Innocent X Denounces Westphalia

NOV 26 1648 · 12:00

Pope Innocent X, who condemned the Peace of Westphalia as null and void. Place: Rome Figures: Pope Innocent X (Giovanni Battista Pamphilj) · Fabio Chigi, papal nuncio at Münster, drafter (later Pope Alexander VII) · the Catholic signatory crowns who ignore the protest The Bull The papal brief is dated 26 November 1648, one month after the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück are signed. It is promulgated formally as the bull Zelo Domus Dei on 20 November 1650, after the treaties have already taken full effect across the Empire. The text was drafted at Rome from despatches sent by Fabio Chigi, the papal nuncio who had been a witness at Münster, signed nothing, and would himself be elected pope as Alexander VII in 1655. Chigi had warned Rome from the beginning that the negotiations would conclude on terms the Holy See could not accept. He was right; he was ignored at every stage. The denunciation is total. The settlement is declared null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect, for all time. Particular protest is registered against the recognition of Calvinism alongside Catholicism and Lutheranism, the secularization of church lands in the Empire as of the 1624 reference year, the cession of the bishoprics of Bremen, Verden, Halberstadt, and Minden to Sweden and Brandenburg, and (above all) the recognition of the Dutch Republic against Catholic Spain. The Silence That Followed The signatory powers, Catholic crowns among them, ignore the bull. The Emperor does not withdraw his ratification. Spain does not unsign Münster. France, the most powerful Catholic monarchy on the continent, treats the brief as a matter for its archives and continues to occupy the cities of Alsace assigned to it by treaty. The diplomatic instruments themselves had anticipated the protest: clauses in the treaties declare in advance that any ecclesiastical condemnation, by whomever issued, shall be of no force against the peace. The negotiators had drafted, in effect, an immunity clause against Rome. Westphalia is the first major European settlement to be concluded without papal mediation and to proceed in defiance of papal sanction. It dates, in retrospect, the moment at which the Roman pontiff ceases to be a recognized arbiter of continental political authority. The Vatican will remain a moral voice and a diplomatic actor, but it will not again sit at the table where sovereign states are made. The bull's vehemence is the measure of what has been lost.