall be among the first to prevent the excesses and the vengeance which long servitude has prepared.
I believe deeply in a religious principle, supreme above all social ordinances; in a divine order, which we ought to seek to realize here on earth; in a law, in a providential design, which we all ought to study and promote according to our strength. I believe in the inspiration of my immortal soul; in the teaching of humanity, which speaks to me through the deeds and words of all its saints; in incessant progress for all through the work of all my brothers toward a common moral improvement, toward the fulfillment of the Divine Law. And in the great history of humanity I have studied the history of Italy, and I have found that Rome was twice director of the world: first through the Emperors, later through the Popes. I have found there, that every manifestation of Italian life has also been a manifestation of European life; and that always when Italy fell, the moral unity of Europe began to fall apart into analysis, into doubt, into anarchy.
I believe in yet another manifestation of Italian thought; and I believe that another European world ought to be developed from the Eternal City which had the Capitol and has the Vatican. And this faith has not abandoned me ever, not even through years of poverty and griefs which God alone knows. In these few words lies all my being, all the secret of my life. I may err by intellect, but my heart has always remained pure. I have never lied through fear or hope, and I speak to you as I should speak to God beyond the sepulchre.
I believe you are good. There is no man this day, I will not say in Italy, but in all Europe, more powerful than you; you therefore have, Most Holy Father, immense duties. God measures these according to the means which He has granted to His creatures.
Europe is in a tremendous crisis of doubts and desires. Through the work of time, accelerated by your predecessors and by the upper hierarchy of the Church, faith is dead; Catholicism is lost in despotism; Protestantism is lost in anarchy. Look around you: you will find superstitious men and hypocrites, but not believers. The intellect travels in a void. The bad adore calculation and material goods; the good pray and hope: but nobody believes. Kings, governments and the ruling classes fight for a usurped power, an illegitimate power, since it does not represent the worship of truth, nor a disposition to sacrifice one's self for the good of all; the people fight because they suffer, because they would like to have their turn at enjoyment; nobody fights for duty; nobody, because the war against evil and falsehood is a holy war, the crusade of God. We no longer have heaven; hence we no longer have society.
Do not deceive yourself, Most Holy Father; this is the present state of Europe.
But humanity can not exist without heaven. The whole idea of society is but a consequence of the idea of religion. We shall have therefore, sooner or later, religion and heaven. We shall have these not from the kings and the privileged classes—their very condition excludes love, which is the soul of all religions—but from the people. The spirit of God descends on the multitude gathered together in His name. The people have suffered for centuries on the cross; and God will bless them with faith.
You, Most Holy Father, can hasten that moment. I will not tell you my individual opinions on future religious development; these are of little importance. But I will say to you, that, whatever be the destiny of the creeds now existing, you can put yourself at the head of this development. If God wills that such creeds should live again, you can make them live again; if God wills that they should be transformed, that, leaving the foot of the cross, dogma and worship should be purified by taking a step nearer God, the Father and Educator of the world, you can put yourself between the two epochs, and guide the world to the conquest and the practice of religious truth, extirpating excessive materialism and barren negation.
God forbid I should tempt you with ambition; that would seem to me to be profane. I call you, in the name of the power which God has granted you, and has not granted without a reason, to fulfill the good regenerating European work. I call you, after so many centuries of doubt and corruption, to be an apostle of Eternal Truth. I call you to make yourself the “servant of all”, to sacrifice yourself, if necessary, so that “God's will may be done on the earth as it is in heaven”; to hold yourself ready to glorify God in victory or to repeat with resignation, if you ever succumb, the words of Gregory VII: “I die in exile, because I have loved justice and hated iniquity”.
But for this, to fulfill the mission which God confides to you, two things are necessary: to be a believer and to unify Italy. Without the former, you will fall by the way, abandoned by God and by men; without the latter, you will not have the lever with which only you can effect great, holy and enduring things.
Be a believer; abhor being a king, a politician, a statesman. Make no compromise with error; do not contaminate yourself with diplomacy; do not come to terms with fear, with expediency, with the false doctrines of legality, which is merely a falsehood invented when faith failed. Take no counsel except from God, from the inspirations of your own heart, and from the imperious necessity of rebuilding a temple to truth, justice and faith.
Self-collected in enthusiastic love for humanity, and apart from any other regard, ask God to teach you the way: then enter upon it, with the confidence of a conqueror on your brow, with the irrevocable decision of a martyr; look neither to the right nor the left, but straight ahead and up to heaven. To every object that you encounter on the way, ask yourself: Is this just or unjust, true or false, the law of man or the law of God?
Proclaim aloud the result of your examination and act accordingly. Do not say to yourself: “If I speak and work in such a way, the princes of the earth will disagree; the ambassadors will present notes and protests.” What are the quarrels of selfishness in princes, or their notes, before a syllable of the eternal Gospel of God? They have had importance till now, because, being phantoms, they had nothing to oppose them but phantoms. Oppose to them the reality of a man who sees the Divine view—unknown to them—of human affairs: of an immortal soul conscious of a high mission; and they will vanish before you as vapors accumulated in darkness before the sun which rises on the horizon.
Do not let yourself be frightened by perils; the creature who fulfills a duty belongs not to men, but to God. God will protect you; God will spread around you such a halo of love, that neither the perfidy of irreparably lost men, nor the suggestions of hell, can break through it. Give a new, unique spectacle to the world: you will have new results, unforeseen by human calculation. Announce an era; declare that humanity is sacred and a daughter of God; that all who violate her rights to progress and association are on the way of error; that God is the source of every government; that those who are the best according to intellect, heart, genius and virtue, must be the guides of the people. Bless those who suffer and fight; blame and reprove those who cause suffering, without regard to the name they bear, or the rank that invests them. The people will adore in you the best interpreter of the Divine design, and your conscience will give you rest, strength and ineffable comfort.
Unify Italy, your fatherland. For this you have no need to work, but to bless those who work through you and in your name. Gather round you those who best represent the national party. Do not beg for alliances with princes. Continue to seek the alliance of our own people. Say to us: “The unity of Italy ought to be a fact of the nineteenth century”, and it will suffice; we shall work for you. Leave our pens free; leave free the circulation of ideas in what regards this point, vital for us, of the national unity. Treat the Austrian government, even when it no longer menaces your territory, with the reserve of one who knows that it governs by usurpation in Italy and elsewhere. Fight it with words of a just man, wherever it carries out oppressions and violations of the rights of others outside of Italy. In the name of the God of Peace, invite the Jesuits allied with Austria in Switzerland to withdraw from that country, where their presence prepares an inevitable and speedy bloodshed of the citizens. Give a word of sympathy which shall become public to the first Pole of Galicia who comes into your presence.
In short, show us by some fact that you intend not only to improve the physical condition of your own few subjects, but that you embrace in your love the millions of Italians as your brothers; that you believe them to be called by God to unite in family unity under one single covenant; that you would bless the national flag wherever it should be raised by pure and uncontaminated hands; and leave the rest to us. We will cause to rise around you a nation over whose free and popular development you, by living, shall preside. We will found a government unique in Europe, which shall destroy the absurd divorce between spiritual and temporal power, and in which you shall be chosen to represent the principle of which the men chosen to represent the nation will make the application.
We shall know how to translate into a potent fact the instinct which palpitates throughout all Italy. We will excite active support for you among the nations of Europe; we will find you friends even in the ranks of Austria; we alone, because we alone have unity of design and believe in the truth of our principle, and have never betrayed it.
Do not fear excesses from the people once entered upon this road; the people only commit excesses when left to their own impulses without any guide whom they respect. Do not hesitate before the idea of becoming a cause of war. War exists everywhere: open or latent, but near breaking out and inevitable; nor can human power prevent it. Nor, Most Holy Father, do I address these words to you because I doubt in the least of our destiny, or because I believe you to be the sole indispensable means of the enterprise.
The unity of Italy is a work of God: a part of the design of Providence and a wish of all, even of those who show themselves most satisfied with local improvements, and who, less sincere than I, wish to make them means of attaining their own aims.
It will be fulfilled, with you or without you. But I address you, because I believe you are worthy of taking the initiative in a work so vast; because putting yourself at the head of it would do much to bridge the road and diminish the dangers, injury and blood that will be spilled in the struggle; because with you the conflict would assume a religious aspect and free us from the many risks of civil reaction and offenses; because a political result and a vast moral result might be attained at once under your banner; because the revival of Italy under the aegis of a religious idea, of a banner not of rights, but of duties, would leave behind all the revolutions of foreign countries, and would immediately place Italy at the head of European progress; because it is in your power to cause that God and the People―two terms too often fatally separated―should meet at once in beautiful and holy harmony, to direct the fate of nations.
If I could be near you, I would invoke from God power to convince you, by gesture, by accent, by tears; now I can only confide to the paper the cold corpse, as it were, of my thought; nor can I ever have the certainty that you have read and meditated a moment upon what I write. But I feel an imperious necessity of fulfilling this duty toward Italy and toward you, and, whatsoever you may think of it, I shall find myself more in peace with my conscience for having thus addressed you.
Believe, Most Holy Father, in the feelings of veneration and of high hope which I profess to you.
Your most devoted,
Giuseppe Mazzini
