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Pius IX Ecclesiastical Policy

The ecclesiastical proceedings of the pontificate of Pius IX were marked by the dogma of the immaculate conception, the celebration of the nineteenth centennial anniversary of the martyrdom of Peter, the Encyclical and Syllabus, and the Vatican Council. By fostering to the utmost superstitious regard for relics, shrines, etc. (appearance of the mother of God at Lourdes in 1858 and miraculous cures ascribed to her) ; by virtually deifying the mother of our Lord and in every way promoting her cult (1854); by condemning Protestantism as involving and naturally giving birth to socialism, rationalism, pantheism, atheism, anarchism, and every perverse mode of thought and life ; by repudiating modern civilization as contradictory of the spirit of the gospel (Encyclical and Syllabus, 1864) ; by asserting the right of the church to suppress by force all erroneous teaching and practice and to command civil rulers to execute its behests (ibid.) ; by asserting the right of the church to annul the allegiance of disobedient rulers, and the duty of all true believers to prefer the interests of the church to those of the State and to obey the head of the church rather than the civil magistrate (ibid.) ; by riding roughshod over the consciences of liberal Roman Catholics in France, Belgium, Germany, etc., in pursuance of Jesuit policy ; by assuming for the papacy the right to define ecclesiastical dogma and to require its universal acceptance without the concurrence of a general council (as in the promulgation of the dogma of the immaculate conception, 1854); by forcing the dogma of papal infallibility through a general council (the Vatican, 1869-1870), without giving an opportunity to the opposing minority freely to discuss the question, Pius IX. provoked a widespread spirit of revolt among the more intelligent and conscientious members of his own communion, and led some civil rulers, notably the emperor of Germany, in whose domains the conflict between papal and civil'. authority had long been raging, to adopt drastic measures for the protection of themselves against the exercise of irresponsible authority on the part of the pope (May Laws, etc.).

The faithful were encouraged to drown all tendency to thought in an ever-increasing flood of sensuous emotionalism. In thirty years Pius IX canonized more saints than all his predecessors together for a century and a half. To the learned Rome might serve up authority with a garnish of neo-Scholastic metaphysics; for average mankind authority pure and simple was enough. Terrified out of their lives at the way in which science and criticism were taking one theological citadel after another, the more militant section of the clergy declared war on thought itself. Not only was faith made independent of reason, but it was considered all the purer, the less it owed to any kind of mental process. If it was a merit to believe without evidence, it was a shining virtue to believe in the teeth of evidence. Credo, quia absurdum was applied, notably by the popular writers of the French Second Empire, in a fashion grotesquely literal enough to scandalize Tertullian himself. There had always existed in France, as elsewhere, those who loved traditional stories of a marvellous nature, and tended to multiply the number which were presented as facts rather than legends. The existence of this school has always been inseparable from the element of pious belief which enters so much into popular devotion.

The egregious blunder in the May Laws was the punitive clauses directed against the inferior clergy. Instead of enlisting them as friends, the Prussian government contrived by wild and wanton persecution to make them its enemies. The open protection it accorded to the Old Catholic movement contributed in no small measure to estrange those influential elements which, whilst favoring the suppression of Ultramontane tendencies, desired no schism in the Church, and viewed with horror the idea of a National Church in Bismarck's sense. Thus we find that the bitter years of the Kulturkampf extricated the Vatican from one of the most difficult situations in which it had ever been placed.

During this pontificate new monastic orders were founded and old ones took on new life and greatly increased in membership and activity. Tertiaries (lay friends and supporters of the various orders) were encouraged and utilized. Pius unions (1848 onward), the aim of which was to foster among the people zeal for Ultramontane Catholicism and hatred of Protestantism, secret societies, Bible societies, and everything condemned by Pius IX., spread over Roman Catholic Christendom and proved a mighty agency for propagating Ultramontane views. Other types of Catholic opinion were fostered by St. Francis Xavier unions (foreign missions), Borromasus unions (circulation of Catholic literature), etc.