Et cetera: Signs of the times
wing, paying for his education. International protests followed. Perhaps more than any other, this event, in which theological claims trumped parental rights, rallied the world against the...
...The truth is that harsh consequences followed for individuals, for the church itself, and for humanity, especially in continental Europe...
...That defense is historically and morally flawed...
...Furthermore, it is also worth remembering that the harshest outbreaks of anticlericalism came after, not before, Pius's denunciations...
...Signs o f the times [] Last year, the Archdiocese of Chicago ran a multimedia campaign to promote vocations to the priesthood...
...Pius IX's failure to understand the democratic movement of his time was certainly a tragedy...
...Many faithful Catholics were condemned...
...Pio Nono's cause for beatification has been lingering for decades, held back by reasonable doubts and objections (Kenneth Woodward devotes a chapter in Making Saints, Simon and Schuster, 1996, to these failed efforts...
...Who better demonstrates this reality than John Paul II, the pope about to beatify Pius...
...It was consistent with the whole tenor of Pius IX's papacy: doctrinaire positions, fearfully and stubbornly hewed to, trumped even common-sense intuitions and family feeling...
...But these perceptions did not await the twentieth century...
...Perhaps more than any other, this event, in which theological claims trumped parental rights, rallied the world against the continued temporal power of the pope...
...Members of the Women's Ordination Conference discerned a different sign of the times...
...The easy symmetry of beatifying these two popes on the same day may appeal to a mentality habitually working to tidy up and correct history, but there are limits to what the Vatican can do with this kind of manipulation...
...So why a Blessed Pio Nono now...
...Too little has been made of the responsibility of leaders like Pius IX and their reactionary allies for the incubation of antiliberal and antidemocratic attitudes that made it impossible for European Catholics to forge alliances with secular moderates, liberals, and democratic socialists that might have stemmed the tide of fascism and totalitarianism that eventually drowned the twentieth century in bloodshed...
...They argue that his fierce condemnations of virtually every idea then under discussion in European political and intellectual life and his commitment to preserving the temporal power of the papacy in the face of Italian national aspirations were courageous and appropriate responses to the anticlerical, antireligious liberalism of the time--and that, in any case, these policies do not detract from his personal holiness...
...Still, there is an obvious explanation...
...The copy of one of its billboard ads called for a "few good men...
...History, it is said, plays out first as tragedy and then as farce...
...The pope of Vatican II cannot be promoted without matching him with the pope of Vatican I. The idea that Vatican II and all it represents is not just a development of Vatican I and all it represents, but, in important respects, a corrective is unpalatable in present-day Rome...
...Today the pope's temporal power is seen for what it was, an unwieldy burden, hampering the autonomy and spiritual power of the papacy...
...Even his defenders admit that this warfare was costly...
...It also reminds us that the Mortara case was not an anomaly...
...Much has been made of Pius XI's and Pins XII's cooperation with fascism during the 1920s and '30s...
...Morally, Pius's defenders separate the public from the private person in a way that the thrust of recent Catholic teaching has tried to counter...
...It is as though the pope's personal good deeds counted, but his institutional stewardship was not germane...
...Defenders of Pio Nono (the Italian by which he was known and which gave birth to obvious puns) insist that he was a kindly and charming man, which is perfectly true, as long as one adds he could also be a brutal and irascible leader...
...Clergy and laity alike were disheartened by the papacy's refusal to respond for decades to industrialism and the needs of a new working class, to democracy and a bettereducated citizenry, and to the marginalizafion of the church...
...The "Syllabus of Errors," it is worth remembering, was aimed at least as much at liberalminded Catholics as secularizing liberals...
...Another sported the invitation: "If you're waiting for a sign from God, this is it...
...Commonweal 7 August 11, 2000...
...Consider the priesthood...
...The Mortara scandal should not be misunderstood as a kind of preview of the debate about Pius XII and the Holocaust...
...David I. Kertzer tells the full story in The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, Knopf, 1997...
...The effort to exalt that error can only be regarded as farce...
...They dug into their pocketbooks and sponsored the sister billboard below...
...Instead, it casts doubt on the integrity of the process by which Pius IX's cause for beatification has been handled, since Vatican sources have apparently indicated that the whole incident was never really addressed in their inquiry...
...Loyal Catholics repeatedly proposed thoughtful and realistic alternatives to the war of church and modernity in Pius's day, and for their pains they lived under a shadow of suspicion...
...The Vatican doesn't say, pretending that the procedure for designating saints takes place free of external pressures and orders...
...Historically, it is untrue that Pius IX had no alternative but all-out warfare with the rising forces of religious tolerance, liberal constitutionalism, and national unification...
...The splendid absurdity of the coming event can be grasped when we recognize that John XXIII and John Paul II would both have been condemned for their ideas and their words had they expressed them when Pius IX was in power...
...The alliances the papacy maintained with conservative and reactionary forces hindered the emergence of liberal democratic governments in much of Europe...
Vol. 127 • August 2000 • No. 14
