Pius IX

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Pius IX

1792-1878

Pope

Early Years. The individual who would serve as Pope longer than any other man in history was born Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti in Senigallia, Italy. As a child, he was bright but sickly, subject periodically to epileptic seizures. After receiving a classical education in Volterra, he went to Rome in 1809 to study theology and philosophy but returned home the following year because of political unrest. In 1814 he went back to Rome, where he sought admission to the Pope’s Noble Guard. After authorities declared him physically unfit to serve, however, he entered a Roman seminary to study theology. Ordained in 1819, he was appointed the spiritual director of a Roman orphanage, where he remained until 1823, when he was sent as a church auditor on a mission to South America. After his return to Rome in 1825, he was appointed canon of the Church of Santa Maria and director of the San Michele hospital. In 1827 he was made archbishop of Spoleto. Four years later, when a band of four thousand Italian revolutionaries broke from the Austrian army and threatened Spoleto, Archbishop Mastai-Ferretti intervened, persuading the revolutionaries to disband and convincing the Austrian authorities to pardon the rebels and to provide them with funds to return to their homes. Following this display of leadership and diplomacy, Pope Gregory XVI (reigned 1831-1846) transferred Mastai-Ferretti to the more-important diocese of Imola, and in 1840 Gregory named Mastai-Ferretti a cardinal. In 1846, following Gregory’s death, the cardinals who assembled to elect a new Pope were divided into a conservative faction that favored absolutism in ecclesiastical affairs and a liberal faction that favored moderate political reforms. In a close vote, the liberal leader, Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti, was elected the new Pope. He took the name Pius IX, and his coronation took place on 21 June 1846.

Administering the Papal States. During the early years of his pontificate, Pius IX established conciliatory policies toward the nationalists, who clamored for the political unification of Italy, though he himself did not support their revolutionary goals. His first major act was to grant amnesty to political exiles and prisoners in the Papal States. Unlike his conservative predecessor, Gregory XVI, Pius IX also announced his willingness to accept moderate political reforms, and in 1847 he established an advisory council of laymen from the various papal provinces in Italy, created a civil guard, and set up a cabinet council. He rejected, however, the more radical ideas of those Italians who demanded constitutional government and a declaration of war against Austria. Pius IX demonstrated his conservative leanings in his encyclical of 9 November 1846, in which he condemned intrigues against the Holy See, the spirit of sectarian bitterness, secret societies, Bible associations, false philosophy, communism, and the licentious press.

The Revolutions of 1848. The radicals were not satisfied with Pius’s moderate reforms, and—as revolutions swept Europe in 1848—street riots forced him to accept a constitutional government for the Papal States, although he still rejected demands for war against Catholic Austria. Later that year, after his prime minister was assassinated, Pius IX and many cardinals fled from Rome to Gaeta in the kingdom of Naples, where he remained in exile until 1850. Then, after French troops restored order in his territory, Pius returned to Rome, by this point an avowed foe of liberalism and reform.

Italian Unity. Ultimately, Pius was unable to withstand the forces of nationalism. In 1860 all the territory of the Papal States except Rome became part of the new kingdom of Italy. Ten years later, after the withdrawal of the protective French troops, Rome became the capital of a completely unified Italy. The success of the Italian nationalists greatly reduced the temporal power of the papacy. The new government passed the Law of Guarantees (1871), granting the pope the rights of a sovereign (such as conducting his own diplomatic negotiations), an annual pension, and authority over the Vatican and a small district around it. Because acknowledging this law was tantamount to giving up claim to political sovereignty over nearly all papal territory, Pius refused to do so. (The papacy finally recognized the law in the Concordat of 1929.) Considering himself a prisoner within the confines of Rome, Pius IX retired to the Vatican, where he remained until his death on 7 February 1878.

Advancing Religious Authority. Although the Roman Catholic Church lost temporal power during the pontificate of Pius IX, under his leadership the papacy significantly advanced its authority in ecclesiastical matters. In 1854 Pius proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, which asserts that as the Mother of God, Mary was pure from all sin, including original sin. This proclamation marked the first time a pope defined a dogma without the support of a council. Ten years later Pius IX challenged the liberal currents of the times in an 1864 encyclical that condemned sixteen propositions declared to be dangerous to the faith. Accompanying this encyclical was his well-known Syllabus of Errors, which listed eighty previously censured ideas that Catholics were instructed to reject. Some of the condemned errors included the heresies of pantheism, naturalism, rationalism, and communism. The list also condemned freemasonry, the idea that Protestantism was an acceptable form of Christianity, and liberal innovations such as the separation of Church and State, freedom of worship, freedom of the press, and public schools outside church supervision. In 1870 the Vatican Council called by Pius IX promulgated the dogma that “when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA,... he possesses . . . that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.” Although some German, Dutch, and Austrian Catholics rejected this dogma and withdrew from Rome to form the “Old Catholic Church,” this pronouncement of papal infallibility did not provoke violent reactions from state authorities, largely because—with the declining temporal power of the Roman Catholic Church—the papacy was no longer a threat to the sovereigns of nation-states.