Gregory XVI

Chocolate has early associations in the West with Spanish Catholic missionaries to America. From the middle of the 16th century, chocolate was employed in many useful ways, including economic. However, till now, there have been no associations with the liquid drink and financial survival during and after periods of war or revolution. Yet for Italian monks during the Napoleonic years (1798-1814), chocolate was employed to support certain impoverished clerics during the leanest years of this period. Leading one of these initiatives was Mauro Cappellari, the future Pope Gregory XVI (r. 1831-1846), who, along with others in his Camaldolese order, produced and retailed the chocolate throughout Italian lands. This article draws on Italian archival materials in Rome and Camaldoli in order to piece together this hitherto overlooked food enterprise. In addition, this article will also reveal much about the chocolate trade and production in general in Italian lands.

Pope Gregory XVI (Mauro Cappellari)  (1831-1846) has the reputation of being the keenest theological mind among popes in the 19th century.  As a result many have looked at his one published work, Il Trionfo della Santa Sede (1799), as an indicator of the theological precocity of this future pontiff. However, this article suggests that, in fact, Cappellari had many problems early on in his theological formation. Il Trionfo della Santa Sede was a frustrating endeavour, but not the reasons traditionally assumed. Instead of struggling to concentrate in the midst of the French invasion of Italy in the late 1790s, Cappellari struggled to master orthodox theologies and to attain a requisite level of scholarship.
Cappellari was also frustrated by the delays to publication during the Triennio (1796-99), which discouraged works in this genre from being published. Publication was also protracted because of his poor financial situation, as he had to pay for the costs of publishing Il Trionfo. Another large misconception is the association of Il Trionfo with the French Revolution. The work was not written during the height of the Napoleonic wars, rather finished years earlier (by 1796); the title and preface which allude to the French invasion were last-minute additions prior to its being printed. Following publication, Il Trionfo essentially disappears, absent from any meaningful theological discussion at the time. However, the fifteen years of theological guidance on the part of his order (1783-1798), resulting in part from his struggles to publish Il Trionfo, provided him with the necessary theological guidance for substantial service in the Roman Curia after 1814.

The article reveals for the first time how Catholic clerics survived financially during the Napoleonic period in Italy (1796-1814). Despite the very rich, 200-year historiography on one of the Church’s most critical periods, there is almost nothing on how religious clerics coped. Their institutions had been despoiled by the French, often in collaboration with locals, negating traditional forms of clerical income, such as alms or rental income from non-ecclesiastical properties. This caused clerics to search out unorthodox ways of eking out a living either for themselves, their religious communities or both as such distinctions were often blurred. Masses were monetised and traded; ecclesiastical paraphernalia composed of precious metals were smelted and commodified, and relics were sold for profit. The uncovering of these controversial acts by men who in normal times were upstanding reveals how desperate these times were.

‘Gender and sainthood during the pontificate of Pope Gregory XVI (1831-1846): how men and women were assessed differently.' Department of History, La Sapienza (University of Rome), 15 March 2017.

'Protestants, Jews, and Muslims. The Politics of Pope Gregory XVI (1831-1846) towards non-Catholics.'  Department of History, La Sapienza (University of Rome), 22 March 2017.