April 2024
The conclusion of a timely history.
Freemasonry in the Life and Times of Pope Pius IX : 2
On April 29, 1848, in an act of supreme courage, with reports of revolution coming to him, it seemed from every corner of the Earth, its roar reaching his ears most threateningly from beneath his own windows in the Quirinal, Pope Pius IX published the allocution which froze the smiles of adulation on the faces of the Liberals and the Radicals and turned them, in the space of seconds, into grim, deadly and dangerous enemies. For the Pope not only refused to declare war on Austria, since the Austrian people were one in the “undivided sentiment of his fatherly love,” but he disavowed any connection with Mazzini’s sly schemes for an Italian republic and he broke, once and for all, with the Risorgimento (Resurgence), the name given to the Italian Nationalist movement.
He warned all Italians against the “perfidious designs and counsels of men who would detach them from the obedience due their respective sovereigns.” “As to ourselves,” he went on, “we declare in the most solemn manner that all our thoughts, our cares, our endeavours, as Roman Pontiff, aim at enlarging continually the Kingdom of Christ, and not at extending the boundaries of the temporal principalities which Providence has bestowed on the Holy See for the sole dignity and free exercise of its supreme apostleship.”
Violence followed upon violence when it was fully realised that Pio Nono had served notice on the world that he was neither the knowing nor the unknowing leader of Liberalism. Young Italy and the secret societies under Mazzini raged, conspired and plotted. So did Cavour, the Prime Minister of Sardinia, for the interests of the Piedmontese. Lord Palmerston worked openly through his special envoy in Rome, Lord Minto, whose policy it became to encourage the most dangerous revolutionaries in Italy. Pio Nono was fully aware of all this, and to those who had the honesty and courage to reproach him with the folly of his former credulous and childlike trust in the success of his “reform program,” his vain belief that he could win by kindness where his predecessor, Pope Gregory XVI, had failed by severity, and his misplaced confidence in the “gratitude of the people,” he would answer simply that he was “very like the unwise and doting parents who had made over their goods to their children before their death, and are turned out of their house and home in their old age!”
“I am like the little shepherd boy,” he said, “who had for companion a great necromancer. The boy had seen him again and again call up the Devil, and had learned the formula of incantation. So he too one night tried the power of the spell. The evil one arose at his call, and the frightened child would fain have got rid of him, but he had not, however, learned the spell that could slay the fiend, who henceforth haunted and tormented him.”
Assassination
September came, in that dreadful year of 1848, and on the sixteenth of the month Pio Nono appointed, as his Prime Minister, Count Pellegrino Rossi, the extraordinary man who, although born in Tuscany, had been, in turn, a revolutionary, a political exile, a Swiss politician, a professor of law at Paris, a member of the French Chamber of Peers, French Ambassador to Rome until the Paris revolution of 1848, confidant and close friend of Pio Nono, and now his Prime Minister. And by September, that month apparently so prized of revolutionaries, Mazzini’s “war of the people” had gotten well under way. In the streets of the cities of the north, hired revolutionaries were slaughtering government officers before the eyes of the people. Men were being hunted down like beasts, their bodies left to lie rotting where they had fallen.
Nevertheless, Count Rossi was able to get in long hours of work, straightening out the affairs of the Papal States. During all of October, the war was moving down from the north, and Rome was being agitated by every kind of wild rumour and political intrigue. The air was tense with mystery and the foreboding of evil. Rossi was warned early in November that revolt, bloody and terrible, was planned for the fifteenth, the day set for the opening of the Chambers at the Palace of the Cancelleria.
And as the month advanced and the number of the calumnies circulated about him multiplied — for the revolutionaries knew him to be a strong man and the greatest opposition to their plans for the seizure of the Papal States — and as the people everywhere, in the streets, restaurants, bars, the army and the Civic Guard, were more and more taken in by the inflammatory lies, the warnings to Rossi became more frequent and alarming. But the brave Minister remained firm in his resolve to open Parliament on the appointed day, and to open it himself in the name of the Pope-King.
By way of precaution, he reviewed the Carabinieri — the mounted soldiery — on the fourteenth, in the open square in front of Saint Peter’s, and he had them parade through the streets of Rome, little suspecting that every man had been won over to the enemy! During the night of the fourteenth, warning after warning reached him. “Do not go to the council hall! Death awaits you there!” wrote the Countess de Menon. “Do not leave your house! You shall be murdered!” the Duchess di Rignano begged him. But he continued, late into the night, to add the finishing touches to the speech which he had prepared for his delivery on the morrow.
And over in the slums of the Trastevere, across the Tiber, two leaders of Mazzini’s deadly Young Italy, Dr. Pietro Sterbini and Luigi Brunetti, the latter the son of the wily and evil “Ciceruacchio” whom Pio Nono had once unwittingly trusted, were practicing on the dead body of a recently murdered Italian precisely where and how to strike so as to divide the great artery of the neck, and so insure the instant death of the victim.
Morning came, and with it more warnings to Rossi and to his poor tortured wife. The Pope also had been warned, and threatened. He tried to persuade his Minister from going to the Parliament, and when finally he failed he begged him, “At least, do not be rash and expose yourself needlessly. You must spare our enemies a great crime, and me a sorrow that nothing could remedy!”
“I have no fear, Your Holiness,” Rossi answered him. “These men are cowards and will not dare carry out their threats. Only bless me, most Holy Father, and all shall be well.”
“I defend the cause of the Pope,” he told the Monsignor who stopped him at the door with still another warning, “and the cause of the Pope is the cause of God. I must and will go.”
At quarter past twelve, his carriage rumbled into the courtyard of the Palace of the Cancelleria. A battalion of the Civic Guard was drawn up in the square. And in the courtyard, a hissing, howling, completely hostile mob watched him step out and, with calm and unperturbed countenance and steady step, make for the stairs leading to the Council Chamber. Immediately, they pressed about him. Somewhere, a cry for help rang out, and as the attention of the guard was directed toward it, Ciceruacchio’s son, Luigi Brunetti, drove his waiting knife straight into the throat of the brave Minister of the Papal States.
But one man rushed to aid him, Righetti, the deputy minister of finance who had accompanied him. He raised him in his arms, the great, gaping hole in his neck visible for all to see, and he bore him to the rooms of Cardinal Guzzoli, nearby. A priest from a neighbouring church reached him in time to give him the Last Sacraments. And a few moments later, he died.
Righetti, with tremendous courage, then rode through the mad crowd in the courtyard and the square, to the Quirinal, to the anguished Pope, the blood of the dead Premier still wet upon his clothes, his hands and his face. That night, lest his body be outraged in death, they secretly buried the fallen defender of the Vicar of Christ. And that night, too, the murderer of her husband was paraded in triumph before the home of the Countess Rossi, as she sat stunned and broken, with her children. The mob compelled her servants to light her house in celebration of their deed, as they venerated the knife which had achieved their purpose.
Reign of Terror
Pope Pius IX was now in the hands of his enemies. He was now completely in the power of the carefully planned Revolution, which sought not only his death, but the death of the papacy. One by one his Government had deserted him. The Carabinieri had gone over to the Revolution, broken open the jails and released upon the city frenzied and vicious criminals eager to shed the blood of one or many, for money. The Roman senators, Italian nobles, magistrates and officials, all of whom were indebted in one way or another to the Holy Father, abandoned him and fled to their estates in the country. Only the diplomatic corps were faithful. When they beheld the mob milling dangerously in the streets before the Quirinal on the day after the murder of Count Rossi, and the soldiers acting suspiciously, they came in a body to Pope Pius IX, prepared to lay down their lives to protect him — all, that is, with the exception of the ministers from Great Britain, Sardinia and America! They were conspicuously absent.
The Ambassadors arrived at the Quirinal just in time. When the republican deputies, headed by Galletti, the close personal friend of Mazzini, and the notorious Sterbini, the leader now of Young Italy, together with their “guard of honour” (twenty thousand of the Pontiff’s own troops) burst in upon the Pope — determined to force upon him the five impossible demands they had drawn up, consent to which would mean the end of the Papal States and cooperation with Mazzini’s anti-Christian regime — they found him surrounded by the pitiful few in all Rome who remained faithful in this terrible hour: one hundred of the Swiss Guard, two Cardinals — one the brave Cardinal Antonelli, who would follow the Holy Father into exile and serve as his Secretary of State through the desperate, sorrow-filled years ahead — a few priests, a few servants. Pio Nono was walking calmly up and down in the midst of them, prepared to die rather than give in.
He refused to treat with the revolutionaries. “Go, gentlemen,” the angry Ambassador from Spain, Martinez de la Rosa, told them, then. “And tell the leaders of this revolt that if they persist in their odious project they must march over my dead body to reach the sacred person of the Sovereign Pontiff. But tell them, too, that the vengeance of Spain will be terrible!”
Galletti went out, and on the very spot where Pio Nono had been wont to give them his blessing, during the days in which they thought he would give them everything they wanted — even eventually to handing over the Church which Jesus Christ had founded unto the end of time — the intimate of Mazzini told the people that the Pope had refused their demands. Immediately, a reign of terror broke out. The terrifying beat of drums sounded from every section of the city. It reached the ears of the Pope and his embattled few over the ominous thunder of the crowd. Soldiers, on foot and on horseback, Civic Guardsmen, crack troops back from war, all stormed the papal palace. Men scaled the walls of the Quirinal on long ladders. Twice the mob set it on fire. Bullets were aimed at the windows, and the valiant Swiss Guard returned the fire.
A group of sharpshooters sent a rain of rifle shot into the windows of the Pope’s anteroom, and at four O’ Clock in the afternoon, Bishop Palma was shot dead as he looked out, for a moment, from the window of his apartment. At eight O’ Clock, after the Civic Guard had brought up two heavy pieces of field artillery and trained them on the front gate, the Pope received a deputation bringing to him the “people’s ultimatum,” which was, that if he did not consent to the adoption of the five points previously submitted, they would break into the Quirinal and put to death every person found inside it with the single exception of His Holiness himself.
Escape
It was then that Pope Pius IX addressed the Ambassadors. He announced to them that, to avoid bloodshed and still more horrible crimes, he was forced to yield to the choice of a ministry his enemies had selected, which included Mazzini’s friend, Galletti, as Premier, and Sterbini as Minister of Commerce. “But at the same time,” the Holy Father declared in formal protest, “I wish you and all Europe to know that I do not even nominally take any part in the government, and that I remain absolutely a stranger to its acts. I have forbidden any abuse of my name. I have even forbidden the future use of the ordinary formulas.”
The Holy Father had not affixed his signature to the five-point program; that he would never do. On the eighteenth of November, the revolutionary government dismissed the Swiss Guards in spite of their protests, and the Vicar of Christ was left in the care of the murderous men who made up the Civic Guard. On the evening of the twenty-fourth of November, the French Ambassador, the Duke d’Harcourt, arrived in state at the Quirinal, and demanded an audience with His Holiness on urgent business. He was admitted to the Pope’s apartment and engaged him at once in earnest conversation.
Presently there came forth from the rooms of the Pontiff a simple parish priest in the company of Pio Nono’s servant, Filippani. They both entered, very quietly, a private passage, long and winding, leading to a small door which opened upon a dark and little-used corner of the Quirinal courtyard, in which, on this night, there was waiting an old horse-drawn cab. But first, before the cab could be reached, it was necessary to get the door open, and the two quiet figures encountered some very bad moments when it was discovered that the servant had forgotten to pick up the key and nothing remained but for him to return to the Pope’s rooms and get it.
Filippani sped down the corridor, and as swiftly flew back along the fortunately deserted passage, and when he came in sight of the old courtyard door once again, he beheld on his knees before it his companion, lost in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament which he bore upon his breast, in the pyx in which a Pope before him, Pope Pius VI, had carried his Lord with him into captivity. For it was Pius IX, Bishop of Rome and Vicar of Christ who, in disguise and at the risk of his life, adored his God at the most tense moment of his pontificate. Once in the cab, Filippani directed the driver by the spies and sentries and out through the less frequented streets of the city to the spot where the Bavarian Ambassador, Count Charles de Spaur and his chasseur, both fully armed for battle, awaited them. They left the faithful Filippani behind them, and proceeded to Albano, where the Countess de Spaur with her son and his tutor had been awaiting them since early morning (it was now nine in the evening), through what she later described as the most torturous hours of her life. After safely passing through a gruelling challenge from the guards at Lariccia, the fugitives drove on at high speed to the border of the Papal States, and thence to Gaeta, in the Kingdom of Naples — and freedom.
Back in Rome, in His Holiness’ apartment in the Quirinal, the Ambassador of the French, the magnificently brave Duke d’Harcourt, continued for two long, endless hours to read in a loud voice to the echoing walls of an empty room. He then announced to the guard outside in the corridor that His Holiness was retiring for the night and did not wish to be disturbed. He left the palace in his usual brisk manner and, again in his state coach, flanked with outriders and torchbearers, he set out swiftly upon the road leading to the sea.
It was not until morning that Rome discovered that the Pope, disguised as a simple priest, had fled through the night and put himself well beyond the reach of those God-hating men who, with him in their evil possession, would have spoken to the world and to the Catholic faithful all over the Earth, slyly and subtly robbing them of their Faith and their heritage, in the name of the Vicar of Jesus Christ.
A little outside Gaeta, some days later, after Mass celebrated by the superior of the Sanctuary of the Most Adorable Trinity, and attended by the King and Queen of Naples, the princes, cardinals and foreign ministers, Pope Pius IX, at the moment reserved for his solemn benediction, walked instead to the altar, and kneeling there, prayed aloud:
Eternal God, my august Father and Lord, behold at Thy feet Thy unworthy Vicar, who entreats Thee with his whole heart to pour out upon him from Thy eternal throne Thy divine benediction. O my God! direct his steps, sanctify his intentions, guide his mind, govern his actions. May he be here, where Thou hast led him in Thy admirable providence, or in any other portion of Thy fold to which he may go, a worthy instrument of Thy glory and that of Thy Church, which, alas! is assailed by Thy enemies. If, to appease Thy wrath so justly enkindled by the many indignities that are offered to Thee, in word, in action, and by the abuse of the press, his own life may be an agreeable holocaust to Thy Divine Heart, he consecrates it to Thee from this moment. Thou hast given it to him; to Thee only belongs the right of taking it away when it may please Thee; but O my God! let Thy glory triumph, let Thy Church be victorious! Preserve the good, support the feeble, and may the arm of Thy Omnipotence arouse all who are slumbering in darkness and the shadow of death. .. Bless the cardinals, the bishops, and all the clergy, that they may accomplish, in the peaceful ways of Thy law, the sanctification of the people. Then may we hope, not only to be delivered during our mortal pilgrimage from the snares of the impious and the machinations of wicked men, but to reach that place which affords eternal safety.
The congregation wept audibly, as children, until they thought their hearts would break, from love, from grief, from joy — from realisation of God.
Uncompromising Return
Pope Pius IX returned to Rome on April 12, 1850, under the protection of the French Army, after Mazzini’s Republic of Rome had fallen. He took up his residence, no longer in the Quirinal, but in the Vatican Palace. He made Cardinal Antonelli his Secretary of State, and for the remaining twenty-eight years of his extraordinarily long pontificate, Pope Pius IX, every trace of his former Liberalism vanished, struck out, in allocutions, encyclicals and infallible pronouncements, against the more than ever active enemies of the Church.
He brought down upon his head, by his direct, forceful and uncompromising utterances, the bitter hatred of the revolutionaries, Protestants and Liberals, but he earned, throughout the Catholic world, the lasting and devoted love of the people. They flocked to Rome from all over the world, in pilgrimage after pilgrimage, to do him honour. They rose to do battle for him when his enemies oppressed him the hardest. They watched with grief the Rome of Pio Nono, its existence threatened more and more with each passing year as the armies of Cavour’s King Victor Emmanuel — with the secret support of England’s Lord Palmerston and the contemptible Napoleon III (who as a Catholic betrayed his Holy Father) — gobbled up the Papal States one after the other until, on March 13, 1861, the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, with Victor Emmanuel its king and Florence its temporary capital, and the Pope left with only the old duchy of Rome, the ancient Patrimony of Saint Peter.
However, all this was still in the future when, in 1850, Pope Pius IX, to the intense chagrin of great numbers in England who thought the papacy dead and buried forever since 1848, re-established an ecclesiastical hierarchy in England, with Nicholas Wiseman as Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster and head of the new bishops. Later, the Holy Father did the same thing for Holland, with the same resultant anti-Catholic demonstrations in that country.
On December 8, 1854, having spent all of his holy life — his boyhood, his priesthood, as bishop, cardinal and Pope — at the feet of the Mother of God, the most Blessed Virgin Mary, and having deeply considered also, in his exile at Gaeta, the earnest petitions of Catholics all over the world in its behalf, Pope Pius IX defined, ex cathedra, in the glorious Basilica of Saint Peter’s before one hundred and seventy bishops and innumerable pilgrims come literally from the ends of the Earth, the divine dogma of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception. The voice of the Sovereign Pontiff broke and tears filled his eyes as he paused before uttering the infallible words:
We declare, pronounce and define that the doctrine which holds that the Blessed Virgin Mary, at the first instant of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace of the Omnipotent God, in virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of mankind, was preserved immaculate from all stain of original sin, has been revealed by God, and therefore should firmly and constantly be believed by all the faithful …
As the Holy Father finished speaking, the cannon of the Castle of Sant’ Angelo boomed and the bells of the basilicas and churches of Rome long rang out the glorious news, which ushered in the Age of Mary — the last age of the world. The Catholic faithful rejoiced, and grace flooded their souls as they prayed the prayer Our Lady herself had given twenty years before to Catherine Labouré, “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.”
In May, 1860, although Victor Emmanuel’s insulting order that he surrender Umbria and the Marches had just reached him, and he was also aware that Garibaldi was preparing to land in Sicily, Pope Pius IX serenely beatified Blessed John Sacander, the martyr, Blessed Canonico de Rossi and Blessed Benedict Joseph Labre. On the feast of Pentecost, on June 8, 1862, in the presence of three hundred cardinals, patriarchs, primates, archbishops and bishops, with the little duchy of Rome now perilously threatened by Victor Emmanuel and the south no longer the territory of his beloved son, the King of Naples, who had received him so gratefully in his exile, Pope Pius IX nevertheless solemnly and with visible and supernatural joy canonised the glorious Japanese martyrs who had been crucified for the Faith at Nagasaki in 1597, among whom were the three Japanese Jesuits, Paul Miki, John de Goto and James Kisai.
The Syllabus
And then, on the tenth anniversary of the definition of the Immaculate Conception, on the eighth of December, 1864, he published the encyclical Quanta cura and its accompanying Syllabus of Errors, which rocked the world, Catholic and anti-Catholic, and raised up a storm of hatred against him which as yet has not, in some quarters, fully subsided!
The Syllabus, compiled by Cardinal Bilio from the encyclicals, allocutions and apostolic letters of Pope Pius IX during the eighteen years of his pontificate, was a condemnation by the Holy Father of the errors growing out of the false principles and teachings of the age of Liberalism which, unwittingly absorbed even by Catholics who thought themselves pillars of the Church, were eating away the foundations of the Faith, all Christian government, all Christian morality, and, under the guise of “modern progress, modern science, modern social institutions, liberty and liberalism, enlightenment and civilisation,” were ushering in the reign of Antichrist.
There is no question in the mind of anyone who innocently and chastely reads the writings and utterances of Pope Pius IX but that he believed, without any qualification, the fundamental doctrine that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church.(1) In the year 1863, when he was faced with all the arguments which the Liberals were pushing against him concerning the poor ignorant native who, through invincible ignorance, must be saved outside the body of the Church, Pope Pius IX, in his encyclical, Quanto conficiamur, declared that he knew about this ignorant native, all the arguments in favour of his deliverance from eternal damnation, he had heard all about this invincible ignorance — about which the Liberals were so hopeful — but despite all this, he held that, unless this ignorance in a person of good will were dissolved and clarified by the light of Faith, it could not bring him to salvation. The strong, unchangeable utterance of the Faith, that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church, must still be maintained and dogmatically uttered even when we are thinking of the ignorant native on the desert island.
The modern Liberals of our time in Catholic life have never paid any attention to anything else which Pope Pius IX has said except this little half-bow of charity toward the ignorant native. And that the Holy Father knew, that the Liberals of his own day were misunderstanding him, is made clear by the Syllabus of Errors, which was issued in the following year, in which he sets down, without qualification, that it is condemned even to hope for the salvation of such men without the Faith.
Nothing but a desire to live comfortably in non-Catholic society, not to offend and not to make enemies, and a gradual, often unconscious, succumbing to the perpetual and appealing propaganda of newspapers and magazines put out by the rich and powerful anti-Christians, can explain the Catholic Liberals’ selection, in our time, of two or three vaguely worded sentences in all the volumes of Pope Pius’ utterance, and the use of these sentences to build up a whole new Liberal attack on a many times defined dogma of the Church, thereby entering well into the plans of the Church’s enemies. Pope Pius IX, who, by going even halfway politically with the enemies of Christ in the beginning of his pontificate, by the concessions he then made to the Liberals, lost for himself and his successors the temporal power of the Popes — and who learned at such bitter cost that Liberalism in any of its forms, and religious Liberalism in particular, leads to chaos and revolution — strove during every year of his reign to place before the faithful the truths of salvation.
His constant message to his bishops and archbishops was ever the same as the one which he wrote from Naples on December 8, 1849, in his encyclical Nostis et nobiscum:
You must indeed especially see to it that the faithful themselves have firmly fixed in their minds that dogma of our most holy religion, namely, the absolute necessity of the Catholic Faith for obtaining salvation … that dogma received from Christ and inculcated by the Fathers and the Councils, which is found in the formulas of Profession of Faith in use among the Latins and the Greeks and other oriental Catholics …
He told Werner de Mérode, the brother-in-law of Count de Montalembert, in November, 1863, that it was a sin to believe that there was salvation outside the Catholic Church.
Freemasonry Condemned
On six different occasions, between 1846 and 1873, he condemned Freemasonry and its kindred secret sects. “You are from your father the devil,” he said to them in Singulari quadam, “and it is the works of your father that you wish to do.” He writes, in November, 1865, in Ex epistola, of the rulers of the various countries who had failed to suppress the Masonic sects: “Would that they had not shown such negligence in so serious a duty; we would not then have to deplore such great wars and movements of revolt by which all Europe has been set ablaze. …” And he goes on to condemn the false but widespread opinion, arising from ignorance of the facts, that Freemasons are a harmless and philanthropic body, and that the Church has nothing to fear from them.
On November 21, 1873, in Etsi multa — deploring the persecutions which had come upon the Church in Rome and throughout the whole world, the anti-Catholic activities of the German imperial government (Bismarck’s Kulturkampf and the notorious Falk Laws which were, incidentally, the cause of bringing to America so many fine Germans, forced to flee because of them from their homeland), and the revolutions and anti-Catholic movement in South America — Pope Pius IX attributed them all to the Masonic and allied sects, “of which the Synagogue of Satan that is now mobilising its forces against the Church of Christ is composed.” He warned his bishops to point out constantly to the faithful the fallacy of those “who, whether deceived themselves or striving to deceive and ensnare others, still presume to assert that these dark associations aim only at social betterment and human progress and the practice of beneficence, pointing out, at the same time, that it is not alone the Masonic body in Europe that is referred to, but also the Masonic associations in America and in whatever part of the world they may be.”
The anxious Pope had already given Jacques Crétineau-Joly (1803-1875), the journalist and historian, permission to publish in his book, The Church and the Revolution, copies of the documents and correspondence of the Alta Vendita which had been seized by the Pontifical Government of Pope Gregory XVI. The Alta Vendita was commonly believed to be, at that time, under the over-all direction of Palmerston, the governing centre of Freemasonry. The programme for society and the instructions for carrying it out, revealed in these papers, blanched the face of many a strong man.
Vatican I : Rage Against Infallibility
On June 29, 1868, the Holy Father, having witnessed during the past two years the bitter passion of the Church in practically every land in Christendom, and with Garibaldi’s besieging army but temporarily driven back in its drive on Rome, nevertheless with tremendous courage issued a Bull convoking an ecumenical council to open in the Vatican Basilica on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 1869.
This time, the fury of the Church’s foes knew no bounds. The international press acknowledged no restraints on its mingled resentment, scorn, hatred, anger, satire, maledictions and dire prophesies of plots, subplots and dark papal intrigues. They surmised, and published it far and wide — with all sorts of insinuations — that Pio Nono was about to proclaim the doctrine of infallibility. The Liberals and Radicals, the Greek Orthodox and the Protestants raged, in print and on the platform. Did not Pius know that he was the last Pope? And with the fall of the temporal power not far distant, did he not realise that the papacy at long last would be at an end? What was he thinking of, calling an ecumenical council! They suspected, and were prepared for, the worst.
The Gallicans in every country came to life again, and produced their stock in trade, their adamant assurance of the superiority of a council over a Pope. The Catholics, on the other hand, alternately argued that this was not the time to call, of all things, an ecumenical council, and that there never was any real attack on the doctrine of infallibility — real enough to require defining — for had not Pio Nono himself defined ex cathedra the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, and had not the Council of Florence, in 1438, proclaimed definitely the Primacy of the Pope?
The great mass of the Catholic faithful abroad thought only that the year 1869 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Holy Father’s priesthood, and millions offered their Mass and Holy Communion for his intentions on the Sunday of the Good Shepherd, the day on which the happy anniversary fell. His great trials had but endeared him all the more to the loving hearts of his people. “No Pope has ever entered into such close and universal relations with the heart of humanity,” the Archbishop of Cologne wrote of Pio Nono on that day.
And in Rome, during the months preceding the Council, the bishops and theologians prepared the subjects to come under discussion, and the question of infallibility was not among them. For it had not been the Holy Father’s express intention of convening a council in order to define infallibility, but rather in order that “a supreme remedy might be applied to the supreme dangers that threaten Christianity,” and because he was resolved, this fearless Pope, “to build up in the eyes of the whole human race the edifice of Catholic dogma, in a form so complete, so beautiful that … the whole Earth must admire it and exclaim that the hand of God is there!”
The great Vatican Council, the first ecumenical council held in the Church since the Council of Trent three centuries before, opened on December 8, 1869, with over seven hundred Fathers present, from all over the world. Eighty thousand people jammed Saint Peter’s, a living, breathing testimony to the hostile enemies outside of the unquenchable spirit of the Church of Jesus Christ, revivified at every second of its existence by the Third Person of the Adorable Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, and constantly watched over by His matchless Spouse, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the tender Mother of all those incorporated in the Body and Blood of her Son.
Even though the doctrine of infallibility was not included in the matters for discussion, it was, nevertheless, in the minds of all as the Council opened. When it became known that no place had been given in the drafts (or schemata prepared for discussion) to the question of papal infallibility, the majority of the Fathers deliberated, since such a hue and cry had for so long been raised against it in the press, whether neglect to define now might not raise a question of its truth in many minds. And so, in April, five months after the opening of the Council — at the urgent appeal of Cardinal Manning, speaking for himself and a large body of the bishops — Pope Pius IX directed that the question of infallibility be prepared for immediate consideration by the Council.
It goes without saving that during the discussions which followed it never once occurred to the Fathers to debate the divinity of the doctrine, the fact of its divine revelation. They were concerned simply with the question of the opportuneness of the time — violently anti-Catholic and revolutionary — in which, not to change or add to the dogma in any way, for that never could be done either by Pope or council, but to reaffirm and state it in unmistakable language.
On July 18, 1870, despite the overwhelming, hysterical and desperate protest in the press all over the world, the Dogmatic Constitution Pastor aeternus, defining the infallibility of the Pope, was adopted. On that day, the Holy Father, Pope Pius IX, solemnly defined:
Faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the Christian Faith, for the glory of God our Saviour, the exaltation of the Catholic religion, and the salvation of the Christian people, the Sacred Council approving, we teach and define that it is a dogma divinely revealed: that the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra — that is, when in the discharge of the office of pastor and teacher of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the Universal Church — is, by the divine assistance promised him in Blessed Peter, possessed of that infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer willed that His Church should be endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith or morals; and that, therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church.
A violent thunderstorm, threatening since early morning, broke over Rome just as the voting on the doctrine began. For an hour and a half, peals of thunder shook the vast Basilica, and flashes of lightning lit up the faces of the Fathers as each rose, in his turn, to pronounce his assent. The altar appeared out of the pitch darkness, as the lightning lingered upon it, and the great congregation was filled with awe as Our Lord’s Words to Saint Peter, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church,” inscribed on the base of the dome, suddenly stood out clearly for all to read. To many present it recalled the thunders which rolled and the lightnings which flashed round Sinai, while Moses within the storm cloud on the mountain top received the law from the Eternal God.
As the voices of the congregation were raised in the glorious praise of the Te Deum, the storm ceased, and the sun broke through the clouds. It shone with an especially golden radiance, unusual even for Italy, directly upon the exalted face of the Holy Father, revealing the fine, sensitive features of Giovanni-Maria Mastai-Ferretti grown strong with the exceeding strength he had summoned, with the help of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in order to bring safely, through the violent storms which for almost twenty-five years had at every moment beset it, the precious barque of Peter. It revealed, this light of the sun, the personal holiness of the “good Pio Nono”! And it revealed, through the supernatural joy which now was habitual to him, no matter how great his trials, the lines of suffering worn deep into his countenance, for indeed he had been well-named by Saint Malachy, “Crux de Cruce,” Cross upon Cross.
Even the hostile London Times, whose columns daily had been filled with articles which gave much pain to the Holy Father, was forced to report of the transcendently moving scene: “The Benediction followed. The entire congregation fell on their knees, and the Pope blessed them in those clear sweet tones distinguishable among a thousand.”
Prisoner in the Vatican
And then, perfectly in keeping with the story of his whole pontificate, on the very same day as the glorious triumph of the Vatican Council, on the very same July 18, 1870, news reached him that war had been declared between France and Prussia.
Within a month, Napoleon III had withdrawn the remnants of the French Army still in Rome. This was the opportunity for which Victor Emmanuel and his advisers had been waiting, and on the twentieth of September, after bombarding the gates of the city, his troops at last entered Rome by a breach in the Porta Pia. “You are whited sepulchres,” the Holy Father told Victor Emmanuel’s envoy. “I know you not, and cannot know you or treat in any manner with you!”
After that, Rome was no longer the City of the Popes. It was become, this chosen city of Peter, the capital of an Italy controlled by anti-Christian forces. The time would come when the Prime Minister of Italy would be the Grand Master of the Italian Masons, Crispi, and the mayor of Rome would be Nathan, a Jew. How Saint Peter must have grieved, even in Heaven, to see his Master crucified anew in the city of his predilection, the new Jerusalem!
In May, 1871, the Italian Government passed the incredible “Law of Guarantees” which, among many other things, after stripping the Holy Roman Pontiff of all of his possessions, proclaimed him a guest of the government and allowed him “to enjoy the apostolic palaces of the Vatican and the Lateran, as well as the Villa de Castel Gandolfo”! — while it went on with the inevitable confiscation of monasteries and convents, abolition of religious teaching in the schools, legislation on marriage, interference with the training of priests in the seminaries, and the rest of the program of the whole anti-Christian regime once it comes into power. The Law of Guarantees made the Pope, indeed, the creature of the State.
Pope Pius IX refused to acknowledge the Law of Guarantees, and became a prisoner in the Vatican, since to step outside it would necessitate crossing the territory held by the Italian Government and would constitute a recognition of its right to that territory. That the imprisonment of the Pope was a real as well as a voluntary one, we know. When, on the twentieth of June, 1874, on the twenty-eighth anniversary of his coronation, Pio Nono appeared at a window of the Vatican, the more than a hundred thousand persons in or around the Vatican Basilica for the Te Deum and Benediction which concluded the ceremonies in his honour, broke into cheers at the sight of him. Victor Emmanuel’s troops immediately rushed into the square, summarily dispersed the crowds and dragged off to prison all those whose outraged souls had caused them to protest. These were many, among them ladies from the oldest and noblest families in Rome. Long prison terms were given four men who had cried out, “Evviva il Papa Ré!”
Final Years and Death
Pope Pius IX adjourned the Vatican Council one month after the seizure of Rome; it has never since been reconvened. The gloriously intransigent Pope lived on, a prisoner in the Vatican, for almost seven more years. When his faithful Catholics, who flocked to Rome in thousands to pay him honour, would address him as Pius the Great, he answered that God alone was great, and refused the title. When they would offer him a golden throne, he begged that the money be used to ransom theological students from military service. He continued to live as he had always lived, sleeping in “one of the smallest of the eleven thousand rooms at his command,” providing for the poor even in his own great poverty, spending long hours in prayer and meditation, counselling the proud and the intellectual in words similar to those he addressed, at the time of the Vatican Council, to Bishop Dupanloup of France, “Return, brother, I pray you, to that golden simplicity of little ones.” He kept his words of burning love for the poor, of the calibre of the poor women of Rome who, thirteen thousand strong, came and read to him one day their address, “To the Father of the Poor.” They laid at his feet a sum of money “made up of the cents lovingly given by hands and hearts which Pius IX had often bounteously filled.”
He instituted the feast of the Precious Blood. He declared Saint Joseph Patron of the Universal Church. He made Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, Saint Hilary of Poitiers, and Saint Francis de Sales, Doctors of the Church. No Pope before him in the history of the Church beatified more blessed and canonised more saints than did Pope Pius IX. He raised the Church in the United States from the status of a mission, and established, between 1847 and 1853, the archbishoprics of St. Louis, New York, Cincinnati, New Orleans and San Francisco. In 1875, he named Archbishop John McCloskey of New York the first American Cardinal.
On the seventh of February, 1878, at the age of eighty-six, having served his Lord, Jesus Christ, as His Vicar just four months short of the thirty-two years of Saint Peter’s pontificate, the glorious Pope Pius IX died, consoled and comforted to the last by that other great foe of Liberalism, Cardinal Manning. Pio Nono was mourned by true Catholics all over the world and hated to the end by the Church’s enemies — always the sign of a good Pope. “I have loved justice and hated iniquity,” the great Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII, had said, “therefore I die in exile.”
Aftermath
Pope Pius IX died, still a prisoner in the Vatican. And sure proof that his strong and valiant fight against the seed of Lucifer had stopped Our Lady’s deadly and powerful enemy short of his all but complete victory over Christ’s Church is seen in the diabolical hatred and malice with which the fiendish mob, inspired by the Masonic clubs of Rome, attacked his coffin in an attempt to desecrate his body as it was being moved, three years after his death, from the Vatican to his chosen last resting place in the Church of Saint Lawrence-outside-the-walls. The reason for this outrage was not, as some have said, that Pio Nono had allowed foreign troops (the French) to protect him in Rome for so many years, but rather because he had stood out to the last against the Liberals and Radicals, the Socialists and Communists, the apostles of false progress, false liberty and the unlimited power of the State — all of whom preached so compellingly, with all the power of the press of the world behind them — and because he would not refrain from denouncing them whenever the opportunity offered, under whatever name they might assume or whatever mask they might wear.
The tragedy of all tragedies, however, is that Pope Pius IX has not been allowed to rest in peace. The Catholic Liberals, on whom he made unrelenting war during his entire pontificate, have in our day tried to make him the father of the modern heresy! But we can trust the Immaculate Mother of God to take care of this trial as she has all others in the life of her devoted son. One by one, he beheld his greatest enemies die before him, broken and humiliated. And today, what Pio Nono foretold of Victor Emmanuel has come true. “Again I tell you,” he said, “you shall not long enjoy your violence.” The Kingdom of Italy is no more. Nor is the Imperial Germany of Bismarck. The sun has set, at last, on Palmerston’s Britain. There is no longer a French Emperor. Europe is paying the price of its sins against its ancient Father, to whom it owes all that it has ever been, for today it is in the hands of those who are the secret foes even of Masonry.
And the Papal States? That which was lost in 1870 was not the papacy, as the anti-Christian world had planned and thought, but only the land which had guaranteed the independence of the papacy in the performance of its spiritual mission. Some of this land has been returned, and Pope Pius XII, the Pope of our day, is exercising his sublime office from the tiny territory of Vatican City.
And Pio Nono? The glorious Pope Saint Pius X, who took his name and who was ever in joyous admiration of his sanctity, opened the process for the beatification of Pope Pius IX on the eleventh of February, 1907. We pray that it may come quickly, for the triumph of Pope Pius IX is the triumph of the Church. It was the thought of the Church which filled his last moments, and it was concerning the Church that he spoke his last words. “Guard the Church,” he said to the Cardinals kneeling at his bedside. “Guard the Church I loved so well and sacredly.”
Original title. Our sub-heads. Pius IX was finally beatified by John Paul II on 3 September 2000.
FOOTNOTES
(1) Editor's Note: On 9 August 1949, by order of Pope Pius XII, Fr Feeney's literalist view that he now articulates — that those who failed to enter the Church formally, even with no fault of their own, could not reach salvation — was condemned by the Holy Office, which taught: "It is not always required that one be actually incorporated as a member of the Church, but [one must] adhere to it in wish and desire. It is not always necessary that this be explicit...." (My italics)