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| Blessed Pius IX, the Pope of the Immaculate Conception! |
The Boy Who Should Not Have Become a Priest
Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti was not supposed to be a priest.
He was not supposed to be much of anything, really. Born on May 13, 1792, in the small coastal town of Senigallia in the Papal States, he was the ninth and last child of Count Girolamo Mastai-Ferretti and his wife Caterina Solazzi—a family of minor Italian nobility, respected in their town but far from wealthy or powerful. Giovanni was a bright, pious boy, but from the time he was a teenager, his body had other plans for him.
He suffered from epilepsy. The seizures were severe and unpredictable—sometimes coming without warning, striking in public, leaving him on the ground and gasping. In a world that understood little about neurological conditions, epilepsy carried a stigma. It was whispered about. It was feared. It was, for all practical purposes, a door that shut itself.
When young Giovanni applied to serve in the Papal Noble Guard—a prestigious position that could have launched a distinguished career—he was turned away. The seizures disqualified him. His father had hoped for a military career. That hope died on the same ground where the seizures fell.
But Giovanni's mother, Caterina, was a woman of deep Marian devotion. She prayed constantly, and she prayed for her son. And in the midst of his suffering and his humiliation, something shifted in the young man. In 1810, after a spiritual retreat, he wrote down resolutions that reveal a soul already turning toward God: he committed himself "to fight against sin, to avoid any dangerous occasion, to study not for the ambition of knowledge but for the good of others, to abandon himself into the hands of God."
To abandon himself into the hands of God. Those words, written by a teenager whose body had already betrayed him once, would become the quiet thread running through an entire life.
The Pope Who Helped Him
In 1815, Giovanni suffered another bout of seizures that effectively ended his participation in ordinary public life. He might have disappeared entirely—a minor nobleman's youngest son, forgotten by history, spending his days quietly in the shadow of his family's modest estate.
Instead, he met a pope.
Pope Pius VII—the same pope who had been held prisoner by Napoleon Bonaparte for years, the same pope who had suffered and endured and come back—returned to Rome after his long captivity. Giovanni, now studying theology privately, came into the orbit of the returning pontiff. When Pius VII learned of the young man's plight—his vocation to the priesthood, his desperate desire to serve God, and the epilepsy that seemed to make it impossible—the old pope did something remarkable.
He intervened personally. He supported Giovanni's theological studies. He arranged for his ordination despite the seizures, initially requiring that another priest assist him during Mass. Over time, as the seizures became less frequent, even that requirement was lifted.
Giovanni was ordained a priest on April 10, 1819—Holy Saturday. He celebrated his first Mass the next day, on Easter Sunday, at the Church of St. Anne of the Carpenters, at the Tata Giovanni Institute—an orphanage in Rome.
Easter Sunday. The feast of resurrection. For a man who had been told, again and again, that his life was over before it began, the symbolism was not lost.
He chose the name Pius—when he one day became pope—in honour of this man. Not in honour of power or prestige, but in honour of the pope who had seen a broken young man and said: You can still serve.
The Young Priest
From the moment of his ordination, Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti revealed the qualities that would define his entire life: an extraordinary devotion to prayer, a burning love for the Eucharist and for the Virgin Mary, and a deep, instinctive compassion for the poor and the forgotten.
His first assignment was as rector of the Tata Giovanni Institute—the very orphanage where he had celebrated his first Mass. He worked there for four years, and the children loved him. He was known for the warmth of his presence, the gentleness of his manner, and the way he could make even the most frightened child feel safe.
In 1823, Pope Pius VII sent him on a mission to South America—specifically to Chile—accompanying the apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Giovanni Muzi. The mission's purpose was to assess the role of the Catholic Church in the newly independent republic. It was, in fact, a historic journey: Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti became the first future pope ever to have set foot in the Americas.
The mission did not go as planned. By the time the delegation arrived in Santiago in 1824, the political situation had shifted, and the new government was far less friendly to the Church than had been hoped. The mission ended without the success it had sought. But Giovanni returned to Rome with something valuable: experience. He had seen a young nation. He had seen the Church struggling to find its place in a changing world. He had seen what happened when faith met politics—and how fragile the peace between them could be.
Back in Rome, he was appointed director of the St. Michael Home, a major institution serving the community. He reformed it with characteristic energy and efficiency. Then, at just thirty-five years old, he was made Archbishop of Spoleto.
It was, by any measure, a remarkable rise. And it was only the beginning.
The Archbishop Who Pardoned Rebels
Spoleto was a small diocese in central Italy, and Archbishop Mastai-Ferretti was young and largely untested as a leader. But the appointment would test him immediately.
In 1831, a revolutionary uprising—part of the broader wave of nationalist movements sweeping Italy—broke out in Spoleto. The young archbishop could have responded with force, with fear, with the heavy hand of authority. Instead, he did something unexpected: he used his influence to secure a general pardon for the rebels. Mercy, not punishment. Reconciliation, not repression.
It earned him a reputation as a liberal—a man who believed in reform, in compassion, in meeting the people where they were rather than where tradition demanded they should be.
When an earthquake struck the region, he proved himself an efficient and tireless organizer of relief, visiting the wounded personally and directing the distribution of aid. His reputation grew.
In 1832, he was transferred to the Diocese of Imola—a more prestigious appointment. There, he continued to build a name for himself as a preacher of extraordinary power, a pastor who visited prisoners, who cared deeply for seminarians and clergy, and who threw himself into education and the spiritual life of his flock with an energy that left everyone around him breathless.
In 1840, Pope Gregory XVI made him a cardinal. Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, the boy with epilepsy who had been turned away from the Guard, the youngest son of a minor count, was now one of the princes of the Church.
And in June 1846, when Gregory XVI died, the cardinals gathered in conclave to elect a new pope. They chose Giovanni.
He was fifty-four years old. He had little diplomatic experience and no experience at all in the Roman Curia. But he was beloved, he was devout, and he was—or so everyone believed—a man of the future.
They had no idea what that future would actually bring.
The Liberal Pope
When Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti appeared on the balcony of St. Peter's and announced his chosen name—Pius IX, in honour of the pope who had helped him as a young man—the mood in Rome was one of extraordinary joy.
Europe in 1846 was alive with the dream of liberal reform. The old rigid monarchies were crumbling. Nationalists in Italy dreamed of a unified Italian state, free from foreign domination. Intellectuals spoke of constitutions, of press freedom, of the rights of citizens. And here was a new pope who seemed to embody everything they hoped for.
Pius IX's first acts confirmed their hopes. He granted amnesty to political prisoners and exiles. He freed the press from censorship. He introduced street lighting to Rome. He established a Roman Council composed largely of laymen. He eased restrictions on Jewish movement within the Papal States, allowing Jews to live and work more freely than they had for generations.
For twenty months, Pius IX was, by a wide margin, the most popular man in Italy. The exclamation "Long life to Pius IX!" rang through the streets of Rome and across the peninsula. English Protestants celebrated him as a "friend of light." Italian patriots saw in him a pope who might finally unite their fractured nation.
It was the happiest period of his long pontificate. And it was about to end.
The Revolution That Changed Everything
The revolutions of 1848 swept across Europe like wildfire. In France, the monarchy fell and a republic was declared. In Vienna, the great Habsburg Empire shook. In Milan and Venice, the people rose against Austrian rule. Across the continent, the old order was cracking, and everywhere Catholics and Protestants, liberals and conservatives, nationalists and republicans shouted for change.
In the Papal States, the excitement was electric. Patriots demanded that Pius IX join the war against Austria—that he lead, as pope and temporal ruler, a crusade for Italian freedom and unity. It was a dream. It was also, for a pope who claimed to be the spiritual father of all Catholics—including Austrian Catholics—an impossible position.
Pius hesitated. He could not, in conscience, wage war against a Catholic nation. In a carefully worded allocution on April 29, 1848, he declared that as the common father of all Catholics, he could not prevent his subjects from fighting as volunteers, but he himself could not lead them into battle.
It was a reasonable position. It was also, in the fever of revolutionary Italy, an unforgivable one.
The reaction was swift and brutal. The pope's chief minister, the liberal Cardinal Pellegrino Rossi, was assassinated on November 15, 1848—stabbed in broad daylight on the steps of the Roman parliament. In the days that followed, soldiers surrounded the Vatican. The Swiss Guard was disarmed. Pius IX found himself, for the first time, a prisoner.
On the night of November 24, 1848, the pope fled Rome in disguise, escaping to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south. A Roman Republic was declared in his absence—a secular, anti-clerical government that abolished papal temporal power entirely.
Pius IX spent nearly two years in exile. They were hard years, and they changed him.
The Exile and the Transformation
During his exile in Gaeta, in the Kingdom of Naples, Pius IX prayed. He prayed deeply, continuously, with the kind of intensity that strips away everything except what is essential. He prayed about what had happened. He prayed about what it meant. He prayed about what God wanted of him.
What came out of that prayer was a profound shift—not in his faith, which remained as fierce and devoted as ever, but in his understanding of the world.
He had believed, sincerely and with good heart, that liberalism could be reconciled with the faith. That constitutions and reform and the free press could coexist peacefully with the Church and her teachings. He had opened his arms to the revolutionaries, and they had responded by overthrowing his government, assassinating his minister, and chasing him from his own city.
The experience did not make him bitter—though bitterness would have been understandable. It made him clear. He came to see, through long hours of prayer and reflection, that the revolutionary movements of his time were not simply political experiments gone wrong. They were driven by ideas—ideas about the supremacy of human reason over divine revelation, about the irrelevance of the Church, about the progress of civilization without God—that were, at their roots, fundamentally incompatible with the Catholic faith.
When he returned to Rome in April 1850, escorted by French troops who had restored papal authority, he was a different man. Not cruel. Not vengeful. But resolute. He had seen where the road of uncritical liberalism led, and he would not walk it again.
The papal residence moved from the Quirinal Palace—which became the palace of the Italian kings—to the Vatican, where popes have lived ever since. And Pius IX began, with quiet determination, to build the spiritual fortress of the Church against the storms he now knew were coming.
The Crown of Mary
The first great act of his transformed pontificate was also, in many ways, his most beautiful.
For centuries, Catholics had believed—with a devotion that went back to the earliest days of the Church—that the Blessed Virgin Mary had been conceived without the stain of Original Sin. It was not a new idea. The Church Fathers had hinted at it. Medieval theologians had debated it passionately. Franciscan preachers had proclaimed it in the streets. Kings and emperors had petitioned the papacy to define it as formal doctrine. And the faithful, generation after generation, had prayed to a Mary they understood to be all-holy, all-pure, the one human creature whom God had preserved, by a singular grace, from the wound that afflicted all the rest of Adam's children.
But it had never been formally declared as dogma. The theological arguments were complex. The scriptural evidence was indirect—rooted in Genesis 3:15, where God tells the serpent, "I will put enmity between you and the woman," and in the centuries of tradition that had grown up around that verse. Some theologians had questioned whether the doctrine could be proven from Scripture and tradition alone. The definition had been debated, delayed, and deferred for generations.
Pius IX decided to end the debate.
In 1849, he issued the encyclical Ubi Primum, asking the bishops of the world to share their views and those of their flocks on whether the Immaculate Conception should be defined as dogma. The response was overwhelming: ninety percent of those who replied were enthusiastically in favour.
A commission of theologians was appointed. The arguments were examined, the scriptural and traditional evidence was marshalled, and the wording of the definition was crafted with extraordinary care. Two Jesuit theologians, Fathers Perrone and Passaglia, drew up the document. Prelates from across the Catholic world gathered in Rome to discuss it.
And on December 8, 1854—the feast of the Immaculate Conception itself—in St. Peter's Basilica, before a vast assembly of cardinals and bishops, Pius IX rose and proclaimed the dogma. His voice carried through the basilica, steady and clear:
"We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful."
The basilica erupted. The bells of Rome rang. Word spread across the Catholic world within days—and everywhere, in churches and homes and cathedrals, Catholics wept with joy. A truth they had carried in their hearts for generations had been spoken aloud, officially, by the pope himself.
And four years later, in 1858, a young French girl named Bernadette Soubirows reported that the Virgin Mary had appeared to her in a grotto in Lourdes, and had identified herself with words that sent a shiver through the Catholic world: "I am the Immaculate Conception."
The dogma and the apparition, separated by only four years, seemed to speak to each other across time—a confirmation, from heaven itself, of what the Church had just declared on earth.
The Catalogue of Errors
The world was changing faster than almost anyone understood. And Pius IX, from his vantage point at the centre of the Catholic Church, could see the shape of the changes more clearly than most.
Industrialisation was rewriting the social order. Nationalism was redrawing the map of Europe. Philosophy and science were challenging the very foundations of faith—not with crude atheism, but with something subtler and more dangerous: a quiet assumption that human reason alone was sufficient to explain the world, that God was unnecessary, that the Church was an ancient relic of a superstitious age.
Liberalism—the ideology of individual liberty, secular government, and freedom of conscience—was winning hearts and minds across Europe. It was not, in itself, evil. But Pius IX saw, with painful clarity, that in its dominant forms it carried within it assumptions that were corrosive to the faith: the assumption that all religions were equally true or equally irrelevant, that the Church had no special authority, that the pope was simply one voice among many in a democratic marketplace of ideas.
On December 8, 1864—the tenth anniversary of the Immaculate Conception dogma—Pius IX issued two documents that would echo through the next century and beyond.
The first was the encyclical Quanta Cura—"With What Great Care"—a passionate warning to the bishops of the world about the errors and dangers facing the Catholic faith in the modern age.
The second was attached to it: the Syllabus Errorum—the Syllabus of Errors. It was a catalogue of eighty propositions—ideas, movements, and philosophies—that the pope declared to be incompatible with Catholic teaching.
The Syllabus shocked the world. It condemned pantheism, naturalism, absolute rationalism, socialism, communism, secret societies like Freemasonry, and—most controversially—certain forms of liberalism. Its final proposition, which drew the most ridicule from the secular press, was simply this: "The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization." The pope declared this proposition false.
The press laughed. Bismarck sneered. Liberal Catholics squirmed. In France and Russia, the publication of the Syllabus was actually forbidden by the government.
But the Syllabus was not, as its critics claimed, a mindless rejection of all progress. Catholic apologists like Bishop FΓ©lix Dupanloup and the great Cardinal John Henry Newman pointed out that each proposition in the Syllabus was drawn from specific papal documents addressing specific situations—and that without that context, the propositions appeared far more sweeping than they actually were. Newman wrote that the Syllabus had "no dogmatic force" on its own but was meant to be read in conjunction with the original documents it cited.
What the Syllabus was, beneath the controversy, was a declaration of the Church's refusal to surrender. In an age that told the Church to be quiet, to accommodate itself, to shrink into irrelevance, Pius IX said: No. The truth is the truth. And we will not pretend otherwise.
Whether history has vindicated that stand is a question Catholics and the wider world continue to debate. What cannot be denied is that the Syllabus was, in its own way, prophetic. The twentieth century would see the rise of totalitarian ideologies—fascism, communism, secular nationalism—that carried to their logical conclusions precisely the errors Pius IX had named. The Church's warnings about the dangers of materialism, of the subordination of the spiritual to the political, of the assumption that human reason alone could build a just society—these warnings, dismissed as reactionary in 1864, would ring with terrible relevance across the catastrophes of the next hundred years.
The First Vatican Council
By the late 1860s, Pius IX had been pope for over twenty years. The Papal States were shrinking—piece by piece, the Italian nationalists were absorbing papal territory into the new Kingdom of Italy. Rome itself, the eternal city, the seat of the pope for nearly two millennia, was the last great prize they sought.
Pius IX knew the end was coming. He could feel it in the political winds, in the shifting of alliances, in the withdrawal of French troops who had been Rome's shield. And before that end arrived, he wanted to accomplish one more thing—something that would outlast empires, outlast politics, outlast the rise and fall of nations.
He wanted the Church to speak, with one voice and absolute clarity, about the authority of the pope.
On June 29, 1868, Pius IX convoked the First Vatican Council—the first ecumenical council of the Catholic Church in over three hundred years, since the Council of Trent had concluded in 1563. About seven hundred bishops and prelates arrived in Rome for the opening session on December 8, 1869.
The council's stated purpose was broad: to address the errors of the modern world, to clarify Catholic doctrine in response to the rising influence of rationalism, materialism, and liberalism. And it did this, first, in the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius, which affirmed that God can be known through reason alone by contemplating creation—but that revelation and faith are nonetheless necessary, and that Scripture and tradition together constitute the source of revealed truth.
But the great question—the one that had been whispered about for months before the council even opened—was papal infallibility.
The doctrine itself was not new. Catholic theologians had debated and affirmed papal infallibility for centuries. The pope's supreme authority in matters of faith and morals was rooted in Scripture itself—in Christ's words to Peter: "Upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." And in: "I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith shall not fail; and when you are converted, strengthen your brethren."
But it had never been formally defined as dogma. Some bishops—particularly from Germany, Austria, and France—argued that the timing was wrong. They feared that a formal definition would alienate Protestants, provoke hostile governments, and create more division than unity. They were called the "Inopportunists"—not because they doubted the doctrine, but because they questioned whether this was the right moment to declare it.
Pius IX disagreed. He believed, with the conviction of a man who had spent twenty years watching the world try to strip the Church of its authority, that the time had come for the Church to declare, once and for all, what the pope's authority truly was.
The debates were fierce. The arguments were passionate. Some bishops left Rome rather than vote against the definition. But on July 18, 1870—in a session that began under a darkening sky, with thunder rumbling and lightning breaking a window in St. Peter's transept—the council voted.
Of the 533 bishops present, 533 voted in favour. Only two voted against. Both of those two, afterward, submitted to the decision of the council with full faith.
The dogma of papal infallibility was defined: when the pope speaks ex cathedra—that is, when he, as pastor and teacher of all Christians, formally defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the entire Church—he is preserved, by the divine assistance promised to Peter, from the possibility of error.
It was not a claim that the pope could never sin, never make mistakes, never err in judgment or politics or personal conduct. It was a claim about one specific, narrow, solemn act: the formal definition of doctrine on faith and morals. In that act, and in that act alone, the pope was protected by God from error.
The world outside St. Peter's reacted with alarm. Bismarck saw it as a threat to German sovereignty. Protestant nations objected. A small number of Catholics—mostly German—broke away entirely, forming the Old Catholic Churches. But the vast majority of Catholics accepted the definition with faith and joy, and the Church moved forward.
The Fall of Rome
The day after the infallibility vote—July 19, 1870—France declared war on Prussia. It was not a coincidence of timing so much as a convergence of fate. Napoleon III, the French emperor who had kept a garrison of troops in Rome to protect the pope, suddenly needed every soldier he had for his own survival.
The French troops were withdrawn from Rome. And within weeks, the last protection of the Papal States was gone.
On September 20, 1870, Italian troops breached the Aurelian Walls of Rome near the Porta Pia. Pius IX had ordered a token resistance—not enough to cause serious bloodshed, but enough to make it unmistakably clear that Rome was being taken by force, not surrendered freely. A few dozen soldiers on each side were killed. Within hours, the ancient capital of the papacy was in the hands of the Kingdom of Italy.
Pius IX retreated to the Vatican Palace. The Italian government offered him sovereignty over the Leonine City—the area on Vatican Hill—and passed the Law of Guarantees, which promised the pope freedom, inviolability, and a generous annual stipend.
Pius IX rejected every offer. He excommunicated King Victor Emmanuel II and declared the occupation of his territories "unjust, violent, null, and void." And he declared himself a prisoner.
"Fine loyalty! You are all a set of vipers, of whited sepulchres, and wanting in faith," he had said to the Italian envoy who came to offer a peaceful resolution, throwing the king's letter on the table with fury.
From that day forward, Pius IX never left the Vatican. He refused to set foot on what he considered Italian-occupied territory. He refused to appear on the balcony of St. Peter's facing the square—a tradition that would not resume until 1929, when the Lateran Treaty finally resolved the conflict between the papacy and the Italian state, nearly sixty years after Pius IX's death.
The pope who had once been the most popular man in Italy was now, in the eyes of Italian nationalists, the enemy. And in the eyes of much of secular Europe, he was a relic—an old man clinging to a dead world.
But Pius IX did not see it that way. He saw a pope who had been robbed of his temporal authority by force, and who refused to pretend otherwise. He saw a Church that had lost its political power but had gained, in that very loss, something far more precious: the clarity to focus entirely on its spiritual mission.
"I need money, it is true," he told those who warned him about the financial consequences of rejecting the Italian government's stipend. "My children throughout the world will meet my wants."
And they did. Catholics around the globe, hearing of the pope's plight, began sending donations—small amounts, but from millions of people. This revival of popular support became known as Peter's Pence, and it continues to this day as a way for Catholics everywhere to support the Holy See.
The Last Years
Pius IX spent his final years in the Vatican, surrounded by cardinals and clergy, receiving visitors from across the Catholic world, and continuing to govern the Church with the same energy and conviction he had shown throughout his pontificate.
He consecrated the world to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1875—a devotion that would grow enormously in the decades to come, a prayer for a world that had wounded itself with its own pride and ambition.
He canonized saints and beatified the blessed. In 1862, he had convened three hundred bishops to Rome for the canonization of the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Japan—the very martyrs whose story of faith and blood we told in an earlier chapter of this series. The connection was not accidental. Pius IX understood, as few popes before him had, that the Church's greatest strength lay not in armies or alliances but in the witness of those who lived and died for the faith.
His health declined gradually through the 1870s. Bronchitis weakened him. A fall to the floor raised his temperature. He grew thinner, quieter, more interior. But his humour—which had been a lifelong companion—never left him. When the Cardinal Vicar of Rome ordered bells rung and continuous prayers said for his recovery, Pius IX smiled and asked: "Why do you want to stop me from going to heaven?"
He told his doctor, simply, that his time had come.
One final act of mercy marked his last days. His old adversary, King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy—the man he had excommunicated, the man whose troops had breached the walls of Rome—was dying. When word reached Pius IX of the king's condition, he lifted all excommunications and ecclesiastical punishments from the king without hesitation, without condition, without a word of reproach.
Victor Emmanuel II died in January 1878. Pius IX followed him one month later.
On February 7, 1878, at 5:40 in the afternoon, Blessed Pope Pius IX died in the Vatican, aged eighty-five, while saying the rosary with the members of his staff. His last words, recorded by the cardinals kneeling at his bedside, were: "Guard the Church I loved so well and sacredly."
After Death
His body was originally buried in the grotto beneath St. Peter's Basilica. Three years later, in 1881, it was moved to the Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura—one of the four major papal basilicas in Rome.
The transfer was almost disrupted. An anti-clerical mob attacked the funeral procession, attempting to seize the pope's body and throw it into the Tiber River. Catholic priests and laypeople, surrounding the bier, were pelted with stones and insults. They held firm. The body of Pius IX was laid to rest in peace.
Pius IX had requested no funeral monument. He was buried in an ark of bare stone—a final act of humility from a man who had held, for thirty-two years, the highest office in the Catholic Church.
Decades later, when his body was exhumed during the beatification process, something remarkable was discovered: the body was found to be totally incorrupt. In Catholic tradition, the preservation of a body from the natural processes of decay is understood as a sign of extraordinary holiness—a physical confirmation of the spiritual life that had animated the man while he lived.
The Long Road to Beatification
The cause for the beatification of Pius IX was one of the longest and most difficult in Church history.
It began in 1907, under Pope St. Pius X, at the prompting of the venerable Don Luigi Orione. It was relaunched, with varying degrees of success, by Benedict XV, by Pius XI, and by Pius XII, who in 1954 approved the introduction of the formal Apostolic Process.
The Italian government, for decades after the events of 1870, strongly opposed the beatification. The wound of the Risorgimento—the great Italian unification—had not healed. Pius IX was, in the eyes of Italian nationalists, the pope who had stood in the way of a united Italy. His beatification, they feared, would be a kind of posthumous rebuke.
The opposition was not only political. The case of Edgardo Mortara—a Jewish boy who, in 1858, was removed from his family by papal authorities after it was discovered that a Christian maid had secretly baptized him during a childhood illness—haunted the cause for generations. Jewish organisations protested. Catholic liberals were uncomfortable. The incident, seen through modern eyes, raised painful questions about the intersection of religious law and human rights that the Church has had to grapple with honestly and humbly.
John Paul II, when he declared Pius IX venerable in 1985, and when he beatified him on September 3, 2000, acknowledged the complexity of the man directly. Pius IX, he said, was "much loved, but also hated and slandered." The beatification was not a judgment on every political decision of a thirty-two-year pontificate. It was a recognition of the man's personal holiness—his prayer, his devotion, his love for the Church, his courage in defending what he believed to be true, and his surrender, in the end, to the will of God.
Remarkably, Pius IX and Pope John XXIII—the two popes who seemed, on the surface, to represent opposite poles of the Church—were beatified on the same day. It was a deliberate choice by John Paul II, a gesture that said: the Church is large enough to hold both. The defender and the reformer. The man who said no to the modern world and the man who said yes to a new conversation with it. Both were holy. Both were faithful. Both served the same God.
What His Story Means for Us
Blessed Pope Pius IX lived for eighty-five years and held the papal throne for thirty-two of them—the longest verified reign of any pope in history. His pontificate encompassed revolution, exile, exile's return, doctrinal triumph, political catastrophe, and spiritual victory. He was a liberal who became a conservative, a ruler who became a prisoner, a man who lost almost everything the world values and gained everything the Church holds dear.
What does his story teach us?
It teaches us that God works through weakness. Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti should never have been a priest. His epilepsy disqualified him from the Guard, derailed his education, and marked him, in the eyes of the world, as someone to be pitied. And yet it was precisely through that weakness—and through the mercy of a pope who saw beyond it—that he was led to the priesthood, and eventually to the papal throne. The cross of our lives is rarely the one we would have chosen. But it is often the one God chose for us.
It teaches us that prayer transforms. The exile of 1848–1850 was, by any measure, the darkest period of Pius IX's life. And it was also the period that forged him into the pope he would become. Not through bitterness, but through prayer—long, honest, searching prayer about what God wanted of him and of the Church. The men and women who pray deeply in their darkest hours are not escaping reality. They are entering it more fully.
It teaches us that the truth does not bend. Pius IX lived in a world that was constantly pressuring the Church to accommodate itself—to soften its teachings, to blur its boundaries, to become one voice among many in a crowded marketplace of ideas. He refused. Not out of stubbornness or pride, but out of a deep conviction that the truth entrusted to the Church by Christ was not his to give away. The Syllabus of Errors, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the definition of papal infallibility—each of these acts was, in its own way, a declaration that the Church would not surrender what it had been given, no matter how great the pressure to do so.
It teaches us that losing power is not the same as losing purpose. When Rome fell in 1870, the papacy lost the last of its temporal territories. From a purely political perspective, Pius IX had failed. The Papal States were gone. The pope was a prisoner. The world had moved on.
But the Church did not disappear. It endured. And in the decades and centuries that followed, freed from the entanglements of temporal power, the papacy grew in moral authority, in global reach, in spiritual influence, in ways that no amount of territory could have produced. Pius IX, though he did not live to see it, planted the seeds of that transformation. The very loss he mourned so bitterly became, in God's hands, the doorway to something greater.
It teaches us that mercy outlasts anger. In his final days, Pius IX lifted the excommunication of the king who had taken Rome from him—without condition, without hesitation, without a word of reproach. It was a small act, private, easily overlooked. But it reveals the heart beneath the politics: a heart that, in the end, chose mercy over justice, forgiveness over vindication.
Epilogue: The Prisoner Who Won
Today, Blessed Pope Pius IX rests in the Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura in Rome—in the same city that was taken from him, in the same country that opposed his beatification for decades. The bare stone ark in which he was buried, at his own request, is a fitting monument: no gilding, no grandeur. Just the quiet faith of a man who spent his life defending a truth he believed was worth defending, and who surrendered, at the end, to the same God he had served.
His feast day is February 7—the anniversary of his death. Catholics who remember him today remember not only the controversies that surrounded his pontificate, but the man behind them: the boy with epilepsy who was told he could never be a priest. The young priest who loved orphans. The archbishop who pardoned rebels. The pope who wept for the Church he loved, and who prayed, even in his darkest hours, that God's will would be done.
The prisoner who, in the end, won not with armies or alliances, but with faith.
Blessed Pope Pius IX, you who held fast when the world told you to let go, pray for us. Help us to find, as you found, the courage to serve the truth—and the humility to surrender to the One who holds it all. Amen.
Blessed Pope Pius IX Born: May 13, 1792, Senigallia, Italy Pontificate: June 16, 1846 – February 7, 1878 (31 years, 7 months) Died: February 7, 1878, Vatican City Beatified: September 3, 2000, by Pope John Paul II Feast Day: February 7
"Guard the Church I loved so well and sacredly." — Blessed Pope Pius IX, last words
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