In Spoleto and afterwards in the more prestigious archdiocese of Imola, near Bologna, the “second city” of the Papal States, Mastai “would acquire a reputation . . . as fair-minded, principled, and good-natured, although he could be stern when necessary.” Nor was he blind to the faults of the local clergy, declaring that: “Far from . . . pastors of their flocks, they are more like wolves, a scandal and the ruin of their flocks.” By 1842 he had been made a cardinal and was beginning to earn a reputation far from Rome. In a letter from the Austrian ambassador in Rome to Prince Metternich in Vienna, he was described as a possible compromise choice to succeed Pope Gregory XVI, a dour, unpopular pontiff in many respects his opposite.

According to Kertzer:

Bishop of a minor town and lacking any experience in the intrigues of the Roman Curia – the central administration of the Holy See – Mastai was in some ways an odd choice to be pope. But he was respected for his good humor, his lack of pretension, and his success in winning popular favor in a portion of the Papal States known for its hostility to priestly rule . . . For the conservatives, it was his very weakness that made him so appealing. Given his inexperience in the world of Roman politics, they thought, he might, with proper care, be led along the right path.

History would prove them right and, when their first choice, hard-line Cardinal Lambruschini, failed to garner the necessary two-thirds majority, they threw their support to the supposedly moderate, but presumably malleable, Mastai. He was elected Pope on the fourth ballot and chose the name Pius IX. Thus it was that a mild-mannered, rather naive cleric became the spiritual leader of all the world’s Catholics and the temporal ruler of a semi-feudal domain in the heart of Italy, occupying 14 percent of its area, with a population of about three million people, mostly illiterate peasants and impoverished city laborers but with a growing and increasingly alienated educated class of wealthy professionals and merchants, their numbers swelled by dissident members of the aristocracy with revolutionary aspirations. Initial enthusiasm for Pius IX was even shared by a then-obscure Italian expatriate in Montevideo, Uruguay who sent an impassioned letter to the new prelate declaring that,

If these hands, used to fighting, would be acceptable to His Holiness, we most thankfully dedicate them to the service of him who deserves so well of the Church and of the fatherland. Joyful indeed shall we be if we may be allowed to shed our blood in defense of Pius IX’s work of redemption.

The writer of the letter was none other than Giuseppe Garibaldi, the impulsive, impressionable future warrior hero of Italian nationalism. Described by one contemporary as a man with “the heart of a lion and the mind of an ox,” his boundless enthusiasm for Pius IX would soon enough turn to blind hatred, to the point where he would ultimately advocate total abolition of the Holy See itself.

Things began well enough. The new Pope inaugurated a series of minor reforms, throwing open the gates to Rome’s Jewish ghetto—the last one in Western Europe—and declaring a political amnesty. In 1847 he set up city and state councils transferring some powers previously held by clerics into lay hands. Development schemes, including plans for the first railway in the Papal States, were launched, and “Pio Nono” even lent lip service to the nascent force of Italian nationalism. It didn’t take long for the bubble to burst. J.N.D. Kelley summed it up succinctly in the Oxford Dictionary of Popes:

The resulting outburst of popularity . . . along with his liberal reputation, subsided when he made it clear that, believing the temporal sovereignty of the Holy See indispensable to its spiritual independence, he had no intention of establishing a constitutional state . . . [w]hen he firmly refused (29 Apr. 1848) to join in the war to expel Austria from Italy his neutrality seemed a betrayal. In a crisis made worse by economic breakdown his prime minister, Count Rossi, was murdered on 15 November 1848, and Pius himself fled in disguise to Gaeta, north of Naples [nine days later].

EIGHTEEN FORTY-EIGHT was the year of violent revolution in Europe. Shortly after Pius IX fled Rome to Gaeta in the reactionary Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Roman mob, egged on by Italian nationalists from other parts of Italy, declared a Roman Republic in open defiance of Papal authority. It didn’t last long, but while it did, it became a Mecca for leading Italian nationalists like Giuseppe Mazzini, who served as its political mastermind, and Garibaldi who took command of its ragtag army of bourgeois militiamen, youthful volunteers and adventurers from all over Italy.

It was at this point, to borrow a phrase from Irving Kristol, that Pius IX became “a liberal mugged by reality.” While Austrian forces systematically crushed popular uprisings in Papal territory outside of Rome, a French expeditionary force dispatched by Louis Napoleon—soon to be Emperor Napoleon III but currently president of France’s Second Republic and eager to gain credit with conservative French Catholics by posing as the defender of the Papacy—besieged, shelled and then occupied Rome, crushing the short-lived Roman Republic.

Refusing to return to Rome from Gaeta until order—meaning the old order—was fully restored, it was at this point that Pius IX, generally thought to be so straightforward and naive, demonstrated an unexpected talent for stringing along his foreign backers. Meanwhile, his hardline clerical supporters re-established the corrupt Papal ancien régime with the backing of Austrian and French bayonets, and under the guidance of Pius’ éminence grise, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli. That more-than-worldly churchman, Kertzer informs us,

entered the prelature, but . . . was never ordained and could not say mass. . . . Pius IX, who made him a cardinal in 1847, at the age of forty-one, increasingly came to rely on Antonelli, his opposite in so many ways, and it would be Antonelli, as his secretary of state, who would mastermind the pope’s turn to Austria and reaction.

How much Pius IX deliberately played “good cop” to Cardinal Antonelli’s “bad cop,” or how much the Pope was a weak naif manipulated by a cynical, clerical Machiavelli, we may never know, but the great French novelist, Victor Hugo—a contemporary of both men—seemed to take the latter of the two views, writing that,

Pope Pius IX is simple, sweet, timid, fearful, slow in his movements, negligent about his person . . . one would say a country priest. Beside him, Antonelli, in his red stockings, with his look of a diplomat and the eyebrows of a spy, resembles nothing so much as an unsavory bodyguard.

Between the two of them, they successfully managed to wear down all French efforts to commit the Holy See to constitutional reform even as they stayed in power mainly due to the permanent French garrison installed by the Second Republic and maintained by the Second Empire. The Papal dungeons were refilled with political prisoners, some of whom were executed. The corrupt, clerically-run administration was restored, complete with informers, and the Pope exhorted the faithful throughout Europe to loyally submit to their divinely-ordained sovereigns as the 1848 wave of revolution receded and the old order was once again restored throughout most of the continent. Until 1861, the Papal States survived in a kind of militarily-imposed stasis. Luigi Carlo Farini, a physician, historian and one of the first prime ministers of a united Italy itemized the reaction’s results as of 1850:

Both education and charity governed and administered by the clergy. Clerical police and French police in Rome, clerical police and Austrian police in the provinces. Censorship of the press administered . . . not by any law, but by the whim of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, the bishops, the police . . . All the old civil, communal, ecclesiastical, mixed, and exceptional tribunals restored . . . The Jesuits resurgent and more powerful . . . The prisons full.

At the time, the Pope and his Secretary of State seemed far more concerned about securing outside financing than winning the hearts and minds of their disaffected subjects. Ironically, when financial succor came it was from, of all places, the House of Rothschild. The same Pope who had reversed his earlier act of tolerance and “ordered the Jews of the Papal States back into their ghettos, now depended on the goodwill of Europe’s most prominent Jews to be able to return to his capital.” The loan was forthcoming and a kind of grim normalcy settled in. But in the ensuing decade, as the Austrians were driven out of much of Italy and King Victor Emmanuel’s modern Piedmontese army swept down from the north and Garibaldi’s volunteers overran the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south, all that survived of the Papal States was the city of Rome and its environs, protected by its French garrison. Visiting Rome in early 1869, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow