Pius VIII. (Cardinal Castiglione), be came Pope in succession to Leo XII., in 1829. After a short pontificate of one year, he died in 1830.
Pius IX. (Giovanni Mario Mastai Fer retti) ; born in Sinigaglia, May 13, 1792; was intended for the army, but resolved to devote himself to the Church. For several years attended to pastoral duties and was nominated by Pius VII. on a mission to the government of Chile. On his return to Rome he was appointed by Leo XII. to one of the most important of the ecclesiastico-civil departments of administration. In 1836 he was sent as apostolic nuncio to Naples, while the cholera was raging there, and his name is still revered by the poorer inhabitants of that city, in gratitude for his disin terested efforts to alleviate their suffer ings. In 1840 he was created Cardinal Archbishop of Imola, in the Romagna, where much political disaffection existed; He ruled this diocese with so much zeal and self-denial, and displayed such liber ality of sentiment, that he soon gained the affections of the people, and restored peace and tranquility to the district. Pope Gregory XVI. died June 1, 1846.
and Cardinal Ferretti was elected to the papacy under the name of Pius IX., June 16. The new Pope at first acquired much popularity by favoring the hopes and wishes of the people for the reform of the abuses of the government. But the French Revolution of 1848 gave a much more powerful impulse to the enthusiasm, not only of the Italian pa triots, but of the friends of liberal in stitutions all over Europe. These sweep ing changes the Pope was not prepared to support, and from that moment his popularity began to decline. The popu lar disaffection was greatly increased on his taking for his minister Count Rossi, one of the most aristocratic and unpopular men in Rome. Count Rossi was assassinated Nov. 15, and Pius him self, a few days later, escaped from Rome in disguise, and arrived safely in Gaeta in the Neapolitan territory. He sent to Rome an ordonnance, I ov. 27, de claring void all the acts of the govern ment, which he superseded by a state commission. This document the Roman
chambers treated with contempt, ap pointed a provisional government, and set about improving the victory they had achieved. The Pope remained nearly a year and a half at Gaeta and Portici, an object of sympathy as the head of the Roman Catholic Church. During his absence, Rome, which was in the possession of the native troops under Garibaldi, was besieged, and at last tak en by storm by the French army under General Oudinot. The Pope left Portici, April 4, 1850, escorted by Neapolitan and French dragoons, accompanied by the king of Naples, and re-entered Rome April 12, amid the thunder of French cannon. His chief ecclesiastical acts are the formal definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, in December, 1854; the famous encycli cal of December, 1844, which was pro voked by the Franco-Italian convention, providing for the withdrawal of the French troops from Rome—an act which was, however, practically annulled by the return of the French forces in 1867, in consequence of an attempt at invasion by Garibaldi; and the bull summoning the Ecumenical Council of 1869-1870, which promulgated the doctrine of papal infallibility. In September, 1870, the French troops were withdrawn from Rome, and in October the States of the Church were annexed to the kingdom of Italy, thus ending the temporal power of the Popes. He died Feb. 7, 1878.
Pius X. Cardinal Giussepe Sarto, Pa triarch of Venice, was chosen by the Pa pal Conclave to succeed Leo XIII., Aug. 4, The election was universally approved, and on Aug. 9, the Patriarch was crowned at St. Peter's assuming the title Pius X. He was born in Italy in 1835, of peasant family. Priest, 1858; bishop, 1866; cardinal, 1893. In 1907 in his encyclical he inveighed against "modernism." He raised a great sum of money for the victims of the earthquake in that year. In 1910 he issued a decree debarring the clergy from engaging in the administration of social organizations. He died in 1914.