Count Mastai-Ferretti, Bishop of Imola, the 254th pope since
the inception of St. Peter’s primacy, who had been elevated to the apostolic
throne two years after the Declaration of the Báb, and the duration of whose
pontificate exceeded that of any of his predecessors, will be permanently remembered
as the author of the Bull which declared the Immaculate Conception of the
Blessed Virgin (1854), referred to in the Kitáb-i-Íqán, to be a doctrine of the
Church, and as the promulgator of the new dogma of Papal Infallibility (1870).
Authoritarian by nature, a poor statesman, disinclined to conciliation,
determined to preserve all his authority, he, while he succeeded through his
assumption of an ultramontane attitude in defining further his position and in
reinforcing his spiritual authority, failed, in the end, to maintain that
temporal rule which, for so many centuries, had been exercised by the heads of
the Catholic Church.
In 1870, after Bahá’u’lláh had revealed His Epistle to Pius
IX, King Victor Emmanuel II went to war with the Papal states, and his troops
entered Rome and seized it. On the eve of its seizure, the Pope repaired to the
Lateran and, despite his age and with his face bathed in tears, ascended on
bended knees the Scala Santa. The following morning, as the cannonade began, he
ordered the white flag to be hoisted above the dome of St. Peter. Despoiled, he
refused to recognize this “creation of revolution,” excommunicated the invaders
of his states, denounced Victor Emmanuel as the “robber King” and as “forgetful
of every religious principle, despising every right, trampling upon every law.”
Rome, “the Eternal City, on which rest twenty-five centuries of glory,” and
over which the Popes had ruled in unchallengeable right for ten centuries,
finally became the seat of the new kingdom, and the scene of that humiliation
which Bahá’u’lláh had anticipated and which the Prisoner of the Vatican had
imposed upon himself.
“The last years of the old Pope,” writes a commentator on
his life, “were filled with anguish. To his physical infirmities was added the
sorrow of beholding, all too often, the Faith outraged in the very heart of
Rome, the religious orders despoiled and persecuted, the Bishops and priests
debarred from exercising their functions.”
Every effort to retrieve the situation created in 1870
proved fruitless. The Archbishop of Posen went to Versailles to solicit
Bismarck’s intervention in behalf of the Papacy, but was coldly received. Later
a Catholic party was organized in Germany to bring political pressure on the
German Chancellor. All, however, was in vain. The mighty process already
referred to had to pursue inexorably its course. Even now, after the lapse of
above half a century, the so-called restoration of temporal sovereignty has but
served to throw into greater relief the helplessness of this erstwhile potent
Prince, at whose name kings trembled and to whose dual sovereignty they
willingly submitted. This temporal sovereignty, practically confined to the
miniscule City of the Vatican, and leaving Rome the undisputed possession of a
secular monarchy, has been obtained at the price of unreserved recognition, so
long withheld, of the Kingdom of Italy. The Treaty of the Lateran, claiming to
have resolved once and for all the Roman Question, has indeed assured to a
secular Power, in respect of the Enclaved City, a liberty of action which is
fraught with uncertainty and peril. “The two souls of the Eternal City,” a
Catholic writer has observed, “have been separated from each other, only to
collide more severely than ever before.”
Well might the Sovereign Pontiff recall the reign of the
most powerful among his predecessors, Innocent III who, during the eighteen
years of his pontificate, raised and deposed the kings and the emperors, whose
interdicts deprived nations of the exercise of Christian worship, at the feet
of whose legate the King of England surrendered his crown, and at whose voice
the fourth and the fifth crusades were both undertaken.
- Shoghi Effendi (‘The
Promised Day Is Come’)