Early Life
Cappellari was born at Belluno on 18 September 1765, to an Italian noble family. His parents were from a small village named Pesariis, in Friuli. At an early age he joined the order of the Camaldolese (part of the Benedictine monastic family) and entered the Monastery of San Michael in Murano, near Venice. As a Camaldolese monk, Cappellari rapidly gained distinction for his theological and linguistic skills. In 1799 he published a polemic against the Italian Jansenists titled II Trionfo della Santa Sede ("The Triumph of the Holy See"), which passed through various editions in Italy and was translated into several European languages. In 1800 he became a member of the Academy of the Catholic Religion, founded by Pope Pius VII (1800–23), to which he contributed memoirs on theological and philosophical questions. In 1805 he was made abbot of the Monastery of San Gregorio on Rome's Caelian Hill.
When the French Emperor Napoleon took Rome and expelled Pope Pius VII in 1809, Cappellari fled to Murano. From there he and a group of monks moved to Padua in 1814. After Napoleon's final defeat, the Congress of Vienna re-established the sovereignty of the Papal States over central Italy and Cappellari was called back to Rome to assume the post of Camaldolese vicar general. He was then appointed as counsellor to the Inquisition and later promoted to Prefect of the Congregation of Propaganda Fide ("Propagation of the Faith"), which dealt with all missionary work outside of the Spanish Empire, including to the non-Catholic states in Europe.
On 21 March 1825, Cappellari was created cardinal by Pope Leo XII, and shortly afterwards he was asked to negotiate a concordat to safeguard the rights of Catholics in the Low Countries, a diplomatic task which he completed successfully. He also negotiated a peace on behalf of Armenian Catholics with the Ottoman Empire. He publicly condemned the Polish revolutionaries, who he thought were seeking to undermine Russian Tsar Nicholas I's efforts to support the Catholic royalist cause in France by forcing him to divert his troops to suppress the uprising in Poland.
Read more about this topic: Pope Gregory XVI
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