Pius IX

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PIUS IX

PIUS IX (Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, 1792–1878), pope of the Roman Catholic Church (1846–1878). Born on May 13 into a family belonging to the gentry of the Papal States, the future pope had his priestly formation delayed by an epilepsy-like illness. This left him with an excessively impulsive temperament for the rest of his life.

Mastai was ordained at Rome on April 10, 1815, and in an age when most young priests aimed at a successful career in the church, he stood out because of his piety and complete detachment from ecclesiastical honors. Serving as an assistant to the papal delegate to Chile (1823–1825) gave him an opportunity to see not only the difficulties that liberal governments with regalist tendencies could cause the church but also the new dimensions that missionary problems were acquiring. As bishop of Spoleto (1827), then of Imola (1832), in a region largely won over to the liberal and nationalist ideals of the Risorgimento, he won esteem not only for his pastoral zeal and sympathy for Italian patriotic aspirations, but also for his desire to improve the outmoded and repressive regime of the Papal States.

At the death of Gregory XVI, Mastai, a cardinal since 1840, became the preferred candidate of those conservatives who thought it necessary to make some concession to aspirations for a modernization of the administration of the pontifical state. He was elected pope on the second day of the conclave, June 16, 1846.

The first months of Pius IX's pontificate seemed to confirm the reputation of "liberal" that reactionary circles in Rome had pinned on this enlightened conservative. Disillusionment soon set in: first, in the area of internal reforms, because the new pope had no intention of transforming the Papal States into a modern constitutional state, and, second, when he refused to intervene in the war of independence against Austria because he thought such a step would be incompatible with his religious mission as common father of all the faithful. Economic difficulties and the pope's lack of political experience finally precipitated a crisis. The Roman uprisings of 1848–1849, crushed with the help of a French expeditionary force, left Pius IX more convinced than ever that there was an inherent connection between the principles of the French Revolution (1789) and the destruction of traditional social, moral, and religious values.

The reactionary restoration that followed upon the pope's return to Rome after his flight to Gaeta was to play into the hands of Cavour (Camillo Benso), who exploited the discontent of the middle classes and was able in 1860 to annex the greatest part of the Papal States. In 1870, the Italian army took advantage of the Franco-Prussian War to occupy Rome and its environs. Pius IX, who saw himself less as a dethroned ruler than as the owner of a property for which he was responsible to the entire Catholic world, felt he could not accept the unification of Italy and attempted, with little success, to organize Italian Catholic resistance.

Politically inexpert, Pius IX was advised mostly by men who judged affairs with the intransigence of theoreticians lacking any contact with the contemporary mind. He never understood that in the modern world the problem of the Holy See's spiritual independence could no longer be resolved by the anachronistic preservation of a papal political sovereignty. Thereafter, obsessed by what he called the "revolution," he identified himself increasingly with the conservative governments whose support seemed to provide the most effective guarantee for the maintenance and ultimate restoration of the Roman state. Moreover, seeing that the pope's temporal power had been challenged in the name of the liberal conception of the state and of the right of peoples to self-determination, he issued more and more protests against liberalism. The most spectacular of these were the encyclical Quanta cura (1864) and the Syllabus of Errors that accompanied it.

Pius IX was never able to distinguish between, on the one hand, what was of positive value in the confused aspirations of the age for a democratization of public life and was preparing in the long run for a greater spiritualization of the Catholic apostolate and, on the other hand, what represented a compromise with principles alien to the Christian spirit. He saw in liberalism only an ideology that denied the supernatural. He confused democracy with anarchy, and he could not grasp the historical impossibility of claiming for the Roman Catholic Church both protection from the state and the independence from it he valued so highly.

As a result, Pius IX was unable to adapt the Roman Catholic Church to the profound political and social developments of his time. Nor was he able to provide the impulse that Catholic thought needed if it was to respond effectively to the excesses of rationalism and materialistic positivism. By abandoning control of the church's intellectual life to narrow minds that could only condemn new tendencies as incompatible with traditional positions, he lost valuable time. The real roots of the modernist crisis may be traced back to his pontificate.

Central to the pope's zeal was a confused and clumsily expressed perception of the need to remind a society intoxicated by a scientistic conception of progress of the primacy of what theologians call the supernatural order: the biblical vision of humanity and salvation history, which is opposed to an interpretation of history as a progressive emancipation from religious values and to such a great confidence in human potentialities that there is no room for a redeemer. If we are to understand the inflexibility with which Pius IX fought his battle against liberalism, "the error of the century," as he called it, we must see this struggle as the center of his efforts to focus Christian thinking once again on the fundamental data of revelation. In his own mind, the First Vatican Council (1869–1870), which was interrupted by the entry of the Italians into Rome, was to be the crown upon these efforts.

Historians have for a long time judged the pontificate of Pius IX negatively because of his failures in the realm of diplomacy and his fruitless efforts to resist the advance of liberalism. More recently, however, scholars have come to see that matters were more complex and that Pius IX's activities were a notable help in strengthening the Roman Catholic Church in its religious sphere, whatever may be thought of certain debatable tendencies.

Missionary expansion advanced at an increasingly rapid pace on five continents during the thirty-two years of Pius IX's pontificate, and thriving churches were developed in Canada, Australia, and especially the United States as a result of Roman Catholic emigration from Europe, but his personal role in this expansion was secondary. On the other hand, he made an important contribution to the progress of the ultramontane movement, which caused guidance of the universal church to be concentrated increasingly in the pope's hands. This movement, given solemn approbation by Vatican I's definition of the pope's personal infallibility and his primacy of jurisdiction, did not go unresisted by those who saw the advantages of pluralism in the local churches and feared to see the episcopates come under the thumb of the Roman Curia. But Pius IX, whose very real virtues were idealized and who benefited from a special sympathy because of his repeated misfortunes, succeeded in rousing in the Roman Catholic world a real "devotion to the pope" which remarkably facilitated the enthusiastic adhesion of the masses and the lower clergy to the new conception of the pope's role in the church. While Pius IX did all he could to encourage this trend, he did so less from personal ambition or a liking for a theocracy than for essentially pastoral reasons: the movement seemed to him to be both a condition for the restoration of Catholic life wherever government interference in the local churches threatened to smother apostolic zeal and the best means of regrouping all the vital forces of Roman Catholicism for response to the mounting wave of "secularization."

No less important were the largely successful efforts of Pius IX to promote the renewal of the religious orders and congregations, encourage the raising of the spiritual level of the clergy, and improve the quality of ordinary Catholic life. During his pontificate there developed an immense movement of eucharistic devotion, devotion to the Sacred Heart, and Marian devotion (the latter being encouraged by the definition in 1854 of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary). This movement has sometimes been faulted as superficial, but the multiplication of charitable works and pious associations and the immense development of the religious congregations give the lie to this simplistic judgment. Pius IX himself made a large contribution to these developments. First, he was an example of personal piety for the devotional movement. Second, and above all, he applied himself systematically to energizing, and at times even pushing, the development that had begun right after the great revolutionary crisis. It was precisely because he regarded an intransigent attitude as indispensable to this work of Christian restoration that he forced himself, despite his personal preference for conciliation and appeasement, to repeat unceasingly certain principles that he believed formed the basis for a Christian restoration of society.

Pius IX was handicapped by a superficial intellectual formation that often kept him from grasping the complexity of problems. In addition, the mystical confidence this deeply devout man had in Providence and the excessive importance he attached to prophecies and other manifestations of the extraordinary made him too ready to see in the political upheavals in which the church was involved only a new episode in the great conflict between God and Satan. But having said this we must not forget the very real qualities of the man—simplicity, refinement, serenity, and courage in adversity—and of the pastor, whose ruling concern was always to be first and foremost a churchman, responsible before God for the defense of threatened Christian values.

Bibliography

Some of Pius IX's addresses can be found in Abbé Marcone's La parole de Pie IX, 2d ed. (Paris, 1868), and Pasquale de Franciscis's Discorsi del sommo pontifice Pio IX, 4 vols. (Rome, 1873–1882). Some letters are in Pietro Pirri's Pio IX e Vittorio Emanuele II dal loro carteggio privato, 5 vols. (Rome, 1944–1961).

The carefully written work of Carlo Falconi, Il giovane Mastai (Milan, 1981) covers only the first thirty-five years. The naively hagiographical work by Alberto Serafini, Pio Nono (Vatican City, 1958), stops at his election to the papacy. The excellent work by Giacomo Martina, Pio IX, 3 vols. (Rome, 1974–1990), is essential for a good understanding of the pope's personality. On the pontificate, see Joseph Schmidlin's Papstgeschichte der neuesten Zeit, vol. 2 (Munich, 1934) and my Le pontificat de Pie IX, 1846–1878, 2d ed., "Histoire de l'Église," vol. 21 (Paris, 1962). E. E. Y. Hales's Pio IX: A Study in European Politics and Religion in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1954) is superficial and focuses chiefly on the political aspects.