PIUS THE NINTH.
In the afternoon of Thursday, February 7, our Holy Father, Pope Pius IX., died.
In his person passes away one who to two hundred millions of spiritual subjects was the greatest figure of the age, and who to all the rest of the world, if not the greatest, was certainly the most conspicuous. The history of the last thirty years—that larger history that takes within its scope the whole human family rather than this or that nationality or people—will in after-times centre around him. It will be seen that he has had a hand in shaping it, though to-day it may seem that that hand was brushed rudely aside or lifted only in impotent menace against the irresistible movements and the natural aspirations of the age. Time is a great healer and revealer of truth; and time will deal gently and justly with the memory of Pius IX. When the smoke of the long battle that has been raging in Europe, and more or less over all the world, during the last half-century, shall have finally cleared away, and men’s eyes be better prepared to regard all things honestly, truth, now obscured and hidden, will come to light, and the persistent action, misnamed reaction, of Pius IX. will appear to have been the truest wisdom and the soundest policy.
The field, of which this wonderful life is the central figure, is so vast, its lights and shadows so changing, its surface so diversified, and the events with which it is crowded are so many and so great, that one shrinks from attempting to picture it even faintly. Yet we cannot, even with the brief time allowed us, permit the Holy Father to go to his grave without a tribute of admiration and respect for his memory, however inadequate that tribute may be. Into the minute details of his life we do not purpose here to enter. These are already sufficiently well known, and there are ample sources of information from which to gather them. We purpose rather passing a rapid glance over the most prominent events that mark the career of the Pope, that give it its significance and make of it one of the most remarkable in history.
Whoever attempts to deal with Pius IX., with a view to what the man was, what he achieved, what he failed to achieve, the meaning, the purport, and the influence of his life, must necessarily regard him in a twofold aspect: first, as a temporal prince, a man occupied with human and secular affairs; secondly, as the supreme head of the Catholic Church, the vicar of Christ on earth, and the father of the faithful. As the one his life was a failure, outwardly at least. He has gone to his grave shorn of all his earthly possessions and dignities; and his successor will enter into office much as the first pontiff entered, with no authority save that bequeathed him by his divine Master. As the second—as supreme pastor of the church—Pius IX. yields to none of his illustrious predecessors in point of moral and real dignity and grandeur. This is the strange and significant contrast in the man’s life: the decadence and utter loss of the temporal power and principality of the church under his reign, with a contrary deepening and strengthening of the bonds that bind him to the faithful as their spiritual father and guide. In both these aspects we shall look at him: as a prince who failed in much that he attempted, and as a spiritual ruler who grew stronger by his very losses; under whom the church has marvellously, almost miraculously, developed; and who leaves it to-day in a spiritually stronger condition than perhaps it has ever been in. As a temporal sovereign there may have been greater popes than he; as a spiritual, few, if any, have surpassed him. And much, very much of the growth of the church within the period of his troubled reign is undoubtedly to be attributed to the personal influence of the pontiff, to his own high example of virtue and burning zeal, and to the keen eye he had for the church’s truest interests and welfare.
He was ushered into a revolutionary epoch, in a time when disaster was heaped upon the church and on civil society. Lacordaire says of himself: “I was born on the wild and stormy morning of this nineteenth century.” The same is true of him who became Pius IX. He was born at Sinigaglia, May 13, 1792, while Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette were prisoners and waiting for the scaffold to release them from their woes. Napoleon I. had not yet arisen. The United States had not much more than come into being. Joseph II. ruled and reigned in Austria. France was in the hands of the progeny of Voltaire. Sardinia did not exist. Catholic Ireland did not exist politically. Australia was almost an unknown land. It was a period of moral earthquakes. The progeny of Voltaire were very active in the propagation of their doctrines; and Italy, which for centuries had been the battle-ground of kings and the theatre of petty rival factions, offered an inviting soil for the evil seed. In 1793 the heads were struck off from Louis and his queen; the Goddess of Reason was enthroned in Notre Dame; and the reign of “liberty, fraternity, equality” began and ended with—“death.”
Then came that grim child of the Revolution, Napoleon, and changed everything. He had an eye to religion, and he wanted a sort of tame pope whom he might use as a puppet. Italy felt his iron heel, and things went from bad to worse there. It saw the pope, with others of its treasures, carried off by this rough-and-ready conqueror. In 1805 this same conqueror had himself crowned “King of Italy”—king of a kingdom which did not exist, save as a pillage-ground for whoever chose to enter. In 1808 the Papal States were “irrevocably” incorporated with the French Empire. So decreed the omnipotent conqueror. Where is his empire now? Where was it and where was he a few years afterwards? He was eating his heart out at St. Helena; his empire had vanished; and the pope whom he had captured and imprisoned was back in Rome.
ROME PREPARED FOR REVOLUTION.