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Further Reading

Pope Pius IX [1846-78]

The dual position of the pope, as supreme head of the Church on earth and as a minor Italian prince, was destined to break down through its inherent contradiction; it was the task of Pius IX to postpone the catastrophe.

The reign of Pius IX falls into three distinct parts. Until driven from Rome by the republican agitation of 1848 he was a popular idol, open to liberal political views. From his return in 1850 to 1870 he was the reactionary ruler of territories menaced by the movement for Italian unity, and sustained only by French bayonets; yet he was interested primarily in pointing out to an often incredulous world that most of the vaunted, intellectual and religious progress of the 19th century was but pestilent error, properly to be condemned by himself as the infallible vicegerent of God. The third division of his career, from the loss of the temporal power to his death, inaugurates a new period for the papacy.

The successor of Gregory XVI, the Italian noble Count Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferreti [born in 1792), had in his youth served in the French army, and had entered the papal service as early as 1823. He became Archbishop of Spoleto in 1827, and, in spite of his liberal views, that had become somewhat notorious, he was made cardinal by Gregory XVI. in 1840. He was elected pope with less than the usual amount of opposition, the Conclave requiring only two days to reach a decision. On the day of his coronation he is said to have remarked: "To-day persecution begins," and his pontificate was certainly a stormy one.

At the outset of his reign Pius IX faced a crisis. It was clear that he could not continue the repressive tactics of his predecessor. Italy and Europe were astir with the Liberal agitation, which in 1848 culminated in the series of revolutions by which the settlement of 1815 was destined to be profoundly modified.

With a view to pacifying the States of the Church, which were still in a revolutionary condition, he proclaimed a universal amnesty, and emptied the prisons of their thousands of political victims. At the same time he inaugurated such measures of political reform as he thought calculated to meet the reasonable demands of the revolutionary party. A liberal Secretary of State was appointed, and a new Council of State made up of younger and more progressive prelates was provided for. Commissions were created for the reformation of the administrative system and the revision of the laws. Conservatives were alarmed, but the populace cried, "Long live Pio Nono." But these measures soon proved to be inadequate, and agitation for constitutional liberty and Italian unity and independence was renewed. The social democracy ("Young Italians" or Mazzinists) urged the pope to lead a crusade of united Italy against Austrian domination, and when he refused they repudiated utterly his right to secular authority.

As from 1849 to 1870 the fate of the papacy was determined not so much by domestic conditions, which, save for certain slight ameliorations, were those of the preceding reigns, as by foreign politics, it is necessary to consider the relations of Rome with, each of the powers in turn; and in so doing one must trace not merely the negotiations of kings and popes, but must seek to understand also the aims of parliamentary parties, which from 1848 on increasingly determine ecclesiastical legislation.

It must be remembered that the year 1848 was one of the most revolutionary since the close of the French Revolution (1789-1795). In all the leading countries of Europe spirited agitation for popular rights and constitutional government alarmed the conservatives and called for vigorous repressive measures. On every side thrones and dynasties seemed tottering to ruin, and each day brought the news of another revolution. In Switzerland the radical party succeeded in reuniting all the cantons, Catholic and Protestant, into a well-ordered and compact confederation. The movement carried with it the abolition of the league of Roman Catholic cantons (Sonderbund)and the expulsion of the Jesuits. In Sardinia and Lombardy the Jesuits were expelled in response to the demands of the revolutionary party early in 1848. Naples and Sicily soon followed. Popular uprisings in Austria and Prussia extorted from the rulers important constitutional concessions, and necessitated the expulsion of the Jesuits, who were universally regarded as the archenemies of popular rights. In March, 1848, the Austrian democracy compelled Metternich, the great conservative statesman who more than any other man was responsible for the repressive measures adopted by the European powers (1815 onward) to relinquish the Austrian chancellorship and to leave Vienna.

The movement for Italian unity, nationality, and independence of papal and Austrian foreign powers, had gone on gaining momentum under the wise leadership of Victor Emmanuel with the military support of Garibaldi and the friendly though interested co-operation of Louis Napoleon, until all Italy had been brought under a single government with the exception of the city of Rome, whose retention by the pope had been guaranteed by Louis Napoleon, who kept an army in Italy for the maintenance of this arrangement. The Franco-Prussian war (1870) that broke out almost immediately after the dogma of papal infallibility had been proclaimed, led to the immediate withdrawal of the French army from Italy. This was promptly followed by the occupation of Rome by Victor Emmanuel and the transference thither of the capital of the kingdom of Italy. Thus Pius IX., one of the most arrogant of popes, who had recently proclaimed himself infallible and had lost no opportunity for asserting his lordship over civil rulers, had the humiliation of seeing not only the patrimony of Peter that for over a thousand years his predecessors had made the greatest sacrifices to hold intact and to increase, snatched from his grasp (1866), but Rome itself appropriated by his enemy and himself, stripped of temporal power, a prisoner, so called, in the Vatican, which as a matter of favor he was allowed to occupy.

This seeming reverse, however, proved a blessing in disguise to Roman Catholicism; for it aroused to so great an extent the sympathy of Catholic Christendom as enormously to increase the papal revenues, freed the Roman Curia from the difficult, unprofitable, and often scandalous work of secular administration, and enabled it to devote itself more assiduously to the larger and more profitable fields of ecclesiastical enterprise throughout the world ; while it enabled the papacy to make more plausible its claim of being a universal spiritual force and did much to allay the fears that had been awakened by the intolerant utterances and boundless claims of authority that had been set forth by the pope during recent years.

After 1870 Pius IX could fold his hands, so far as the future was concerned. It is well known that he fed on inspirations, and expected each day the advent of some supernatural occurrence which should bring about the triumph of the Church. In this frame of mind, on the 24th of June 1872, he addressed the German Lese Verein (Reading Society), and referred to the stone that would soon fall from on high and crush the feet of the Colossus. Yet the stone had not fallen from the summit of the holy hill, and the Colossus of the German Empire had not crumbled into dust, which was more than can be said for the pope's inspirations, which led him to expect the sudden withdrawal of the Italians from Rome, and a solution of the Roman question in the sense inspired by his visionary policy. The Holy See directed all its energies towards the solution of the problem; in the event of its proving to be insoluble, it would take care that it should remain a festering sore in the body of the monarchy.

Pius IX died on the 7th of February 1878. He had long passed the traditional years of Peter's pontificate, had reigned longer than any previous wearer of the tiara, and had seen some brilliant days - days of illusory glory. On his death he left the Church shaken to its very foundations, and in feud with almost every government. In Italy the Holy See was surrounded by a hostile force, whose "prisoner" the lord of the Vatican declared himself to be. In Spain and Portugal, and also in Belgium, a Liberalism inimical to the Church was in power. Prussia, together with other German states, was in arms against pope and episcopate. In France the Conservative Monarchical party had just shown its inability to preserve the Crown, whilst the Republic had anchored itself firmly by denouncing the clergy as its enemy. There was hardly a sovereign or a government in Christendom against which Pius IX. had not either protested or against which he had not openly declared war. Such was the heritage that devolved upon lieo XIII on his election on the 10th of February 1878.