by Austrian troops. Sardinia declared war on Austria. The nationalist Lajos Kossuth rose to power in Hungary.
Most pregnant with direct menace from the pope’s viewpoint, however, revolt broke out in Rome. Pius IX’s premier, the liberal Pellegrino Rossi, chief minister for the Papal States, was murdered in November on the stairs of the Vatican’s exquisite Palazzo della Cancelleria, supposedly by medical students who had practiced on a corpse laid out for dissection in order to find exactly the right spot to strike for the jugular vein. The usually reliable Swiss Guards laid down their halberds, leaving the pope essentially unprotected in a Europe of growing nationalism—a barely credible thought, but a fact nonetheless, to which the pope responded by going into exile. Garbed as an ordinary priest, he fled south to Gaeta, a fief of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, under the aegis of Ferdinand II.
The pope’s departure ignited general rejoicing in Rome: a Roman Republic was proclaimed early in 1849, and huge firework displays lit up Saint Peter’s Square on, of all blasphemous dates, Good Friday. Looting and vandalism of papal property followed. Pius responded from the safe distance of Gaeta by excommunicating everyone who had been involved in these outrages and by affirming his devotion to the Madonna, who, he believed, had saved his life. More to the practical point, the new French president, Louis-Napoleon, who had assured Pius of his unwavering support, sent French troops to Rome and crushed the embryo republic. They would remain there, as a peacekeeping force in support of Pius IX, for twenty years, causing a steady simmer of resentment among Italian nationalists, both in Rome and outside it.
It is sometimes thought that Pio Nono’s pursuit of dogma was aimed to combat and reduce the effectiveness of non-Catholic belief. But it was not—not chiefly, anyway. Its main target was “liberal” opinions held within the Church itself. Nobody who was not a scrupulous Catholic already was likely to care deeply about a detailed, nitpicking document like the Syllabus of Errors, or to regard it as anything but a long list of ecclesiastical complaint and, indeed, desperation. Rather, it was a charter for what came to be called “ultramontanism.”
Ultramontanism, meaning literally “adherence to ideas promoted on the other side of the Alps,” referred to the geographical location of Rome as against the rest of the Catholic Church, and particularly in contrast to “Gallicanism,” or things happening in France, which denoted non-Roman practices of other churches and the (in Pius’ view) woeful tendency, verging on sinfulness, to give more importance to the traditions and opinions of national governments, national churches, and local hierarchy than to Rome. The ultramontane Catholic was strict, reflexively obedient, and in all things a dogmatist: an unwavering follower of Pio Nono. To him (or her), the views of national governments did not matter a straw compared with the eternal Truth embodied in papal policy. Thus it would not count if some national government—Ireland’s, say, or Germany’s—wished, under a grant of Catholic emancipation, to veto some episcopal appointment if it thought the candidate politically undesirable; a more flexible church could put up with that. Not now. Not any more. In particular, the astonishingly ill-timed Syllabus of Errors was aimed at what Pio Nono and the papal curia saw as the baleful and enduring effects of the French Revolution, which had happened half a century before.
What were these “errors”? About eighty were listed. Some were of the most fundamental kind. It was an “error” (number 55) to think that “the Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.” It was an “error” to think that “the marriage tie is not indissoluble” and that civil authority had the right to grant divorces (number 67). It was an “error” to suppose that people who came to reside in some Catholic countries had the right to “enjoy the public exercise of their own peculiar worship,” and that was as true for Baptists as for Mohammedans or, for that matter, fire worshippers. It was an “error” to hold that the Church lacked the power of “defining dogmatically” that its religion was the only true religion, or that it needed the “permission and assent of the civil government” to exercise its authority. And so on, for many clauses and many pages. The capstone was undoubtedly the last, number 80, which in simple purblind majesty pronounced that there was no way in which the Roman pontiff “can, and ought to, reconcile himself and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”
It is not often that one can say an official document gets everything wrong, but the Syllabus of Errors came as close to that exalted state as anything set forth by the Catholic Church since the death of Luther. To call it antediluvian is to understate its impact. It set Catholic orthodoxy in antagonistic relation not only to the cautiously growing liberalism of the
Inevitably, many Catholic moderates saw it as a blow against the Church’s “ablest and most eloquent defenders,” who now, in the words of Odo Russell, the English government’s representative in Rome, could “no longer speak in [the Church’s defense] without being accused of heresy.… Silence and blind obedience must henceforth be their only rule of life.” Many believed the pope had placed himself “at the head of a vast ecclesiastical conspiracy against the principles of modern society,” which was indeed true. The French government, whose troops alone stood between the pope and the forces of the Risorgimento, banned the syllabus. “If we do not succeed in checking this senseless Romanism,” wrote Archbishop Dupanloup of Orleans, “the Church will be outlawed in Europe for half a century.”
People embrace religions with special fervor when they yearn for clear ideological security, and the effect of Pio Nono’s definiteness was to make the Church more popular, not less, not only in Italy but in the rest of Europe, and in both North and South America. Religious bodies, both clerical and lay, expanded; the missionary scope of the Church, in Africa and Asia, increased. Pio Nono created over two hundred new bishoprics. The life of the Church in France, where it had been devastated by the Revolution, dramatically revived, producing the long outburst of faith and worship that led to a rash of church building and the growth of such popular Marian miracle cults as that of the healing spring at Lourdes. Given the choice, many people prefer forthright expressions of faith, however irrational and superstitious they may seem, to the qualified utterances of more cautious moral theology, and this received full scope from the papacy of Pius IX, whose syllabus condemned rationalism, socialism, and liberalism of all kinds. A lot of people hated him, but he was still an enormously popular pope. You knew where you stood with him when you were making the sign of the cross.
This helps explain the otherwise puzzling enthusiasm among Catholics for Pio Nono’s views and teachings on the subject of the Virgin Mary, Christ’s mother, and the prestige her cult enjoyed in Catholic worship during his reign. Little attention was paid to her, or her myth, by the early church. There is ample evidence for the historical existence of Christ. For that of his supposedly virgin mother, though, there is practically none. Obviously Jesus had a mother of some kind, but we know next to nothing about her, and her cult in the Catholic Church—including her much-invoked and incessantly lauded virginity, in all its stark unlikeliness—is an accretion for which there is no real Biblical sanction. “Mariolatry,” the cult of the Virgin, is basically a variant—though a much-inflated one—of ancient cults of the Mythic Mother that long preceded Christianity. She first appears, in art, in third-century-C.E. catacomb pictures of the Annunciation and the Adoration of the Magi. These represent an effort to Christianize an existing pagan deity—Cybele, who had been worshipped originally in Asia Minor, but whose cult as the mother of the gods was brought to Rome in the early third century B.C.E. By imperial times, it had grown into a yearly celebration, linked to that of Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility, who had her own temple on the Campus Martius. From there it was only a short step to the worship of Mary as the real mother of the god Jesus. This was reinforced by the supposed discovery in the Holy Land of an actual portrait of Mary painted by the Apostle Luke, patron saint of artists. This precious artifact, the so-called Hodegetria, was probably destroyed by the Turks in the 1453 Siege of Constantinople, where a special church, the Hodegon, had been built for it. (There were no physical relics of the Virgin Mary, since according to doctrine she had been “assumed” in her entirety into Heaven, so the Hodegetria was the closest thing to a sacred relic of her the Church possessed. Copies were made of it, one of which is in the Pantheon in Rome.)
