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Yet some also think his narrowness crippled his church. Pius reigned just as the old order in the West was giving way to new notions of God, the state and the citizen. His response--a wholesale rejection of modernity--dominated Catholicism for almost a century after his death and continues to color its present. A true reactionary who saw the secular state, and indeed civil rights, as satanic manifestations, he made it difficult for generations of believers to claim intellectual independence or integrity. Says journalist-historian Garry Wills, who savages Pius in his best seller Papal Sins: "He was a disaster, and his influence has been bad ever since. If you beatify him now, there will be a whitewashing of him, which will involve the church in more dishonesty." Pius is the heavy in the well-reviewed The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, by Brown University historian David Kertzer, which is being adapted for Broadway by playwright Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy). Even the author of the definitive, three-volume Pius biography, Jesuit historian Giacomo Martina, does not favor his subject for sainthood.
The Vatican has long been aware of Pius' explosiveness as a candidate for canonization. As Kenneth Woodward reports in his book Making Saints, the first time Pius' cause was formally addressed, every firsthand witness criticized his papacy's conduct. His beatification was repeatedly postponed, most recently in the 1980s, when churchmen apparently deemed it not to be "opportune." That seems to have changed. It will be interesting to see whether the upcoming ceremony will end the debate or spark an even more thorough public airing of this larger-than-life Pope's remarkable career.
Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti was born at a disadvantage. The ninth child of a minor count in the town of Senigallia, he applied early to join the Pope's Noble Guards. They rejected him: guards did not have epilepsy. A biographer quoted him complaining that because of his condition, he "could not concentrate on a subject for any length of time without having to worry about his ideas getting terribly confused." He was ordained in 1819 on condition that another priest always be present when he celebrated Mass. By 1827 he was Archbishop of Spoleto.
The position plunged him into a supremely complicated religious and political game. Throughout Europe the old order of divinely sanctioned kingdoms was battling models of popular sovereignty and citizenship inspired by the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the adolescent U.S. The Italian peninsula was a crux of this struggle. The Pope himself was a monarch, ruler of the states girdling the boot approximately from Naples to Venice, playing survival politics amid what historian Kertzer describes as "a patchwork of duchies, grand duchy, Bourbon and Savoyard kingdoms [and] Austrian outposts." Would-be nation builders plotted Italy's unification from the south and the north. Revolutionaries, writes Kertzer, goggled across papal borders at those who regarded "the notions that people should be free to think what it pleased them to think [as] heretical."