Blessed Pope Pius IX (1792-1878)

The Longest Pontificate in History

Pius IX reigned for thirty-one years, seven months, and twenty-two days, from 16 June 1846 to 7 February 1878^[16]: this is, in verified terms, the longest pontificate in the history of the papacy, the only one to exceed the twenty-five jubilee years that Roman tradition had attributed to Saint Peter alone - hence the saying, "the years of Peter shall not be seen again."^[17][18] Pius IX was the first to pass them, celebrating his papal jubilee in 1871 and then his thirtieth anniversary in 1876.^[19]

That exceptional duration gave him time to imprint his mark on the entire Church: he created 123 cardinals in twenty-three consistories^[20], canonized fifty-two saints^[21], beatified two hundred and twenty-two servants of God^[22], proclaimed three new Doctors of the Church^[23], and published thirty-eight encyclicals^[24]. No pope had governed so long; none had watched his world give way so completely beneath his feet.

From "Liberal Pope" to "Intransigent Pope"

The figure of Pius IX sums up the nineteenth-century divorce between the Church and liberal revolution. Elected in the hope of a Catholicism reconciled with modern liberties, he embodied for two years the dream of a "neo-Guelph" Catholic liberalism — the idea, carried by thinkers such as Vincenzo Gioberti, of an Italy unified under the moral presidency of the pope.^[25] Then the revolution of 1848 showed him that the forces he had encouraged were aiming, beyond reforms, at the end of papal sovereignty itself and Italian unity under Turin.

Out of this trauma emerged the Pius IX remembered by history: the pope who, in the Syllabus of 1864, rejected the idea that "the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile and adapt himself to progress, liberalism and modern civilization."^[26] This refusal was not political nostalgia: it was the assertion that the Church cannot be absorbed by the State or submit revealed truth to the spirit of the age. The whole second half of his reign unfolds this line, up to the First Vatican Council.

The Pope Who Lost Temporal Power

Finally, Pius IX is the pope under whom the temporal power of the popes, more than eleven centuries old, collapsed. When the army of the Kingdom of Italy broke through at the Porta Pia on 20 September 1870, the Papal States disappeared and Rome became the capital of unified Italy.^[27] Pius IX rejected the Law of Guarantees offered by the new regime, enclosed himself in the Vatican, and bequeathed to his successors the Roman Question - resolved only in 1929 by the Lateran Accords.^[28]

This defeat, experienced as a martyrdom, paradoxically transformed the papacy. Stripped of its legions, the pope gained in moral and spiritual authority what he lost in territory. The "prisoner of the Vatican" became a universal figure of conscience, and the council that defined his infallibility sealed, at the very moment he lost Rome, the full recognition of his spiritual primacy.^[29]

Ecclesial and Biographical Notices

The official list of the Holy See places Mastai-Ferretti among the sovereign pontiffs under the name Pius IX, with a pontificate from 16 June 1846 to 7 February 1878.^[30] The standard English-language synthesis remains Michael Ott's article in the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia, which retraces his career, election, the 1848 revolution, the restoration, and the struggle against Italian unity.^[31] The Encyclopaedia Britannica confirms the chronology and emphasizes the shift from the "liberal pope" to doctrinal firmness.^[32]

Modern historiography is dominated by Giacomo Martina's major biography, Pio IX (Gregorian University, three volumes, 1974-1990), long regarded as the most complete scientific study, and by Frank J. Coppa's English synthesis, Pope Pius IX: Crusader in a Secular Age (1979).^[33][34] For the person of the pope and his spirituality, the positio for the beatification cause, assembled throughout the twentieth century, gathers testimonies and archival documents.^[35]

Sources for the Roman Question and Beatification

The doctrinal acts are preserved and accessible: the bull Ineffabilis Deus (8 December 1854), the encyclical Quanta cura and the Syllabus (8 December 1864), the dogmatic constitution Pastor aeternus (18 July 1870), and the encyclical Etsi multa against the Kulturkampf (21 November 1873).^{[36][37][38][39]} For the fall of temporal power, the Italian Law of Guarantees of 13 May 1871 and its rejection by the pope are documented in the diplomatic correspondence of the period.^[40]

Finally, the beatification homily delivered by John Paul II on 3 September 2000 is the magisterial source that fixes the spiritual meaning of the pontificate, presenting Pius IX as "an example of unconditional adherence to the immutable deposit of revealed truths."^[41]

A Noble Birth in Senigallia

Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti was born at Senigallia, an Adriatic port in the papal Marche, on 13 May 1792, the ninth child of Count Girolamo Mastai-Ferretti and Countess Caterina Solazzi.^[42][43] The family belonged to the small provincial nobility, deeply attached to the Apostolic See. At baptism he received a long series of names - Giovanni Maria Battista Pietro Pellegrino Isidoro - according to the usage of Italian noble families.^[44]

Educated by the Piarists at the College of Saint Michael in Volterra, the young Mastai received there a Marian devotion that would never leave him and that would one day shine forth in the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception.^[45]

Epilepsy and a Thwarted Vocation

Mastai-Ferretti's vocation almost broke against illness. As an adolescent, he suffered from epileptic seizures that initially barred him from an ecclesiastical career: Pius VII, when petitioned, refused to admit him to the papal noble guard because of these attacks.^[46][47] The young man turned to prayer and believed he obtained lasting improvement during a pilgrimage to Loreto.

With his health restored, he was ordained priest on 10 April 1819, with the dispensation that he celebrate Mass in the presence of another priest as a precaution - a measure soon abandoned in practice.^[48] This first trial marked the future pope: beneath the appearances of his office, he retained the sense of a fragile man carried by Providence.

From Spoleto to Imola: the Pastoral Bishop

The young priest first distinguished himself by charity. From 1823 to 1825, he accompanied as auditor the apostolic mission to Chile and Peru, his first experience of a world beyond Europe.^[49] Back in Rome, he directed the San Michele hospice, a large charitable institution for children and the elderly.

Appointed Archbishop of Spoleto in 1827, he showed moderation during the revolutionary disturbances of 1831, obtaining clemency for insurgents and organizing relief after an earthquake.^[50] Transferred to the see of Imola in 1832, in the turbulent Legations, he spent fourteen years in intense pastoral work - visits, catechesis, charity - which earned him a reputation as an open and benevolent bishop. Gregory XVI created him cardinal in pectore — in secret, without public announcement of the name — on 23 December 1839, published on 14 December 1840.^[51][52]

The Conclave of 1846

After the death of Gregory XVI on 1 June 1846, a brief but decisive conclave opened. Two lines faced one another: the intransigent zelante line, embodied by Cardinal Luigi Lambruschini, secretary of state of the deceased pope, and a moderate opening to the reforms demanded by Italian opinion. Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti, reputed to be kindly and liberal in temperament, appeared as the man of conciliation.^[53]

He was elected on 16 June 1846, on the fourth ballot, and took the name Pius IX in memory of Pius VII, whom he venerated. The rumor of an Austrian veto against Lambruschini, arriving too late, circulated for a long time without decisive proof.^[54] Crowned on 21 June 1846, the new pope, aged fifty-four, was greeted by an unprecedented wave of enthusiasm: all Italy thought it saw in him the pope of the future.

The Amnesty of July 1846

Pius IX's first gesture electrified the peninsula. On 16 July 1846, less than a month after his election, he proclaimed a general amnesty for political prisoners and exiles in the Papal States - more than a thousand people were pardoned.^[55][56] The effect was immediate and immense: cities were illuminated, hymns to Pio Nono were sung, and the pope became, in the words of historians, "the most popular man in the Italian peninsula."^[57]

The Catholic Encyclopedia, however, notes the naivety of the gesture: it did not occur to the pope "that many of the pardoned political offenders would use their liberty to further their revolutionary ideas."^[58] The amnesty that made him an idol unknowingly prepared the revolution that would drive him out.

Reforms and National Enthusiasm

The reforms followed one another: creation of an advisory Council of State, a civic guard, relaxation of censorship and relative freedom of the press, a municipal council for Rome, and the development of railways and the telegraph, held back under Gregory XVI — the phrase attributed to him, "roads to hell," being a legend without documentary attestation (see the dossier Gregory XVI).^[59][60] For Italian patriots, the reforming pope seemed capable of leading the national movement against Austria.

"Blessed be the great God, whose right hand has drawn from the treasury of his gifts a Pius to give to our age." — patriotic verses sung in honor of Pio Nono in 1847^[61]

This enthusiasm rested on a misunderstanding. Pius IX wanted to reform the administration of his States and improve the condition of his subjects; liberals and nationalists expected him to bless war against Catholic Austria and Italian unity under a constitutional monarchy. The two projects were opposed at their root.

The Fundamental Statute of 1848

Pressure rose with the revolutionary wave that set Europe ablaze in the spring of 1848. On 14 March 1848, Pius IX granted the Papal States a Fundamental Statute, a genuine constitution with two chambers and a lay government, while reserving to the Sacred College a right of veto in spiritual matters.^[62] For a theocratic state, the concession was considerable.

But it could not satisfy revolutionaries who wanted national war and the end of clerical government. The trap closed: having become the head of a constitutional state, the pope was summoned to march with revolutionary Italy against the Catholic Habsburg Empire.

The Allocution of 29 April 1848

The breaking point was the war against Austria. When the Milan uprising and the Piedmontese war drew part of the papal troops northward, Pius IX understood that they wanted to make the head of Christendom a belligerent in a fratricidal war between Catholic nations. On 29 April 1848, in a famous consistorial allocution, he solemnly declared that, as common father of all the faithful, he could not declare war on Catholic Austria.^[63][64]

That allocution dispelled at once the mirage of the national pope. In the eyes of the patriots, Pius IX had betrayed the Italian cause; his popularity collapsed as quickly as it had risen. Revolutionary Rome slid into agitation.

The Assassination of Pellegrino Rossi

To govern in the storm, Pius IX called to the head of the ministry a statesman of the first rank, Pellegrino Rossi, a jurist and economist rallied to Catholicism, who favored ordered modernization. His firmness earned him the hatred of extremist factions. On 15 November 1848, as he was going to the opening of the chambers at the Palace of the Chancellery, Rossi was assassinated by a knife thrust to the throat, before a crowd that made no move to defend him.^[65][66]

The murder unleashed the riot. The next day, 16 November, insurgents besieged the Quirinal Palace, the pope's residence, killed one of his prelates, and turned their rifles toward the papal windows. Pius IX was now a prisoner in his own palace.

The Disguised Flight to Gaeta

On 24 November 1848, with the help of the French and Bavarian ambassadors, Pius IX escaped from the Quirinal disguised as an ordinary priest and, in a nocturnal flight, reached Neapolitan territory.^[67][68] He took refuge at Gaeta, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where part of the cardinals joined him. The capital of Christendom was in the hands of revolution.

"In human affairs, one must be content to do the best one can, and for the rest abandon oneself to Providence." — Pius IX, cited by John Paul II in the beatification homily of 3 September 2000^[69]

This saying, later taken up by John Paul II, sums up the interior attitude of the exiled pope: politically powerless, he abandoned himself to God. It was at Gaeta, in trial, that his decision matured to consult the worldwide episcopate on the definition of the Immaculate Conception.^[70]

The Roman Republic

In Rome, the revolutionary assembly abolished temporal power and proclaimed, on 9 February 1849, the Roman Republic, soon governed by a triumvirate dominated by Giuseppe Mazzini, with the military support of Garibaldi.^[71][72] From Gaeta, Pius IX excommunicated the usurpers and appealed to the Catholic powers for the restoration of his sovereignty.

The Roman Republic, which secularized Church property and overturned the old order, lasted only a few months. Its existence was enough to convince Pius IX that revolutionary liberalism aimed, under cover of reform, at the annihilation of the Church within the State.

French Troops and General Oudinot

Four Catholic powers - France, Austria, Spain, and Naples - answered the pope's appeal. In the end, it was the French expeditionary corps of General Oudinot, sent by the Second Republic of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, that decided the matter. After a difficult siege against Garibaldi's defenders, Rome fell on 3 July 1849 and the Roman Republic collapsed.^[73][74]

A paradox thus inaugurated the second part of the reign: it was a republic, France, that restored the pope's temporal power, and a French garrison that would protect Rome until 1870. The fate of the papacy now depended on the policy of Napoleon III.

The Return to Rome in 1850

Pius IX did not return immediately. He waited until order was fully restored and came back to Rome only on 12 April 1850, after sixteen months of exile.^[75][76] The man who returned was no longer the reforming pope of 1846: according to the phrase of the Catholic Encyclopedia, he returned "no longer a political liberal."^[77]

Marking the rupture symbolically, he left the Quirinal Palace, scene of the 1848 uprising, and henceforth fixed his residence in the Vatican.^[78] The great lesson he drew from the ordeal was doctrinal as much as political: the Church cannot make a pact with the principles that armed the revolution against her.

Cardinal Antonelli and the Government of the States

Temporal government was entrusted to Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, secretary of state from 1848 until his death in 1876, a skillful diplomat and resolute conservative.^[79] Antonelli concentrated civil authority and pursued a rigid policy of defending papal sovereignty, at the cost of an administration often judged immobile and of postponed reforms.

This conservative restoration fed the hostility of European liberals, who made the Papal States the symbol of political backwardness. The contrast was striking between the doctrinal firmness of the reign and the growing fragility of its temporal base.

The Mortara Affair (1858)

No episode damaged the image of Pius IX in Europe more than the Mortara affair. On 23 June 1858, the papal police removed from Bologna Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old Jewish child, on the grounds that a Christian servant had secretly baptized him while he was gravely ill.^[80][81] According to canon law and the law of the Papal States, a baptized person could not be raised in Judaism: the child was taken from his parents and entrusted to the Church.

The affair provoked international indignation, from liberals and Jews alike, and gave opponents of temporal power a powerful propaganda argument.^[82] Pius IX, attached to the child whom he had raised under his protection, never yielded; Edgardo Mortara became a priest and defended the pope's decision all his life. The episode remains a stumbling block in the beatification dossier: it illustrates the frontal collision between the confessional law of a dying theocratic state and modern sensitivity to the rights of the family and of conscience. But the dossier does not end with the indignation of 1858: Edgardo himself, grown to adulthood, freely chose to remain Catholic, was ordained priest, and declared himself grateful and happy with his life in the Church.^[83] Conducted in full knowledge of this episode — the cause was long slowed by this controversy — the beatification succeeded under John Paul II on 3 September 2000: that is the fact.^[84] To see in it the act of a pope bound by the canon law of his time, according to which a baptized child had to receive a Catholic education, and not a personal cruelty, is the interpretation of the author of the present article: neither the Church nor the homily of John Paul II formulates any thesis on the Mortara affair.

The pontificate of Pius IX is marked by three major doctrinal acts, each of which has its own specialized Ignispedia article. Their meaning for the reign is recalled here without reopening the detailed treatment given elsewhere.

The Immaculate Conception (1854)

On 8 December 1854, by the bull Ineffabilis Deus, Pius IX defined as a dogma of faith that the Virgin Mary had been, "from the first instant of her conception, preserved immune from all stain of original sin."^[85] It was the first dogma defined by a pope on his own authority, after consultation of the whole episcopate - a foreshadowing of the definition of infallibility sixteen years later. Four years afterward, at Lourdes, the apparition would present herself to Bernadette as "the Immaculate Conception", confirming the Roman definition in Catholic eyes.

Detailed article: The dogma of the Immaculate Conception (1854)

Quanta cura and the Syllabus (1864)

On 8 December 1864, exactly ten years after the Immaculate Conception, Pius IX published the encyclical Quanta cura, accompanied by a Syllabus listing eighty modern errors: pantheism, rationalism, indifferentism, socialism, communism, separation of Church and State, and the claim of the State to monopolize education.^[86][87] The last article, which condemned the idea of a reconciliation between the pope and "progress, liberalism, and modern civilization," caused scandal and was often caricatured outside its technical meaning.

Detailed article: The Syllabus of Pius IX (1864)

The First Vatican Council and Infallibility (1869-1870)

Convoked by the bull Aeterni Patris of 29 June 1868, the First Vatican Council opened on 8 December 1869 before some seven hundred Fathers. On 18 July 1870, the constitution Pastor aeternus defined the primacy of jurisdiction of the pope and his infallibility when he teaches ex cathedra on faith and morals.^[88] The Franco-Prussian War broke out the next day; the withdrawal of the French garrison sealed Rome's fate, and the council, interrupted, would never be formally closed.

Detailed articles: The First Vatican Council (1869-1870) and Papal infallibility

Castelfidardo and the Loss of the Marche

Italian unity was built at the expense of the Papal States. After the annexation of Romagna in 1859-1860, Piedmontese troops invaded the Marche and Umbria. On 18 September 1860, the small papal army gathered by the French general de Lamoriciere - including the Papal Zouaves, Catholic volunteers from all over Europe - was crushed at Castelfidardo.^[89][90] The pope retained only Latium around Rome, protected by the French garrison.

Pius IX answered the annexations with solemn protests and the excommunication of the despoilers, without being able to prevent anything. Temporal power was reduced year by year to the city of Rome alone and its immediate surroundings.

The Capture of Rome (20 September 1870)

The final trial came with the fall of Napoleon III. The French defeat at Sedan on 2 September 1870 deprived Rome of its protection: the French garrison withdrew. On 20 September 1870, the army of the Kingdom of Italy opened a breach in the wall near the Porta Pia and entered Rome; Pius IX ordered a purely symbolic resistance to make clear that he yielded to force.^[91][92] A plebiscite ratified the annexation, and Rome became the capital of Italy.

Detailed article: The capture of Rome in 1870

Thus ended eleven centuries of temporal power of the popes, opened by the donation of Pepin the Short in the eighth century. For Pius IX, the loss was not merely political: it called into question the very freedom of the Apostolic See, which he believed was guaranteed by its territorial independence.

The Law of Guarantees and the "Non possumus"

The new Italian State tried to organize coexistence. The Law of Guarantees of 13 May 1871 recognized the inviolability of the pope's person, sovereign honors, free use of the Vatican, the Lateran, and Castel Gandolfo, and an annual endowment of more than three million lire.^[93][94] But this law was a unilateral act of the Italian State, revocable, not a treaty recognizing true sovereignty.

Pius IX rejected it entirely, refused the endowment, and opposed every negotiation with his famous "non possumus" - "we cannot": the pope cannot renounce rights that do not belong to him personally but to the universal Church.^[95] This refusal founded the Roman Question, which would poison relations between Italy and the Holy See until the Lateran Accords of 1929.

The "Prisoner of the Vatican"

From 1870 onward, Pius IX considered himself "a prisoner in the Vatican" and never crossed the threshold of the palace again, refusing to appear in a Rome he regarded as occupied.^[96] His successors would maintain this attitude until Pius XI. By the encyclical Respicientes ea omnia of 1 November 1870, the pope excommunicated all those who had ordered or carried out the spoliation of Rome — without naming King Victor Emmanuel II in person^[97] — and forbade Italian Catholics, through the formula non expedit ("it is not expedient" to take part), to take part in the political life of the new kingdom.

Far from weakening the papacy, this voluntary captivity increased its aura. Deprived of his States, the pope became a moral witness whose spiritual authority, now detached from any territorial interest, radiated over the whole Catholic world.

According to the reproduction published by the author himself, Pius IX addressed on 17 May 1877 to Constantin James a brief of encouragement for his work Du darwinisme ou l'homme-singe (1877). In it the pope describes Darwinism as a "tissue of fables" to which "alienation from God and the leaning toward materialism" seek support, and judges that such "fancies," because they "borrow the mask of science," must be "refuted by true science"^[98]. In it he congratulates the author for having, by a book judged so opportune, deserved well of religion as of his brethren, and concludes with the apostolic blessing. This brief, an encouragement addressed to an author and not a dogmatic definition on evolution, attests the attitude of Pius IX toward Darwinism^[99].

Bismarck's Kulturkampf

In the last years of his reign, Pius IX faced the great anti-Catholic offensive of the unified German Empire. From 1871 onward, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck launched the Kulturkampf ("struggle for civilization"): the May Laws of 1873 subjected clerical formation to the State, expelled the Jesuits, suppressed dioceses, and imprisoned recalcitrant bishops and priests.^[100][101]

Pius IX responded with the encyclical Etsi multa of 21 November 1873, denouncing the persecution of the Church in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy.^[102] The Kulturkampf would indeed fail under Leo XIII, who negotiated the gradual repeal of the May Laws.

The Restoration of Catholic Hierarchies

While Latin Europe was becoming secularized, Pius IX extended the Church in the English-speaking and missionary world. On 29 September 1850, by the bull Universalis Ecclesiae, he restored the Catholic hierarchy in England, with an archbishopric of Westminster and twelve dioceses - a gesture that provoked a fierce Protestant reaction but marked the renewal of English Catholicism.^[103] In 1853, he similarly restored the hierarchy in the Netherlands.

He multiplied concordats - Spain (1851), Austria (1855), and various Latin American states - and supported missionary expansion in Asia, Africa, and Oceania. The Church that lost Rome gained the world: under Pius IX the globalization of Catholicism that would characterize the following century began to take shape.

A Doctor and Devotee of the Universal Church

The pope crowned this doctrinal zeal with acts of piety on the scale of the whole Church. On 23 September 1856, he extended the feast of the Sacred Heart to the entire Church; on 8 December 1870, in the midst of upheaval, he proclaimed Saint Joseph patron of the universal Church.^[104][105] He proclaimed three new Doctors of the Church: Saint Hilary of Poitiers (1851), Saint Alphonsus Liguori (1871), and Saint Francis de Sales (1877).^[106]

These decisions, taken at the very moment when the pope was losing his States, reveal his deep conviction: the true power of the See of Peter is not territorial but spiritual, and it is through doctrine, worship, and holiness that the Church passes through revolutions.

Marian Devotion as the Thread of a Life

If one trait unifies Mastai-Ferretti's existence, it is devotion to the Virgin Mary, received at the College of Volterra, unfolded in his preaching as bishop, and sealed in the definition of the Immaculate Conception.^[107] The proclamation of 1854 was not the abstract act of a jurist: it was the culmination of a personal piety that made the Mother of God the refuge of the pope in all his trials.

"He was an example of unconditional adherence to the immutable deposit of revealed truths." — Saint John Paul II, beatification homily for Pius IX, 3 September 2000^[108]

The Humor of Pio Nono

Pius IX left the memory of a man of quick wit and famous humor, which did not abandon him in defeat or captivity. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes his "charity toward the poor, kindness of heart, and wit," which made him deeply lovable.^[109]

This mixture of doctrinal gravity and personal cheerfulness explains the lasting attachment of the faithful to Pio Nono. Behind the intransigent pope of the documents, witnesses knew a warm, accessible man, capable of joking about his own misfortune.

Serenity in Trial

The pontificate of Pius IX was, in John Paul II's words, "truly not easy": the pope "had to suffer much in carrying out his mission."^[110] Loved and then hated, praised and then slandered, stripped of his States and mocked by the liberal press, he drew from abandonment to Providence a peace his adversaries did not understand.

"He was deeply loved, but also hated and slandered. Yet precisely in the midst of these contradictions the light of his virtues shone more brightly." — Saint John Paul II, beatification homily, 3 September 2000^[111]

It was this supernatural serenity in the heart of defeat that the Church recognized as holiness in beatifying him: not political success, which escaped him, but the fidelity of a shepherd to his mission amid the collapse of his world.

The Death of 7 February 1878

Pius IX died in the Vatican Apostolic Palace on 7 February 1878, at nearly eighty-six years of age, carried off by the crisis that ended the longest pontificate in history.^[112][113] He died as the "prisoner of the Vatican," without having seen again a Rome he regarded as occupied, but surrounded by the veneration of the Catholic world.

Only a few weeks earlier his great adversary, King Victor Emmanuel II, had died: the closeness of the two deaths seemed to contemporaries to close symbolically an epochal confrontation between the papacy and the new Italy.

The Funeral and Nocturnal Transfer

In accordance with his wishes, Pius IX was to rest not in the Vatican grottoes but in the basilica of Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls, which he loved. The solemn transfer of his body, during the night of 12-13 July 1881, under Leo XIII, turned dramatic: an anticlerical crowd tried to seize the coffin from the procession in order to throw it into the Tiber, and the intervention of the carabinieri was needed to protect the remains of the deceased pope.^[114] The incident showed the violence of the passions that the Roman Question had left in the city.

Beatification by John Paul II (2000)

The beatification cause, opened as early as 1907 under Pius X and long slowed by political controversies and by the Mortara affair, reached its conclusion at the threshold of the Jubilee of the year 2000. After the recognition as a miracle of the unexplained healing of a French nun — favorable opinion of the medical board on 15 January 1986, definitive decree in December 1999^[115] —, John Paul II beatified Pius IX on 3 September 2000, together with John XXIII - a pairing deliberately chosen for two popes who seemed opposed in everything but who, according to John Paul II, were united by the same holiness.^[116] The feast of Blessed Pius IX is fixed on 7 February.

His body, canonically recognized on the occasion of the beatification, now rests in a glass coffin at Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls, where the faithful come to pray before the pope of the Immaculate Conception and the First Vatican Council.^[117]

• Pope Gregory XVI — Pius IX's predecessor, the last monk-pope, hostile to railways and modern liberties.
• Pope Leo XIII — Pius IX's successor, who adjusted the line toward the modern world and negotiated the end of the Kulturkampf.
• The dogma of the Immaculate Conception (1854) — defined by Pius IX, the summit of his Marian devotion.
• The Syllabus of Pius IX (1864) — the catalogue of modern errors condemned by Quanta cura.
• The First Vatican Council (1869-1870) — the council of Pius IX, which defined papal infallibility.
• Papal infallibility — the doctrine defined under his pontificate by Pastor aeternus.
• The capture of Rome in 1870 — the end of the temporal power of the popes.
• The Papal States — the thousand-year temporal territory lost under Pius IX.