Roman Elegies: The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe.

• Author: Bakshian, Aram, Jr.
• Position: Book review

David I. Kertzer, The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe (New York: Random House, 2018), 512 pp., $35.00.

Anyone familiar with the nearly 2,000 year history of the papacy--and the long list of villains, ciphers and oddities occupying the papal throne between the reigns of many true saints, sages and statesmen--must sometimes wonder if there is a papal equivalent to the Peter Principle. As almost everyone knows, the Peter Principle posits, and experience certainly confirms, that people in large entities such as corporations and bureaucracies tend to be promoted to the level of their incompetence. In the case of the papacy, what one might call the St. Peter Principle often yields the same result. Never was there a more perfect example of the St. Peter Principle than the longest-reigning (1846-78) Pope of them all, Pius IX, the subject of a new political biography by David I. Kertzer.

Pius IX, or Pio Nono as he was known to the Italian faithful and not-so-faithful, was one of those kindly, virtuous and well-intentioned fellows who, in normal times, might have been able to handle the responsibilities that were thrust upon them--the examples of King Louis XVI of France and Czar Nicholas II of Russia come immediately to mind--but who simply weren't up to their jobs in perilous times. There is a certain poetic justice to the fact that, in recent years, Pius IX and Nicholas II have both been proposed for sainthood in the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches respectively. Both men were worthy but inept martyrs to their beliefs although Nicholas, murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918 along with his family, paid a far higher price for his martyrdom than Pius, who spent the last years of his life in luxurious, self-imposed confinement in the Vatican, expiring at the age of eighty-five.

In the case of Pius, religion had everything--and nothing--to do with his martyrdom. As Pope, he was spiritual head of the oldest and largest branch of Christianity. Indeed, in his own view, he was the sole legitimate head of all Christendom. Hundreds of millions of faithful Catholics around the world gladly accepted him as their pastoral leader without taking any interest in diplomacy or power politics on the Italian Peninsula which, in June of 1846 when he was elected pontiff, was still what Metternich dismissed as a "geographical expression" rather than a unified state.

Far from being a nation, Italy in the middle of the nineteenth century was a crazy quilt of lesser kingdoms and principalities (as well as tiny San Marino, an ancient republic that nobody thought worth overrunning). Large tracts of it were governed directly, or through family branches, by the powerful Habsburg Empire, including the rich province of Lombardy-Venetia that included what had once been one of the world's great maritime trading powers, the Venetian Republic. The two biggest homegrown Italian powers occupying opposite ends of the boot were the Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled from Turin by the House of Savoy in the north, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, ruled by a Bourbon dynasty out of Naples in the south.

Smack in the middle of this geopolitical melange was a backward, feudally-governed chunk of real estate--swampy, impoverished and riddled with corruption--that, with periodic expansions and contractions over the centuries, had been the earthly domain of the heirs of St. Peter, ruled from their religious and political capital, Rome. At least one Pope, Julius II (reigned 1503-1513) spent more of his time in the field commanding Papal troops or playing at power diplomacy than in spiritual affairs, although he did find time to patronize Michelangelo, the young Raphael and other artistic geniuses whose masterpieces are still on display in the Vatican. Other than its contributions to art and architecture, however, the Popes' temporal realm--as opposed to their sacred role--could claim hardly any historical accomplishments. One of the few was a pioneer example of feminism run rampant. During the eleven-year reign of Pope Innocent x, an elderly, isolated misanthrope specializing in nepotism, the real reins of power were held by various greedy members of his family. Foremost among them was his termagant sister-in-law, Olympia Maidalchini, who systematically looted the Vatican treasury and controlled Papal patronage. As a leading churchman of the time, Cardinal Allesandro Bichi, remarked when Innocent x was settled on as a compromise choice to succeed Pope Urban VIII, "We have just elected a female Pope." Which, in most temporal rather than spiritual respects, Olympia certainly was. Other than this rather forward-looking event, the Papal States were historically stagnant.

Even the name reflects the patchwork nature of the Popes' dominions; rather than being known as the Papal State, they were usually called the Papal "States." Papal tenure had always been a dicey business, with various early, medieval and renaissance Popes being murdered, mutilated or driven into exile, either by rival claimants to the Throne of St. Peter or by the Roman mob. Pope Formosus was even posthumously put on trial during the Cadaver Synod. But all such disturbances had ended with re-establishment of the Papal order. Even the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte's subsequent First Empire only resulted in a shortlived Roman Republic which morphed, simultaneously with Bonaparte's own transformation from revolutionary hero to arriviste emperor, into the Kingdom of Rome (with Napoleon's infant son proclaimed titular "King of Rome" much as heirs to the British throne are invested...