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Who is Pope Pius IX?
He was the last pope who reigned over the Papal States, a large piece of central and northern Italy which the Popes got in 753/754 by probably the largest scam in history. Pi…us IX was pope from 1846 until 1878, the longest reign in papal history. Pius IX was one of the youngest popes. He was a very bad ruler and turned the Papal states into a real police state. He was strongly anti semiti. The treatment of the Jews in Rome drew criticism from all over Europe. Children were kidnapped and baptised against their will. A Jew could not testify in court against a non Jew. Pius IX, kept a Jewish child as his personal pet for a while causing even a reaction from the US president. in 1870 the french troops who protected the pope and the papal states had to leave Rome to join the fernch army in the Franco Prussian war. Rome was liberated by an army of volunteers and Pope Pius IX had to be protected by the new Italian army against the fury of the Romans. To compensate the loss of his worldly power, Pius IX declared papal infallibilty. This means that under special circumstances, when the pope made a statement about religious matters, he was infallible. This mean for the German government in interference in internal German matters. The new German state (1871) was afraid that its catholic populaton would rather follow the "infallible" pope than the government. This lead to a very bitter and strong fight between the German government and the pope. The pope won, because the German government wanted him to join in the battle against upcoming socialism. Pope Pius IX died in 1878. He was so unpopular amongst the Roman population that the Vatican had to wait until 1881 to take his body to the church where he wanted to be buried. The transport took place in the middle of the night. The Romans discovered the funeral procession, attacked it and flung the casket in the Tiber. Answer The above is a popular account that has been circulating for decades about pope Pius IX. It is lacking in its veracity to a serious degree. Pius IX was pope for almost 32 years, having been elected in 1846 and reigning until his death in 1878. In the beginning he was a bad leader: he was a liberal pope, elected as such on purpose through the influence of the liberal majority. He emptied the papal prisons of the Church's enemies and curtailed the more severe rules that were oppressive to those that wished freedoms in opposition to the Church. This was a political mistake as the Italian nationalist movement was looking to take the papal states. The result was that the liberals saw the pope as weak and the Papal states ripe for the taking. They wasted no time - the Vatican itself was attacked, the prime minister and a cardinal assassinated among others, and the pope, though a liberal, had to flee for his life, escaping in the cover of night. He had played his part and was now a flimsy symbol left to be destroyed. Or so they thought. Pius IX now understood why his predecessors had been so stern in their decrees and dealings, especially against the liberals. The nationalists could not consolidate and their republic faltered and they had to regroup. Pius IX returned in 1850, but he was a changed man. He enacted a papal army made up of volunteers from around the world to defend the papal states from the Nationalist army under Garibaldi who was nibbling up territory and taking Church property as he went. He reinstated the restrictions against the liberals and revoked those as well that he had granted the Jews - he, in fact, had granted them concessions before the attack but now simply reapplied them, nothing more. In 1854 Pius IX infallibly decalred the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Four years later, Bernadette Soubirious would see apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Lourdes. The lady identified herself as the Immaculate Conception, a term too complex and new for Bernadette to have known. The sensational story that the pope had a Jewish child as a pet is quite old and quite twisted. What really happened is that a Catholic servant girl for a Jewish family had baptized one of their children. Six-year old, Edgardo Mortara had been deathly ill and judging it necessary to save the child's soul she administered baptism. The child survived but now was Christian and according to papal law, no Christian could be reared by a practicing Jew. The removal of the boy was enforced by papal police. Pius IX had foreseen such difficulties - to him the presence of Jews in papal territory was already poorly done as interaction between the two religions was bound to cause compromises that would in turn cause problems. Point in fact: Jewish families hired Catholic servants as such servants could work through their Sabbath and were prized as trustworthy insofar as their religion held them to such strict morals. Then this emergency baptism happened...and Pius was not going to give. The Italian nationals were quick to harp on the case and international pressure grew in favour of returning the boy to his family, after all, Church law or not, such a separation was traumatic. The pope politely told the world no and saw that the boy was reared Catholic. The parents were free to visit the child any time, but he would not be returned to them and, frankly, he never asked to be. When Mortara reached the legal age for adult independence he expressed his wishes to remain Catholic to his family and entered a seminary. The Italian nationalists gained a victory over the Church because of the above; to the ever-modernizing world that was even now already showing signs of globalization, the pope was still living like an autonomous Medieval king, uninterested in their opinions and ideas of the future. Most national leaders, their own governments free of direct religious influence, were resentful of how the Church influenced so many of their citizens through their basic religious beliefs. The pope proved unimpressed and kept scourging the liberals in his encyclicals which identified and condemned the modernism and liberalism that he had been so lenient towards in the beginning. As well, he refurbished Rome, strengthening the economy, managing modern transportation and generally fixing up the eternal city - to this day many buildings bear plaques in gratitude for these efforts. Facing political annihilation, however, the Church was being besieged by its enemies on all sides. Forever wary after the attack on the Vatican and seeing that the Faith was being affected by this display of political power loss, the pope saw it was time to formally refute the ideas that were percolating into belief. He thus summoned an ecumenical council. The First Vatican Council ran from December 8th, 1869 to September 1, 1870 when it was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war. The council was convened in order to outline the nature of papal infallibility as well as practically identify and condemn modern errors. The doctrine of papal infallibility simply was that a pope, when acting in his capacity as the pope addressing the universal Church, could speak definitively regarding faith and morals. Save for a small dissent group that would split from the Church and become the "Old Catholics", all the Churchmen already held the doctrine but some questioned whether it was prudent to pronounce it now. Knowing that the papal states were lost, the pope was wary of how some of the faithful were equating weakening political authority with Church authority, when the two were unrelated, just as they had been in the early Church before Constantine. The pope thus infallibily declared the doctrine of papal infallibility, a belief already implicit to Catholics; indeed to pronounce such a thing without already implicitly having the power would have been absurd, and to accept, even more so. When the war came the council was suspended and never resumed; within the year the Italian nationals had taken the papal states and the pope was restricted to Rome, in the current Vatican State that still exists to this day. When the pope died in 1878 he was a prisoner in the Vatican and had to be buried in St. Peter's grotto. Three years later he was exhumed in order to be buried in the basilica of St. Lawrence outside the Walls as he requested, a basilica outside of the Vatican but yet within Rome. The nationalists were to have none of it; they attacked the procession and unsuccessfully attempted to desecrate his body by throwing it in the Tiber. Many unflattering histories were written about the pope by those moderns he had been so intent to expose and discredit, resulting in the things presented in the first answer. In 1907 the cause for his canonization was introduced, showing that he actually was popular among the people and recognized by the Church for his efforts and moral strength. Mortara, the Jewish boy, now a priest, was himself a proponent of the pope's cause for sainthood and wrote to support it. The Italian government was livid and vehemently protested. Italy has since warmed to the papacy, having been through so much itself; when Pius was declared venerable by John Paul II in 1985, there was no dissent. In 2000 pope John Paul II raised Pius IX to blessed and had his body exhumed, it was found to be incorrupt and is now open to public viewing and veneration. As a note of high irony, Pope John Paul II also beatified another pope along with Pius IX that day in 2000, and that was John XXIII. This is ironic since John XXIII was the first liberal pope the liberals managed to get back into power. John XXIII, however, remained a liberal. He too convoked a Council, that of Vatican II, which was renowned for its inclusion of Protestant observers as well as deviant Catholic theologians and which discussed how the Church could better accomodate and get in line with the world in order to be accepted. Pius IX and John XXIII are on opposite sides of the spectrum. Pius IX's efforts strengthed the Church for another 100 years whereas within just 10 years of John XXIII's council the Church has become a struggling institution of glorified social workers, seemingly having lost its identity. This has lead many Catholics to believe that John's canonization process will be ultimately suspended, or that if it is rammed through - as it has been at break neck speed for a typical canonization process, although John Paul liked making saints - that it will be found to be invalid at some point. (MORE)
