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Pius was a divided personality. A biographer wrote that "looking into [his] sparkling eyes and hearing the warm measure of his sentences, you felt how beautiful the world could be." He was famously accessible. He played billiards with the Swiss Guard and was the first modern Pontiff to grant audiences to commoners. He personally tended cholera victims, Gentile and Jewish, during an epidemic. He was truly pious. However, he was also excitable, oversensitive and bullying. Sometimes this expressed itself in wit. The benediction he bestowed upon a group of Protestant clergy was borrowed from the prayer over incense: "May you be blessed by Him in whose honor you shall be burnt." But often he employed the bludgeon: bishops who displeased him were ordered to kiss his foot. Later, members of the Vatican's saintmaking congregation seriously questioned whether he had lacked the essential Christian virtue of charity. (A related objection involved his sustaining of the death sentences of two anarchists. His successor reportedly remarked, "This fact alone would impede [his] canonization.") Biographer Martina describes a "siege complex": unable to understand liberals on political or psychological terms, he saw them as "unbelievers...[operating] a war machine against the church."
In 1864 this intemperance was writ very large indeed. The Vatican released the Syllabus of Errors, an index of don'ts that summed up Pius' response to modernity--by spitting in its face. The 80 delusions in question included separation of church and state, freedom of conscience, civil rights and rationalism. Error No. 80 was that "the Roman Pontiff can...reconcile himself to any compromise with progress, liberalism and modern civilization." Writes Wills: "The Syllabus dumbfounded the world." It still has its defenders. Theologian Don Gianni Baget Bozzo says Pius "simply refused to accept the tenets of liberalism in their entirety." It is true that the knee-jerk antireligious sentiment and materialism that irked Pius plague Western culture today. Still, the tract defined Catholicism in the negative--and placed good Catholics at odds with modern Western governance. Wills maintains that it "gave ammunition" to anti-Catholics "down to the time when John Kennedy was running for President and many felt no Catholic could be free--that the church was opposed to democracy in every way."
Many of the Syllabus' most egregious positions were repudiated 35 years ago at the Second Vatican Council. But Vatican II let stand what may be Pio Nono's most lasting achievement, the doctrine of papal infallibility. By 1869 most Catholics already believed that a Pope could, alone, define the word of God through church dogma. But no Pontiff had ever said so explicitly, and some bishops thought this might drive an even greater wedge between Catholicism and the rest of the world. Pius' war on the dissenters featured deception, obfuscation and railroading. When the Archbishop of Bologna complained that church tradition in Europe argued against infallibility, Pius roared, "I am tradition!" and reassigned the Archbishop to a monastery. (He came around.)