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The Pope personally threatened him with dismissal if he did not back infallibility, had Vatican police search his quarters, and ordered him confined. The archbishop fled instead.
Pius, meanwhile, was putting strong pressure on other church leaders in private audiences. In one remarkable council speech, he compared opposition bishops to Pontius Pilate condemning Jesus, and pleaded, "My children, do not leave me. Cleave to me and follow me. Unite with the representative of Christ."
A number of contemporaries of Pius, including the French bishop who was dean of the Sorbonne, wrote that the Pope was mad. Hasler deals with the subject more delicately: "Many aspects of his personality suggest that he was no longer sane." Hasler discovered reports that Pius denounced opponents of infallibility variously as "donkeys," "betrayers" and "sick in the head." Once, in a screaming fit of anger, he put his foot on the head of a kneeling Cardinal, then lifted the man by his ears. Other papal outbursts supposedly caused four churchmen to die of heart failure. Hasler believes that epilepsy might have been part of the problem. Though most historians think Pius outgrew this youthful malady, Hasler found indications that his illness was lifelong.
The triumphant "infallibilists" destroyed much Vatican I documentation long ago, and most of what remains was secret until Pope Paul opened the archives on Pius IX in 1970. Even so, Hasler says he had to become a "detective." Though his is the first book based on the long-sealed archives, the church denied him access to much Pius material.
So far, Vatican spokesmen have not commented on Hasler's book. The German bishops, however, swiftly publicized a scathing review by a conservative historian who dismissed it as old stuff, biased and either "simply bad or slyly perfidious." A more friendly opinion, not surprisingly, comes from Father Hans Küng of the University of Tubingen, who wrote a celebrated attack on infallibility seven years ago. Hasler's book, he says, "only confirms that the inquiry into infallibility is not yet closed." The church, Küng asserts, "cannot avoid the issue."