Pius IX

Roman Catholic pope (1846-1878)

• Born: May 13, 1792
• Birthplace: Senigallia, Papal States (now in Italy)
• Died: February 7, 1878
• Place of death: Rome, Italy

Pius was elected pope shortly before Europe’s revolutions of 1848. His was to be the longest papal reign in history. He led the Church through a difficult period into the era of Italian unity; in spite of the bitter conflict between church and state, he left the Church stronger at his death.

Early Life

Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti was born into a family of lesser Italian nobility in the Marches only a few years before Napoleon I marched into Italy. He studied at Viterbo and at a seminary in Rome, where he developed a vocation for the priesthood. He suffered from epilepsy in his youth and consequently his application for service in the Swiss Guard was refused. He later recovered and was ordained as a priest in 1819. He was sent on a papal mission to Chile (1823-1825), his only experience of foreign travel. He was director of a Roman orphanage, Tata Giovanni, from 1825 to 1827, thereafter serving in the Papal States as archbishop of Spoleto (1827-1832) and bishop of Imola (1832-1840).

Gregory XVI elevated Mastai-Ferretti to cardinal in 1840. In these early years, Archbishop Mastai-Ferretti gained a deserved reputation as a devoted leader of his flock, and he was remembered with gratitude by his congregations as a man of sincere spiritual humility who set aside time to visit the poor and showed a special devotion to children. He also observed directly the consequences of the reactionary rule of Pope Gregory, and his recognition of the need for reform in the Papal States earned for him the reputation of a liberal.

At Imola, he formed a friendship with the liberal Count Giuseppe Pasolini, who introduced him to Vincenzo Gioberti’s Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani (1843; of the civic and moral primacy of Italians). Gioberti was a Turinese priest whose earlier enthusiasm for Giuseppe Mazzini’s ideas about Italian unity had raised suspicions about his orthodoxy. His thesis was that only the pope had the authority to bring unity to Italy, and the solution to the burning question of the Risorgimento was a federation of states under the presidency of the pope. At this period of Mastai-Ferretti’s life, the reformist ideas of Gioberti were appealing, and he took a copy of the book with him when he was summoned to Rome for the conclave upon the death of Gregory XVI in 1846.

Life’s Work

Mastai-Ferretti was elected pope on the fourth ballot, on June 16, 1846. He was the compromise candidate, between a liberal cardinal, to his left, and the former secretary of state to Gregory XVI, the reactionary Luigi Cardinal Lambruschini, to his right. He adopted the name of Pius for his revered Pius VII, once Napoleon’s prisoner, who had helped the young Mastai-Ferretti enter the priesthood. Roman and European opinion was ecstatic. A liberal pope had been chosen, and it was widely believed that the days of absolute papal control of the Romagna were numbered.

One of Pius’s first acts as pope was to grant amnesty to political prisoners and exiles. He granted freedom of the press, introduced street lighting to Rome, and established a new Roman Council (composed of an overwhelming majority of laymen, many of whom held openly republican views). He finally bent to the temper of the times and conceded a constitution in March, 1848. These reforms, however, were more the result of popular pressure than spontaneous concessions granted freely from above. The new pope was worried that he had unleashed forces beyond his control. When Venice and Milan, followed by Charles Albert of Piedmont, rose against the Austrian occupation, the pope refused to assume the symbolic leadership of the national struggle. In his allocution of April 29, 1848, he stated that, as the vicar of Christ on earth, he would not wage war on another Catholic power. That was the moment when the Papacy and the secular leaders of the Risorgimento parted company.

When the pope’s prime minister, Count Pellegrino Rossi, was murdered on November 15, 1848, Pius was forced to flee Rome in disguise and seek asylum in Gaeta under the protection of King Ferdinand of Naples. A republic was declared in Rome, and Mazzini was summoned to lead it, with Giuseppe Garibaldi in charge of the defenses. From Gaeta, the pope appealed to the Catholic powers to overthrow the insurgents, and the French government (under the republican president Louis Napoleon) found itself in the embarrassing position of sending a small force to challenge a sister republic. The Roman republic collapsed in July, 1849, but the pope did not return until the following April.

Henceforth all pretense at accommodation with secular reformers was abandoned. Under the stewardship of the astute secretary of state, Giacomo Cardinal Antonelli, the Papal States prepared for a return to paternalism. The groundwork was laid for a growing conflict between church and state as Charles Albert of Piedmont, under King Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy and his chief minister Count Cavour, assumed the initiative in the final struggle for Italian unity. In Piedmont, the pope had to endure the spectacle of the sequestration of church property, the abolition of religious orders, and the assumption of all educational responsibilities by the state. In Cavour he found a far more formidable adversary than Mazzini and Garibaldi, for Cavour was a brilliant and occasionally unscrupulous politician prepared to impose his will.

As the power of the secular state expanded, so papal territory shrank. As the Piedmontese drove the Austrians out of Lombardy in 1859, Cavour sent forces into the Romagna to wrest it from the rule of the Papacy. The loss of the Papal States was a heavy blow, for Pius considered this territory an essential part of the Church’s patrimony, granted by God in perpetuity. For Cavour and most western European leaders, however, the Papal States were a thorn in the side of modern progress, a medieval impediment in the path of the secular future.

In the two decades after 1850, the pope presided over a great international expansion and revival of the Roman Catholic Church and the spread of its teachings. In 1864, he published the encyclical Quanta Cura along with the Syllabus of Errors, denouncing virtually every social and moral belief that had achieved general acceptance since the French Revolution. The gesture was intended to be an assertion of papal authority in spite of the loss of the Romagna and adjoining territories. Between 1860 and 1870, Rome was defended by French troops provided by Napoleon III , who was acting under pressure from French Catholics; he found himself now in opposition to Charles Albert of Piedmont, whose ambitions he had earlier, as president of a republic rather than emperor, supported. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July, 1870, however, led to the withdrawal of the French occupational force and the collapse of papal resistance to the government of King Victor Emmanuel. The last obstacle to Italian unity was removed and the pope retreated to the Vatican Palace.

It was Pius who cast himself in the role of “the prisoner of the Vatican,” but only after he rejected a generous offer of settlement from the government (the Law of Guarantees). He thus set the pattern for his successors by refusing to come to terms with the secular institutions of power and attempting to persuade Catholics not to participate in the political life of the state.

It was not a coincidence that the Vatican Council summoned by Pius in 1869 proclaimed the pope infallible in all declarations on faith and morals in order to regain a hegemony in the spiritual sphere that had been lost in the temporal. Outbreaks of anticlericalism in Europe culminated in the abrogation of the concordat with Austria in 1874, followed by the aggressive anti-Catholic campaign (Kulturkampf) launched by Otto von Bismarck in Germany in 1875, which included the expulsion of Jesuits and a dissolution of Catholic schools. In spite of his isolation and doctrinally intransigent stance toward the modern world, Pius retained until the end not only the affection of the faithful but also that of the Roman populace in general, as well as the esteem of his opponents. Pius died peacefully on February 7, 1878.

Significance

Although Pius’s reign may be viewed as a disaster politically, ecclesiastically it recorded some major successes. Because he was not a skillful diplomat or an experienced politician, these occurred in the area of doctrine. Three events above all stand out. In 1853, Pius set about defining the dogma of the virginity of Mary. Demands for such a definition were initially received from the lower ranks of the religious orders and the Catholic laity. The pope then requested advice from his bishops, after which the doctrine was defined by a panel of experts. It was the pope himself (who had played an active role in all the proceedings) who read the proclamation at a ceremony in St. Peter’s on December 8, 1854.

The Syllabus of Errors—published ten years to the day after the proclamation on Mary—is a trenchant expression of orthodoxy, setting the Church consciously at odds with a heterodox world that it deplores. Eighty propositions are listed and condemned in the syllabus, including pantheism, rationalism, liberalism, socialism, and communism. All the “principles of ’89”—the heredity of the French Revolution—that had infiltrated themselves into the myriad struggles for reform in the nineteenth century and had contributed to the secularization of civic life are denounced by the syllabus. The document is above all remembered for its final condemnation of the hope that the Papacy can be reconciled to progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.

A similar theological conservatism is evident in the question of papal infallibility endorsed by the Vatican Council of 1869-1870. The pope was not well served by an unauthorized and imprudent article in a Jesuit publication suggesting that the doctrine would be presented in council and accepted without debate. This was by no means the intention, but it offered an opportunity to anti-Catholic forces to claim that the pope was in the hands of the Jesuits. The result was that the question was debated at inordinate length, but its ultimate ratification by a vast majority of the assembled bishops was a personal triumph for Pius.

Taken together, these three questions of dogma illustrate the major concerns of Pius IX at a time when the Church, under fire from progressive and secular forces, sought to assert doctrinal unity behind the authority of God’s appointed vicar on earth in order to keep a hold on the faith of its followers and to lead them into the modern era. Pius himself was not implacably opposed to every aspect of modern life; as pope, however, he saw his first duty as consolidating the power of the Church around the issue of faith and his second as securing a permanent place for the Church among the nation states of the new age.

Bibliography

Corrigan, Raymond. The Church and the Nineteenth Century. Milwaukee: Bruce, 1938. A pro-papal view by a Jesuit historian of Pius’s career and his struggle with the major historical events of his reign, the challenge of republican and monarchical government. There are separate chapters on the unification of Italy, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and the Syllabus of Errors.

Flint, James B. Great Britain and the Holy See: The Diplomatic Relations Question, 1846-1852. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003. Examines the failure of British Prime Minister Earl Russell to establish diplomatic relations with Pope Pius IX. Flint maintains the papal government refused to establish relations because it feared that British diplomats might recommend unwelcome reforms in the Roman Catholic Church, or might use the church to make Catholic Ireland more amenable to British rule.

Hales, E. E. Y. The Catholic Church in the Modern World. New York: Hanover House, 1958. Hales returns to the central episodes referred to in his biography (see below), here treated with more specific historical detail and discussion. Chapters 7 through 11 deal with the major themes and struggles of Pius’s reign, while his career as a whole is set in the broader history of the Church from the French Revolution to Italian fascism and the postwar democracy.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Pio Nono. London: Eyre & Spotiswoode, 1954. The fullest study of the pope’s career in English and essential reading for the student or scholar. This is a political biography written as a defense of Pius’s position vis-à-vis contemporary liberalism, the Roman republic, and Catholic progressives. Informative on his relations with Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, and Napoleon III.

John, Eric, ed. The Popes, a Concise Biographical History. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1964. An encyclopedia of the lives of all the popes, each one written in all essential detail. The tone is pro-Catholic but not unctuous. The section on Pius IX is full, complete, and objective, while presenting an essentially sympathetic portrait of a troubled pontiff.

Kelly, John N. D. The Oxford Dictionary of Popes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. The pages on Pius are concise and detailed, clear on the major doctrinal contributions made by Pius to Catholic thinking. A useful introduction that will send students on to the complete biographies.

Kretzer, David I. Prisoner of the Vatican: The Popes’ Secret Plot to Capture Rome from the New Italian State. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Using previously unopened Vatican archives, Kretzer recounts how Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII, and other members of the clergy sought to dismantle the new Italian state and regain control of Rome.

Rendina, Claudio. I papi, storia e segreti. Rome: Newton Compton, 1983. Another encyclopedia of papal biographies, this one written from a more skeptical point of view, underlining occasional scandals within the Papacy and those reactionary positions undertaken by all popes that aroused indignation in the opinion of non-Catholic Europe. Rendina’s commentary on Pius IX, as in other cases, is enlivened by quotations from contemporary satirists in verse or prose.