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Pope Pius IX - Syllabus of Errors

By the middle of the 19th Century, many forces - political and intellectual - were operating throughout Catholic Europe to widen the breach between Clericals and Anti-Clericals and to provide the latter with a considerable leverage with which to pry the Europe both mass of the population of Catholic countries into a intellectual position of latent hostility towards the Catholic Church.

The first difficulty was the pronounced unwillingness of the Catholic Church, at least officially, to indorse the new political tendencies of the nineteenth century. When one recalls what the French Revolution meant to the opposition Catholic clergy - the loss of many of their privileges, to the confiscation of much of their property, the wholesale diminution of the number of their monasteries, of their schools, and of their charitable institutions - one ceases to wonder at their stubborn universal fight against the principles of the Revolution. It becomes thoroughly comprehensible, moreover, why, for many decades, the hierarchy, from the pope down, inveighed against a "liberty" of individual belief, an "equality" of all religions, and a "fraternity" which endangered the international character of the Church. The result, apparent from the history of the first half of the nineteenth century, was that in the politics of every European state the Catholic clergy were Conservatives and, as such, found allies and friends from among the old landowning nqbility and the peasantry and such exceptional bourgeois and workingmen as were more religious than Liberal. On the whole, it seemed obvious that, because of political reasons, a sharp social cleavage was appearing in the Catholic Church, for the bourgeoisie, as a whole, were fully committed to the principles of the French Revolution and many workingmen expected from the realization of those principles an amelioration of their own lot.

The excesses which accompanied the revolutionary outbreaks of 1848, and especially his own experience in that year with Mazzini's brand of Republicanism, had changed the politics of the pontiff and brought Liberal Catholicism into disrepute. From that year until his death in 1878 Pius IX was the zealous and aggressive opponent of the character new regime of liberty and equality and likewise of nationalism, as then understood and translated into action throughout Europe. With the aid of the whole Catholic clergy he waged implacable warfare against practices which everywhere the bourgeoisie and many workingmen now championed.

Pius IX espoused the reactionary cause with such success that the Conservative governments of Spain and Austria signed concordats with him (1851 and 1855, respectively), restoring to the Church many of its ancient privileges. He strengthened the machinery of the Church by re-establishing Roman Catholic hierarchies in England (1850) and Holland (1853). And all this while he denounced the new social and political order in repeated and ringing invectives, culminating in the famous encyclical Quanta cura and the accompanying Syllabus of Errors (1864).

In this encyclical, the pope not merely condemned the widely accepted notions that a secular state had supreme power and authority over all affairs within its territories and that every state had a moral obligation to accord religious liberty, but he vehemently upheld the older ideal of the Catholic state based on the complete independence of the ecclesiastical power and on the compulsory unity of faith. The Syllabus "of the principal errors of our times" reproduced in a very abbreviated form all the doctrines condemned by him, political as well as strictly religious. Its condemnations covered many groups: freethinkers and agnostics, who would destroy the Church; indifferent people, who would take away its official privileges and reduce it to the condition of a private, voluntary association; supporters of religious neutrality or equality, who would establish lay marriage and lay schools; advocates of secular sovereignty, who would abolish ecclesiastical courts and obligatory vows and nationalize the clergy by restricting their communication with Rome; opponents of the temporal power of the papacy; even the Liberal Catholics, who would admit of jreligious liberty.

Although Dupanloup, a famous French bishop and one of the leaders of the Liberal Catholic party, wrote a book to show that the Syllabus of Errors was not half so bad as it sounded, - that it had been issued as a weapon of defense against the persecutions of the Church on the part of the new Italian kingdom, and that it was intended simply to condemn general revolution and the abuses of modern liberty, - and although his book received the approval of Pius IX and of more than six hundred other Roman Catholic bishops, nevertheless the champions of the principles of the French Revolution and the patriots of the new nationalism utilized the Syllabus and the encyclical of 1864 as occasions for attacking "Clericalism." In "Clericalism" the statesmen and the powerful bourgeoisie, who were shaping the unifications of Italy and Germany or agitating for political democracy in France and in Spain, perceived an enemy of the new order, and, by calling the Catholic Church unpatriotic and undemocratic, they secured allies for themselves from among the numerous working class.