16
June 1846 A.D.
Infallibilist Pope Pius IX Begins His Long Pontificate: Syllabus of
Errors, Immaculate Conception and Vatican 1 are his products.
Pius
IX, original name Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti (born May 13,
1792, Senigallia, Papal
States—died February 7, 1878, Rome; beatified September 3,
2000; feast day February 7), Italian head of the Roman
Catholic church whose pontificate (1846–78) was the longest in history and was
marked by a transition from moderate political liberalism to conservatism. Notable events of his reign included the declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception (1854), the Syllabus of Errors (1864), and the sessions of the First
Vatican Council (1869–70), during which the doctrine
of papal
infallibility was authoritatively defined.
Prepontifical life and early reign
Pius IX was the fourth son of Girolamo Mastai-Ferretti, gonfalonier of
Senigallia, and the countess Caterina Solazzi. He first came into prominence as
archbishop of Spoleto from 1827 to 1832, a time of revolutionary disturbance. He was
made bishop of the important diocese of Imola in 1832, but it was not until
1840 that he received the hat, as cardinal priest of Saints Piero e Marcellino. He was not, in 1846, the most
prominent liberal candidate likely to succeed Gregory
XVI; but it took the conclave only two days to determine his election and so prevent that of the
conservative Luigi Lambruschini. He took the name of Pius in deference to the
memory of Pius
VII, who had been his friend and who had, like him, been
bishop of Imola. The choice was in some sense prophetic, for “Pio Nono,” as his
predecessor had done, began his career as a supporter of liberal ideas only to
learn from bitter experience that liberals often tended to be anticlerical. In
1846, however, all this lay in the future and Europe was agog at the unusual
spectacle of a liberal pope.
The new pope was confronted by a difficult situation. All Europe, save
perhaps Metternich of Austria,
considered the Papal States in urgent need of reform. A memorandum of 1831 by
the French, English, Austrian, Russian, and Prussian ambassadors in Rome had suggested that councils should be elected to assist in local
government, that a central body, composed partly of elected representatives,
control finance, and that the dominant position held by the clergy in the
administration and in the judicial system be terminated. Liberal opinion clung
to these measures as absolutely essential throughout the pontificate of Gregory
XVI. In addition, the papacy was constantly under attack by Italian
nationalists as one of the instruments through which Austria
maintained its domination over the peninsula.
The year of revolutions began in Sicily; soon all Europe was ablaze and
Pius was faced with demands, both liberal and nationalist, much beyond what he
had been prepared to grant (see Revolutions
of 1848). On March 14 he was compelled to grant a constitution establishing a two-chamber parliament with full legislative and fiscal
powers subject only to the pope’s personal veto. On March 23 Charles
Albert of Sardinia declared war on Austria. For a time Pius
continued to endeavour to steer a middle course, claiming in his address to the
cardinals of April 29 that he was a disinterested spectator of the
revolutionary activities sweeping Italy and that his program of reform was merely the fulfillment of the program
long pressed upon the papacy by the powers. In the atmosphere of the time such
sentiments were judged as displaying absolute hostility to the national cause,
and the papacy was never again able to appear in Italy as anything other than a
bulwark of reaction.
To prevent revolution from breaking out in Rome itself, Pius consented to the appointment of
popular ministries, but none of the appointees was able to control the
situation. A steadily deteriorating situation culminated in the assassination
of one of them on November 15. A radical ministry was appointed; when the Swiss guards were disbanded the pope was a virtual
prisoner. On November 24–25, with the aid of the French and Bavarian
ambassadors, he fled to Gaeta in the kingdom of Naples. In his absence,
elections were held for a constituent assembly; this, on February 9, 1849,
declared the temporal power at an end and a democratic republic to be established.
The papacy thereupon issued a formal appeal to the rulers of France, Austria,
Spain, and Naples for assistance. Although it was generally considered that the
pope’s restoration could take place only with some sort of undertaking to
maintain constitutional government in the Papal
States, and although Louis-Napoléon,
the newly elected president of France, was in favour of such a policy, Pius
held out against any concessions and asserted his determination to exercise his
temporal power without any restrictions whatsoever. The upshot of a period of
military and diplomatic maneuvers on the part of France and Austria was the
unconditional restoration of papal rule, and Pius returned to his capital on
April 12, 1850.
The Roman question
It has often been asserted that Pius returned to Rome a changed man, that
the former liberal had become a narrow reactionary. That his policy had changed
there is no doubt, but his fundamental attitude remained the same. The
interests of the church had always been his first concern. He had been prepared
to countenance both nationalism and liberalism while they left the church
intact, but experience had taught him that both led to revolution, which he had
never been prepared to countenance. Furthermore, political concessions on his
part had led to attacks on his spiritual power, and he considered that it could
be protected only by his continued exercise of a temporal authority. Once these
two aspects of his dominion had become indissolubly linked, it is easy to see
why Pius considered himself obliged to oppose any alteration of his position as
a temporal ruler.
In 1846 Pius had considered that a new departure was necessary to meet the
legitimate demands for reform within the Papal States and perhaps also those
for a change in the Italian system of states. Most of the administrative
reforms carried out immediately after Pius’s accession remained, and the papal
territories benefited from the general increase in European prosperity after
1850. But constitutional government was never restored; the amnesty granted on the pope’s return was riddled with exceptions; and to all
expressions of national sentiment the papacy proved hostile. It was not that
papal government was tyrannical but that it formed an absolute barrier in the
way of Italian unification upon which politically minded Italians were set.
On September 20, 1870, Italian troops occupied Rome, and in October a
plebiscite was held in which an overwhelming majority of the votes cast were
for the incorporation of Rome in the kingdom of Italy. Pius remained for the
rest of his days a prisoner, as he regarded himself, in the Vatican. He refused
any intercourse with the Italian government, so that their relations rested
upon a law passed by the Italian parliament in November. The sovereignty of the
pope was declared to be untouched by the loss of his dominion in compensation
for which he was to receive an annual sum of money. He was to be entitled to
conduct his own diplomatic relations with other powers and to have exclusive
authority within the Vatican
itself and a small district around it. In the rest of Italy, church
and state were to be separated. So, though the papacy did not
formally recognize the fact until the concordat of 1929, the Roman question had been settled.
Important as the events just described were for the papacy, the doctrinal
developments of Pius’s pontificate, which spring directly out of these
political disasters, constitute its most significant contribution. Ultramontanism
began with Joseph
de Maistre, as a reaction against Gallicanism and against
Josephinism, seeking to free the church from the chains of secular control by
binding it more closely with the papacy. Félicité
Lamennais developed it by suggesting that the church would benefit
from a general increase in political freedom. Gregory XVI condemned Lamennais’s
teaching because he saw that freedom might mean freedom to deny religion altogether. Pius IX decided in 1846 to experiment with liberalism but
later became convinced that Gregory XVI had rightly suspected it. Nevertheless,
if Italy taught Pius one lesson, developments in France,
where the church prospered more under the liberal regime of Louis-Philippe than
it had under the clerical Charles X, suggested quite the opposite conclusions
to the liberal Catholics there, whose spokesman was Charles
de Montalembert. On the other hand, the coming of the Second Empire
stimulated the party led by Louis
Veuillot, whose Ultramontanism was of the older sort, completely
divorced from liberalism and seeking freedom for the church in an authoritarian
state that would guard it against revolution.
For a period after 1850, Pius’s policy took little heed of either brand of
Ultramontanism. Cardinal Giacomo
Antonelli, the papal secretary of state, followed the paths of Ercole
Consalvi, Pius VII’s secretary of state, in seeking to procure
more favourable concordats with Catholic rulers. Such agreements might be
politically valuable but were no defense against intellectual anticlericalism, and Pius became increasingly convinced that the real danger to the church
lay in the modern secular ideas that the liberal Catholics were endeavouring to
incorporate into its doctrines. The events of 1860 finally convinced him that
the notion of a “free church in a free state” was a snare. The encyclical Jamdudum Cernimus
(1861) denounced not only Piedmontese aggression but all modern political
doctrines. The Risorgimento not only convinced Pius that liberalism in
the church must be destroyed but also placed the liberal Catholics in the
difficult position of appearing to support those who had caused him so much
distress. The alternative to Montalembert’s doctrine was no longer an
unconditional attachment to the principles of the ancien régime but a new kind
of Ultramontanism, asserting the need for concentrating church authority in the
pope’s hands. The ground was being prepared for the First
Vatican Council and the doctrine of papal
infallibility.
But first the strong liberal party in the Catholic church had to be
defeated. In 1863 Montalembert was invited to address a large Catholic congress
at Malines, and he took the opportunity to defend the concept of a free church
in a free state and to condemn intolerance in principle. Pius was content in
reply to point out that on these two points he was running counter to
authoritative pronouncements of Pius VI and Gregory XVI. This was sufficient to
deter Montalembert from accepting a second invitation to Malines in 1864, but
his supporter Félix-Antoine-Philibert
Dupanloup proved an able substitute. Meanwhile, at a congress at
Munich in 1863, Johann
Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger had pleaded for the right of a scholar to
pursue independent inquiry. It was clear to everyone that the church stood in
need of authoritative pronouncements about its relations with the state and
with modern society, and discussion began about the possibility of calling an
ecumenical council for this purpose. But once again the Roman question
intervened decisively in the struggle.
On September 15, 1864, the French and Italian governments came to an
agreement whereby the French garrison was to be withdrawn from Rome within two
years. The garrison did leave, but it returned following Garibaldi’s incursion
into what remained of the Papal States (1867) and was not permantly withdrawn
until the Franco-Prussian
War (1870). The conclusion of the September convention was
sufficient to make Pius decide to take immediate action against liberalism. On
December 8, 1864, he issued the encyclical Quanta
Cura with, attached to it, the famous Syllabus listing 80 of the “principal errors of our times.” As the errors listed
had already been condemned in allocutions, encyclicals, and other apostolic
letters, the Syllabus said nothing new and so
could not be contested. Its importance lay in the fact that it published to the
world what had previously been preached in the main only to the bishops, and
that it made general what had been previously specific denunciations concerned
with particular events. Thus perhaps the most famous article, the 80th,
stigmatizing as an error the view that “the Roman Pontiff can and should
reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism, and modern
civilization,” sought its authority in the pope’s refusal, in Jamdudum Cernimus,
to have any dealings with the new Italian kingdom. On both scores, the Syllabus undermined the liberal Catholics’ position, for it destroyed their
following among intellectuals and placed their program out of court.
Though Dupanloup tried to explain away the Syllabus by insisting upon its context and by stressing its purely negative aspect,
the Syllabus nevertheless dealt a
mortal blow at liberal Catholicism, which ceased after 1864 to be the main
issue taxing Catholic controversialists. While some of Louis
Veuillot’s followers hoped that at the forthcoming council a
positive statement of the orthodox doctrine of the position of the church in
society would replace the negative denunciations of the Syllabus, the majority looked upon that battle as won and so turned to the question
of defining the pope’s infallibility, the keystone of the neo-Ultramontane
program of centralizing the authority of the church in Rome so as to escape
from the control of the secular state.
First Vatican Council
In the doctrine of papal
infallibility itself there was nothing new. It had been employed to
define, on December 8, 1854, the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception, which asserted that the freeing of the Virgin Mary from all taint of original
sin had occurred at the moment of her conception. The pope
had previously made extensive inquiries among the bishops and other divines and
there was little opposition to such an exercise of his undoubted prerogative.
When, however, at a gathering of bishops and other dignitaries of the church in
Rome in 1862 and again at another in 1867 it had been suggested that the
doctrine of infallibility should be authoritatively defined, Dupanloup had led
a successful opposition to the project. It was objected that such a definition
was inopportune, tending to widen the breach between the church and modern
society, and that it would present a one-sided view of the source of authority
in the church; for while the pope possessed powers issuing directly from God,
so too did the bishops, for instance, whose ordinary jurisdiction arose, not
out of their nomination or institution but equally from divine origin; so that
the pope’s powers ought not to be defined without reference to other aspects of
the nature of the church. The criticism that must attach to Pius is that he
allowed the council to put aside discussion on the wider issue, which was its
original program, in favour of the narrower definition. This was, of course,
precisely what the Ultramontane party desired. The Ultramontanes, indeed, undoubtedly
possessed the backing of by far the greater part of the church, partly because
of the reaction engendered by the political misfortunes of the last decade,
partly because of the immense prestige enjoyed by Pius as a result of his long
and tragic pontificate, but to a larger extent because of the contemporary
movement away from intellectualism and in favour of devotional religion.
The First
Vatican Council opened on December 8, 1869. The opposition,
consisting of the German, French, and U.S. bishops, was strong enough to
prevent a definition of the doctrines and nature of the church on the lines
suggested by the Syllabus;
but the Ultramontane party brought forward the question of infallibility, upon
which their position was much stronger. Pius intervened decisively to alter the
procedure of the council on February 20, 1870, and again on April 29. The
outcome was to postpone all deliberation except that upon infallibility. The
decisive vote came on July 13 when 451 voted for it, 88 against it, and 62 in
favour of some amendment. Thereupon the minority left Rome and the final
definition was carried on July 18 by 533 votes to 2. Infallibility was confined
to those occasions upon which the pope made pronouncements ex
cathedra.
Pius reigned for another eight years, during which he became further
estranged from the Italian government and witnessed a general outbreak of
anticlericalism in western Europe. In Germany this culminated in Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, which Pius condemned in the encyclical Quod
Nunquam of February 5, 1875, leaving the solution of the problem
to his successor. Pius died three years later, having seen in his long
pontificate the creation of the modern papacy.
Assessment
The exact responsibility of Pius for the events of his pontificate is still
a matter of controversy, but it may be said that Pius IX took the first steps
toward the modern papacy. Church and state were increasingly separated,
authority in the church was centralized in Rome, and the church was ranged in
opposition to some of the dominant movements of the modern age, including
liberal capitalism, communism, extreme nationalism, and the racism that
culminated in Nazism. Under the direction of Pius IX the papacy abandoned the
political preoccupations and responsibilities imposed by the temporal power it
once possessed and concentrated on spiritual and religious issues.
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