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The modern history of the papacy is shaped by the two largest dispossessions of papal property in its history, stemming from the French and its spread to Europe, including Italy.
In 1793, a French diplomat in Rome, Nicolas Jean Hugon de Bassville, indulged in a provocative display of the tricolour, symbol of French anti-clerical republicanism. A Roman crowd attacked him and he died the next day. Four years later, when Napoleon reached as far south as Ancona in an advance on Rome, this incident remained a specific grievance for which France held the pope responsible - demanding and receiving 300,000 livres as compensation for Basseville's family.
In 1797 French Republican troops under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Italy, defeated the papal troops and occupied Ancona and Loreto. Pius VI sued for peace. The price of persuading the French intruder to head north again, agreed in the Treaty of Tolentino, was a massive indemnity, the removal of many works of art from the Vatican collections and the surrender to France of Bologna, Ferrara and the Romagna.
However, on 28 December of that year, a popular French general was killed in a riot outside the French embassy in Rome, thus providing a new pretext furnished for invasion by the French. French army units marched to Rome, entered it unopposed on and, proclaiming a Roman Republic, demanded of the Pope the renunciation of his temporal authority. Upon his refusal to do so, Pius VI was taken prisoner, and on February 20 was ultimately brought to the citadel of Valence in France where he died.
The new pope, Pope Pius VII, was at first conciliatory towards Napoleon. He negotiated the French Concordat of 1801 which reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church as the major religion of France and restored some of its civil status, removing it from the authority of the Pope. While the Concordat restored some ties between France and the papacy, the agreement was slanted largely in favor of the state; the balance of church-state relations had tilted firmly in Napoleon Bonaparte's favor.
In 1804, Pius VII traveled to Paris to officiate at Napoleon's imperial coronation. On December 2, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, in the presence of Pope Pius VII. Claims that he seized the crown out of the hands of Pope Pius VII during the ceremony in order to avoid subjecting himself to the authority of the pontiff are apocryphal; in fact, the coronation procedure had been agreed upon in advance.
But by 1808 relations had deteriorated. The pope annoyed Napoleon by refusing to sanction the annulment of his brother Jerome's marriage and, perhaps more significantly, by not bringing the ports of the papal states into the Continental System.
The result was that a French army occupied Rome in February 1808. In the following month another section of the papal states (the Marches) was annexed to the Napoleonic kingdom of Italy. Napoleon followed up these affronts by annexing in 1809 all that remains of the papal states, including the city of Rome, and by announcing that the pope no longer has any form of temporal authority. Pius VII responded by an immediate use of his spiritual authority, excommunicating Napoleon himself and everyone else connected with this outrage. Pius VII was immediately arrested and removed to imprisonment in France.
These are the events which brought the entire Italian peninsula under French control by 1809. The situation remained unchanged until after Napoleon's defeat at Leipzig in 1813 – an event followed by Austrian recovery of much of Italy and a subsequent seal of approval at the congress of Vienna.
During the reigns of Pope Leo XII (1823–9) and Pope Gregory XVI (1831–46), Rome became strongly identified with the anti-liberal sentiments of most of the ruling European houses of the day. The election of Pope Pius IX in 1846 seemed to promise a less reactionary papacy. However, in 1848, nationalist and liberal revolutions began to break out across Europe; in 1849, a Roman Republic was declared and the Pope fled the city. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, recently elected president of the newly declared French Second Republic, saw an opportunity to assuage conservative Catholic opinion in France, and in cooperation with Austria sent troops to restore Papal rule in Rome. After some hard fighting, Pius was returned to Rome by a victorious French army, and repenting of his previous liberal tendencies pursued a harsh, conservative policy even more repressive than that of his predecessors.
Even before the Franco-Prussian War, Pius IX had foreseen the temporal power of the Church draining away and had begun redefining the Catholic Church as a spiritual power that would serve as a firm bulwark against the liberal trends of the period.[ citation needed ]
The First Vatican Council established clear theoretical underpinnings to Pius IX's commitment to an intensified centralization of ecclesiastical government in Rome. The council's companion definition of papal infallibility strengthened the energetic exercise of the papal magisterial power that was so marked a feature of the years between the first and second Vatican Councils. The pope's primary purpose was to obtain confirmation of the position he had taken in his Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemning a wide range of positions associated with rationalism, liberalism, and materialism, and to define the doctrine concerning the church. In the three sessions, there was discussion and approval of only two constitutions: Dei Filius, the Dogmatic Constitution On The Catholic Faith and Pastor Aeternus, the First Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ, dealing with the primacy and infallibility of the bishop of Rome when solemnly defining dogma.
Seven months later, on 18 July 1870, the prelates assembled in St Peter's accepted an uncompromising dogma - that the pope, when speaking from his throne on a matter of faith or morals, is inspired by God and is therefore infallible. Papal infallibility was merely the most striking example of the authoritarian stance now being established. It must be said that most of the dissenting bishops had left Rome before the final vote. The direction in which Pius IX was taking the church was made very plain in a document of 1864 known simply as the Syllabus. It is a list of eighty modern errors that included such broad topics as socialism, civil marriage and secular education. The final error is the concept that 'the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism and modern civilization'.
The First Vatican Council was convoked by Pope Pius IX on 29 June 1868, after a period of planning and preparation that began on 6 December 1864. This, the twentieth ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, held three centuries after the Council of Trent, opened on 8 December 1869 and adjourned on 20 October 1870. Unlike the five earlier general councils held in Rome, which met in the Lateran Basilica and are known as Lateran councils, it met in the Vatican Basilica, hence its name. Its best-known decision is its definition of papal infallibility.
Ultramontanism is a clerical political conception within the Catholic Church that places strong emphasis on the prerogatives and powers of the Pope.
Pope Pius VI, born Count Giovanni Angelo Braschi, was head of the Roman Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 15 February 1775 to his death in 1799.
Pius IX was head of the Catholic Church from 1846 to 1878, the longest-reigning Roman Pope. He was notable for convoking the Vatican Council in 1868 and for being pontiff when the Kingdom of Italy occupied the Estates of the Church in 1870, effectively ending the temporal power of the Holy See.
The Papal States, officially the State of the Church, were a series of territories in the Italian Peninsula under the direct sovereign rule of the pope, from the 8th century until 1870. They were among the major states of Italy from roughly the 8th century until the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia successfully unified the Italian Peninsula by conquest in a campaign virtually concluded in 1861 and definitively in 1870. At their zenith, the Papal States covered most of the modern Italian regions of Lazio, Marche, Umbria and Romagna, and portions of Emilia. These holdings were considered to be a manifestation of the temporal power of the pope, as opposed to his ecclesiastical primacy.
Pope Pius VII, born Barnaba Niccolò Maria Luigi Chiaramonti, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 14 March 1800 to his death in 1823. Chiaramonti was also a monk of the Order of Saint Benedict in addition to being a well-known theologian and bishop throughout his life.
The temporal powerof the Holy See designates the political and secular influence of the Holy See, the leading of a State by the pope of the Catholic Church, as distinguished from its spiritual and pastoral activity.
The Concordat of 1801 was an agreement between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII, signed on 15 July 1801 in Paris. It remained in effect until 1905. It sought national reconciliation between revolutionaries and Catholics and solidified the Roman Catholic Church as the majority church of France, with most of its civil status restored. The hostility of devout French Catholics against the revolutionary state had then largely been resolved. It did not restore the vast church lands and endowments that had been seized upon during the revolution and sold off. Catholic clergy returned from exile, or from hiding, and resumed their traditional positions in their traditional churches. Very few parishes continued to employ the priests who had accepted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of the Revolutionary regime. While the Concordat restored much power to the papacy, the balance of church-state relations tilted firmly in Napoleon's favour. He selected the bishops and supervised church finances.
The Syllabus of Errors is a document issued by the Holy See under Pope Pius IX on December 8, 1864, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, as an annex to the Quanta cura encyclical. It condemns a total of 80 errors or heresies, articulating Catholic Church teaching on a number of philosophical and political questions, and referring to previous documents.
The 1799–1800 papal conclave followed the death of Pope Pius VI on August 29, 1799, and led to the selection as pope of Barnaba Niccolò Maria Luigi Chiaramonti, who took the name Pius VII, on March 14, 1800. This conclave was held in Venice and was the last to take place outside Rome. This period was marked by uncertainty for the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church following the invasion of the Papal States and abduction of Pius VI under the French Directory.
Giovanni Battista Caprara Montecuccoli was an Italian statesman and Cardinal and archbishop of Milan from 1802 to 1810. As a papal diplomat he served in the embassies in Cologne, Lausanne, and Vienna. As Legate of Pius VII in France, he implemented the Concordat of 1801, and negotiated with the Emperor Napoleon over the matter of appointments to the restored hierarchy in France. He crowned Napoleon as King of Italy in Milan in 1805.
The history of the papacy, the office held by the pope as head of the Catholic Church, according to Catholic doctrine, spans from the time of Peter to the present day.
The Roman Question was a dispute regarding the temporal power of the popes as rulers of a civil territory in the context of the Italian Risorgimento. It ended with the Lateran Pacts between King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy and Pope Pius XI in 1929.
Pastor aeternus, was issued by the First Vatican Council, July 18, 1870. The document defines four doctrines of the Catholic faith: the apostolic primacy conferred on Peter, the perpetuity of the Petrine Primacy in the Roman pontiffs, the meaning and power of the papal primacy, and Papal infallibility – infallible teaching authority (magisterium) of the Pope.
Vatican during the Savoyard era describes the relation of the Vatican to Italy, after 1870, which marked the end of the Papal States, and 1929, when the papacy regained autonomy in the Lateran Treaty, a period dominated by the Roman Question.
Papal infallibility is a dogma of the Catholic Church which states that, in virtue of the promise of Jesus to Peter, the pope when appealing to his highest authority is preserved from the possibility of error on doctrine "initially given to the apostolic Church and handed down in Scripture and tradition". This doctrine was defined dogmatically at the First Vatican Council of 1869–1870 in the document Pastor aeternus, but had been defended before that, existing already in medieval theology and being the majority opinion at the time of the Counter-Reformation.
The relationship between Napoleon and the Catholic Church was an important aspect of his rule.
Foreign relations between Pope Pius IX and Italy were characterized by an extensive political and diplomatic conflict over Italian unification and the subsequent status of Rome after the victory of the liberal revolutionaries.
The theology of Pope Pius IX championed the pontiff's role as the highest teaching authority in the Church.
The Papal States under Pope Pius IX assumed a much more modern and secular character than had been seen under previous pontificates, and yet this progressive modernization was not nearly sufficient in resisting the tide of political liberalization and unification in Italy during the middle of the 19th century.
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| Diocese of Rome with universal full communion (Papal primacy) |
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