The reaction of the people to the pope’s New Year’s address was telling: protestors looted the store which supplied the cardinal hats and papal skullcap, paraded them through the streets, and threw them into the Tiber. Modern Italian Catholics appear to have remarkably short memories and seem blissfully unaware that less than 200 years ago, Italian men and women fought and died to overthrow the incredibly hated rule of the Vatican over the Papal States, and just how much they despised the priests. American Consul, Nicholas Brown, sent the full text of the address to Washington, noting that to send a synopsis ‘could hardly do justice to its imbecility.’ In his 1849 New Year’s address, Pius railed against the ‘detestable’ decision of the secular revolutionaries to form ‘a so-called National General Assembly of the Roman State,’ and that supporting the secular government was tantamount to committing a grave sin - a barely veiled threat of excommunication.
The French minister of foreign affairs, Édouard Drouyn, noted that the pope was ‘the head of government of a third-rate country.’ And the French ambassador to the Vatican, François Harcourt, wrote that ‘the influences that surround him, which are all obscurantist and reactionary.’ As the revolution gained ground, the pope would sneak out of Rome in late November 1848, seeking the protection of the king of Naples. Kertzer provides a compelling history of events, with plenty of citations from diplomatic correspondence and news reports, painting a vivid picture of the dysfunction of priestly rule in the Papal States (754 to 1870), and Pope Pius IX’s bumbling and ham-fisted resistance to the people’s ever-increasing demands for liberal reforms.
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