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PIUS IX THE PROBLEM POPESome
say Pius IX brought the papacy into the modern world; others say he caused so
much trouble that the Vatican is still trying to recover from it all. Many
Catholic leaders, in the years since his death, have wished he had never been
born. Oddly enough, this problem pope is now going to be canonized as a saint.
Here is the story. Giovanni
M. Mastai-Ferretti was the ninth child of a minor count who lived in the town of
Senigallia, Italy. Giovanni was a devoted Catholic who, as soon as he was old
enough, applied for a job as one of the pope's Noble Guards. But he was rejected
because he occasionally had epileptic attacks. According to one of his
biographers, because of his condition, Giovanni "could not concentrate on
any subject for any length of time without having to worry about his ideas
becoming terribly confused." His mental powers must have strengthened
later on, for in later years he outwitted all his opponents. It
surely seemed as if Giovanni would never amount to much. But he applied for the
priesthood and was ordained in the year 1819, but only on condition that
another priest always be present when he celebrated mass, in case he suddenly
had a seizure. Yet
Giovanni surprised everyone. In spite of his defects, the young man somehow rose
above them. With a commanding personality and quickness in perception, Giovanni
rapidly rose through the ranks. By 1827, at the age of 36, he was appointed Archbishop
Mastai of Spoleto. One
might think that this position would grant the young archbishop the opportunity
to minister widely to the spiritual needs of his people. But the realities of
church and state in Italy are far different. Mastai was immediately plunged into
turbulent political brinkmanship. One crisis followed another as local leaders
warred and kingdoms were jostled. Throughout Europe, the old order of divinely
sanctioned kingdoms was being opposed by new patterns of popular sovereignty and
republicanism, inspired by the French Revolution and the newly emerged United
States. The
battle was especially heated in the Italian peninsula. The Pope himself was a
monarch, ruling over a territory, known as "the Papal States," which
extended from Venice down to Naples. If you will look on a map of Italy, you
will see that the Papal States, the pope's kingdom, included most of the Italian
peninsula. Italy
was a patchwork of duchies, grand duke, Bourbon and Savoyard kingdoms, and
Austrian military outposts. In the midst of it, while Mastai was archbishop, a
succession of popes (Leo XII, Pius VIII, and Gregory XVI) tried to maintain
governmental control of their territory, the Papal States. They were opposed
by politicians and militarists who wanted to strip the papacy of its territories
and unite all of Italy in a secular nation. Gradually,
the attention of church leaders was drawn to Archbishop Mastai, who seemed to
have an uncanny ability to deal effectively with the secularists and keep them
at bay. His carefully brokered surrender of 4,000 Italian revolutionaries to the
archconservative Austrian forces, was regarded as an outstanding achievement. This
resulted on the death of Pope Gregory XVI, of the election of Mastai to the
papacy on June 16, 1846. He took the name, Pope Pius IX. The epileptic that
nobody wanted to hire had risen to the highest position in the church. To
Italians, he was known as "Pio Nono" ("Pius Nine"). The new
pope was only 55 and in excellent health. Austria's
Prince Metternich was exultant at the news, for Mastai was regarded as a
moderate, like Metternich. Immediately,
Pius set to work. He gave amnesty to political prisoners in the Papal States,
gave the city of Rome a constitution and a prime minister. Pio Nono even talked
about creating an Italian federation a single nation under the Vatican
control. It would be an enlargement of his Papal States. He even let some of the
wealthier Jews out of the Jewish ghetto (where they had been forced to live), so
they could live among the Christian population. But
in 1848, a crisis struck which changed the thinking of Pius IX. That year, as
revolutions occurred all across Europe, Italian nationalists tried to enlist
Pius in their plan to expel the Austrian forces and attain Italian unification.
But Pius refused to cooperate. He felt that, by so doing, the unification plan
would collapse, thus ensuring the safety of his own Papal States. But
the revolutionaries succeeded in their plan without him. That year they ejected
the Austrian forces and founded the modern nation of Italy. Learning that they
had slit the throat of his Roman Prime Minister, Pius IX fled for his life,
disguised as a priest wearing tinted spectacles. When he returned to Rome three
years later, he was a changed man. Pius
IX had become opposed to everything modern. Some of his statements and
decisions thereafter were so scandalous, that the Vatican in the 20th
century wished he had never been elected. But, even today, they are still
stuck with those statements and decisions. Here are several principal events of
Pio Nono's papacy: The
seizure of a little boy in June 1858 from his parents was to become a worldwide
scandal, and it centered on Pius IX. Edgardo
Mortara, the small son of a Jewish family, became gravely ill; and, thinking
he was about to die, the Catholic servant in the home secretly baptized him.
But the little boy recovered. In
June 1858, it came to the attention of the papal police that a baptized
Catholic was living in the home of a Jewish family! According to papal-controlled
civil law, Edgardo had to be removed from that home. "The knock came at
nightfall" are the opening words in Kertzer's book, The Kidnapping of
Edgardo Mortara. The papal police broke into the home that night and took the
six-year-old child from his parents. Pius may not have initiated the action, but
he fully approved of itand personally took the little boy as his own. In
a memoir, Edgardo later recalled how the pope would hide him under his great red
cloak and say. "Where is the boy?" Then, opening the cloak, he would
show him to all those standing nearby, "Here he is!" But
news of the abduction created an international scandal. The New York Times ran
20 articles on it in a month. The New York Herald declared there was
"colossal" interest in the matter. To think that the Catholics in Rome
would steal a little boy from his parents, and then the pope would raise him! Pius
IX's public response to the outcry was published worldwide. To a Jewish
delegation he said, "The newspapers can write all they want. I couldn't
care less about what the world thinks." And to the Jews, partly released
from the Jewish Ghetto, he added this threat, "Take care. I could have made
you go back into your hole." To
back up his words, he once again confided the Jews to the ghetto area of the
city, and rescinded their civil rights. In 1870, Pius IX publicly declared them
to be "dogs. . there are too many of them in Rome, and we hear them howling
in the streets." At these words, throughout the world anti-Catholic feeling
only intensified. As
for Edgardo, when not by the pope's side. he grew up in a home funded by taxes
on the Jews. He later became a Catholic priest and lectured on "the
miracle" of his conversion to Catholicism. Yet,
for all his meanness, Pio Nono was warm, friendly, and easily accessible. He was
the first pope to grant audiences to commoners. When not busy, he would play
billiards with the Swiss Guard. He personally attended victims, Gentile and
Jewish. during a cholera epidemic. Yet
he was also excitable, oversensitive, and something of a bully. Sometimes this
was expressed with a strange humor. To some Protestant clergy that visited
him, he gave them this benediction: "May you be blessed by Him in whose
honor you shall be burnt" More headlines went around the world. When
bishops displeased him, he ordered them to kiss his feet, or a worse humiliation
would fall on them. He sustained the death sentences of two anarchists. It is
well-known by those who have read papal biographies that Pius IX was given to
rages and was alternately kind and cruel to subordinates. One
biographer, Martina, describes a "siege complex." Anyone who did not
think as Pius IX thought was considered an enemy of the church and a personal
enemy to be dealt with. He saw them as "unbelievers . . (operating) a war
machine against the church. " Pio
Nono had the audacity to do things that his predecessors since the Council of
Trent had feared to do. One was to proclaim, as an official dogma of the church,
a teaching quietly taught to the faithful for centuries: the Immaculate
Conception of Mary. On
December 8, 1854, Pius IX proclaimed that Mary, the mother of Jesus, "in
the first instant of her conception [nine months before her birth) was, by a
singular grace and privilege of God. . free from all stain of original
sin." According to this teaching, from conception to death, she was
sinless. (It is also taught that she was always a virgin, was truly "the
mother of God," and that she died in Jerusalem c. A.D. 48, and was
"assumed bodily into heaven.") One
of Pius IX's two biggest blunders occurred in 1864, when his best-known
encyclical, Quanta Cura, included the Syllabus of Errors. It is composed
of a list of, what Pius IX considered to be, terrible evils. Eighty items were
listed, and included the separation of church and state, freedom of conscience,
civil rights, religious liberty, democracy. Error 80 was the possibility that
"the Roman Pontiff can . . reconcile himself to any compromise with
progress liberalism and modern civilization." Another
biographer, Garry Wills, in his book Papal Sins, said it simply: "The
Syllabus dumbfounded the world." It still does. In one statement, Pius IX
had characterized a remarkable number of good things as being terribly evil! The
document required that good Catholics be at variance with modern Western
governments. As Wills wrote: "It gave ammunition to anti-Catholics down
to the time when John Kennedy was running for President and many felt no
Catholic could be freethat the church was opposed to democracy." Yet
the truth is that for long centuries, the popes and their councils had always
condemned non-Catholics, and declared that they alone had a God-given right to
persecute and slay any that opposed them. And, to prove their point, they did
just that. Pius IX was not something new; rather he was the last openly
admitting defender of the Catholicism of the Dark Ages, Since his time, the
sentiments have not changed; they have only gone under cover. Then,
five years later, Pio Nono committed his second great blunder. At the time,
every Catholic leader knew it was just that but, kicking and pulling, he
convened Vatican I Council in 1869, and there demanded that church leaders give
formal approval to his theory of "papal infallibility." That which
simple-minded church adherents believed. Pius IX made into a mandatory doctrine
which, if rejected, would bring the pain of mortal sin. As an official dogma, it
drove a deeper wedge between Catholicism and the rest of the world. Like
a good politician, prior to the council, Pio Nono checked on the position of
every archbishop and bishop. He used pressure, flattery, and deception to
achieve his objective. When the Archbishop of Bologna complained that church
tradition in Europe argued against infallibility. Pius roared, "I am
tradition!" and immediately reassigned the archbishop to a monastery. Not
wanting to spend the rest of his life as a monk washing dishes, the archbishop
quickly relented. For
your information, the doctrine of papal infallibility effectively placed the
pope as superior to the councils, something that had been fought over for
centuries. (You will recall that, in 1414-1418, the Council of Constance
declared itself above pontifIs by firing three of them and imprisoning one. GC
106:2). Even
Cardinal John Henry Newman, the famous British Anglican priest who had converted
to Catholicism in 1845, remarked, "It is not good for a pope to live 20
years. He becomes a god and has no one to contradict him." Because
of the foolishness of a man who thought he was smarter than everyone else, the
Vatican has been stuck with the ridiculous dogma of papal infallibility ever
since. History is replete with instances in which popes have spoken error and
done vile things. Frequently, their dogmas have been reversed by later pontiffs.
Any informed person knows that the whole papal system is ludicrous. Oh,
how knowledgeable Catholics wish Pio Nono had died nine years earlier! Then
Vatican I would not have been convened to pass his senseless edict of
"papal infallibility." In
1870, the year after the council, King Victor Emmanuel arrived in Rome, from the
Piedmont (northern Italy), and completed the unification of Italy. That event
marked the end (until 1929) of the church's 1,116-year history as a temporal
power, a worldly monarchy. When
he learned that Victor Emmanuel had arrived and had gained total control of
the nation, Pio Nono, now 79, with his long white hair flying in the wind,
climbed the Scala Santa staircase on his knees, and told his troops to show
token resistance and then surrender honorably. Thankful
that a war had not embroiled the City of Rome, Victor Emmanuel thanked the pope
and offered him some minor authority if he would recognize him as king of the
nation. Pius
IX's response was to excommunicate the king and utter a vow to become a
"prisoner of the Vatican." He never again left the grounds. Although
many Catholics loved it, many Italians did not. After his death, the rabble of
the City tried to grab his coffin and hurl it into the River Tiber. Pope
Pius IX was the longest-reigning pontiff in the history of the Catholic Church!
For 32 years, from June 16, 1846 to February 7, 1878, he ruled the Vatican with
an iron hand. During his papal reign, he lost the Papal States, which was the Vatican's worldly kingdom. He promulgated two doctrines, which the faithful had believed for generations, which no pope had dared openly put into words: his 1854 doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin and his 1869 dogma of Papal Infallibility. In another daring move, in his 1864 Syllabus of Errors, he publicly rejected religious liberty and a host of other worthwhile things. On
April 4. 2000, a delegation of bishops and monsignors went to Rome's Basilica of
St. Lawrence Outside the Walls. Together they descended the staircase to the
6th-century cathedral's crypt. Inside, they were led to one of the many tombs.
It was made of sculptured white marble stone. Carefully, the casket was opened.
Inside rested the embalmed remains of Pope Pius IX, who had died 122 years
earlier. He was dressed in beautifully embroidered red vestments. A gold mask
covered his entire face. It was reported that "the body was almost
perfectly conserved," a sign of physical and spiritual perfection. Roman
headlines proclaimed that Pio Nono's face still exuded "striking
serenity"a sign, it was suggested, of his holy sanctity. This
April exhumation cleared the way for his beatification, which took place on
Sunday, September 10,2000. That beatification confirmed Pius' "heroic
virtue," affirmed a miracle (a nun's broken kneecap healed), and
encouraged the faithful to "venerate" (i.e., worship) his remains.
For this purpose, Pio Nono's body was transferred from the coffin into a glass
coffin so the faithful could view it as they knelt and worshiped. The next step,
which will occur within a few years, will be his canonization. In
the estimation of many in the Catholic Church, the unthinkable is happening: The
Vatican is making a saint out of Pius IX. Why is it being done? Church
leaders wanted to canonize John XXIII, the liberal pope who called the Second
Vatican Council. But, to avoid squabbles in the ranks, they decided to, at
the same time, canonize another pope who was conservative. Should that second
pope be Pius XII or Pius IX? For
40 years, there has been an unabating storm of complaint that Pius XII, the pope
who reigned during the Fascist and Nazi era in Europe, quietly supported
Mussolini and Hitler and did nothing to oppose the Jewish holocaust. So this
year, Pius IX, also a conservative pope, was substituted at the last minute. But
as we have observed, in many respects, Pius IX is just as much a problem! Elena
Mortara, a professor in Rome and great grandniece of Edgardo Mortara, who was
taken from his Jewish parents as a child in 1858, said this a few months ago:
"I am appalled that the Catholic Church wants to make a saint out of a pope
who perpetuated . . an act of unacceptable intolerance." Journalist-historian
Garry Wills, who revealed all the flaws about Pius IX in his current book, Papal
Sins, wrote this recently: "He was a disaster and his influence has been
bad ever since. If you beatify him now, there will be a whitewashing of him,
which will involve the church in more dishonesty," Then
we have the book, The Kidnapping of Egardo Mortara, by Brown University
historian David Kertzer. People are buying it right now in the bookstores. The
book is being adapted for Broadway by playwright Alfred Uhry. This will only
add to the widespread disgust for Pius IX. Even Giacomo Martina, the author of
the most complete biography of Pius IX (a three-volume work), does not favor the
canonization of Pius IX. In his book, Making Saints, Kenneth Woodward (religion
editor at Newsweek), wrote that the first time Pius IX's cause was formally
considered for sainthood, every flrsthand witness criticized what he had done
during his reign. Pio
Nono's beatification was repeatedly postponed, most recently in the 1980s. when
it was said to be "inopportune." His case has been twice stalled by
Vatican judges who found him wanting in patience, justice, and charity toward
subordinates. But
all that seems to have changed. Perhaps enough knowledgeable historians and
laymen have died, and it is time now to start the process of making a saint
out of the man who nearly ruined the modern papacy. But more likely it is a
matter of simple politics: Someone was needed along with John XXIII, and
Hitler's pope was unacceptable. It
is a fact that Pope John Paul II is an exhausted man who can hardly walk, or
even think straight any more. There are those who believe he is being pressured
into declaring Pius IX a saint, in order to offset the gains made in Vatican II.
As soon as John Paul returned, utterly worn-out, from his trip to Israel in
April, permission was coaxed from him for the beatification process to begin. So
the beatification of Pius IX has taken place. It is the last step before
canonization. Many wonder how the church decides which popes are worthy of
sainthood. The lives of most popes have been so notorious, that few of them have
received the honor. Of
the 264 popes, beginning with (it is said) the Apostle Peter, only 81 are
included among the thousands of Catholics who have been venerated as saints. But
the papal figure is highly misleading, since nearly all of the sainted pontiffs
were declared as such before canonization became a formal process in 1588. Thus
the list of 81 sainted popes includes 48 of the first 49 leaders of the church
in Rome. All 48 died before the year A.D. 500. An additional 30 died before A.D.
1100, when recognition of saints was still by acclamation of the people. So
we find that, over the last 900 years, only four popes have been judged worthy
of official beatification, and only three of these have been canonized! Now Pius
IX and John XXIII will be added to the list. In theory, a pope should be held to
the same high standard as any other candidate for Catholic sainthood. But, in
practice, there is a difference: (1) The writings of a pope are assumed to be
perfect, and therefore not subject to criticism. (2) The fact that he became a
pope is considered an act of God, and therefore his actions are automatically
assumed to be perfect. In view of such a policy, all the popes should have been
canonized-if they had lived halfway decent lives!- vf |