Next Sunday in Rome, John Paul will beatify Pius IX together with Pope John XXIII as part of the church’s Jubilee celebration. That John (who reigned from 1958 to 1963) was a saint, few Roman Catholics doubt. Pius (1846 to 1878, the longest reign in papal history) is a very different story. Even within the Vatican, there are officials who think that the beatification of Pio Nono, as Pius was popularly called, will merely exhume old memories and conflicts from a troubled era in the church. Already Jewish leaders have asked that his beatification be halted because Pio Nono raised as his personal ward a Jewish boy who was baptized as an infant by a Catholic housemaid. For that reason the boy was taken from his parents–thus causing an international scandal. At the very least, the twin beatifications–the last step before canonization–raise questions about how the church decides which popes are worthy of sainthood.
Few, in fact, have made the grade. According to Catholic tradition, there have been 264 popes, beginning with the Apostle Peter. Of these, 81 are included among the tens of thousands of Christians who have been venerated as saints over the course of two millenniums. But this figure is highly misleading, since nearly all of them were recognized as saints centuries before canonization became a formal process in 1588. Thus the list includes 48 of the first 49 leaders of the church in Rome, all of whom died before the year 500, and half of whom (including Peter) are venerated as martyrs. An additional 30 died before 1100, when recognition of saints was still by acclamation of the people. In short, over the last 900 years only four popes have been judged worthy of official beatification and only three of these have been canonized, the church’s highest accolade.
At first glance, John and Pius could not be less alike. Jovial John was in office less than five years. But in that time he called Vatican Council II, which opened the church to the modern world and reformed the liturgy and other ancient practices. He also published epochal encyclicals like Pacem in Terris and by dint of warm personality won nearly universal love and admiration. In his brief reign, he sought reconciliation not only among Christians but between communist nations and the West. To the Jews he said, “I am Joseph, your brother.” When he died, John XXIII was mourned by the whole world, and there was a move by liberal bishops to dispense with the canonization process and have the council declare him a saint.
Pio Nono also convened a council–Vatican I–where he fought for and secured the dogma of papal infallibility. A liberal in his first two years as pope, Pio Nono eventually fled Rome before troops of the Risorgimento and returned in 1850 a political and theological reactionary. His best-known encyclical, Quanta Cura, included a “Syllabus of Errors,” which defiantly condemned the notion that a pope “can and should reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and recent civilization.” Under his papacy, leading Catholic intellectuals were suspected of heresy, thus creating a climate of suspicion that critics claim set the church back for almost a century. And yet recent history has generally been more sympathetic to Pio Nono than this brief recital of his most controversial acts. In a reign beset by virulent anti-Catholicism in Europe and the United States, the papacy retrenched, finding new missionary vigor and countercultural strength. Indeed, even open-minded Pope John, it turns out, was personally devoted to the narrow-minded Pio Nono.
Ironically, it was Pio Nono who, by declaring himself a prisoner of the Vatican and refusing to venture outside it, inspired among the ordinary faithful a distinctively modern “cult of the popes.” Stripped of temporal power as sovereigns of the Papal States, and invested with the aura of infallibility, Pius and his eight successors attracted fervent popular devotion as purely spiritual leaders possessing quasi-oracular authority. Six of those eight popes have been mentioned for canonization. Two of them, Pius XII and Paul VI, are in formal process, and in 1954 Pius X (1903-14) was declared a saint.
In theory, a pope should be held to the same high standards as any other candidate for sainthood. All saints are expected to manifest Christian virtue to an exceptional degree, and to provide a unique example of holiness worthy of imitation by others. But in practice there are differences. Unlike a theologian’s works, a pope’s official (but not private) writings are presumed to be orthodox and therefore exempt from scrutiny. His direction of the church is assumed to be the “design of Divine Providence”–or so it was argued on behalf of Pio Nono–and thus beyond serious cavil. (Pope Celestine V, a hermit, was canonized in 1313 even though he resigned after five miserable months in office.) In effect, then, a pope’s sanctity depends on his personal holiness, as manifest by his piety and treatment of others. Nonetheless, Pio Nono’s case was twice stalled by Vatican judges who found him wanting in patience, justice and charity toward subordinates. Finally, there is the question of appropriateness: will his beatification help or harm the church? John Paul II could have beatified Pio Nono 15 years ago but–on the advice of a secret commission–decided that the public response would be too negative.
So the puzzle remains: why exhume and exalt a 19th-century pope whose history is so painful and character so open to dispute? Pio Nono appears to be a questionable model for a church that has since embraced many of the propositions he condemned. A saint should also be a figure already widely venerated by Catholics. But apart from a few aged, ultraconservative bishops in the Vatican, Pio Nono has no following. It may be that John Paul merely wants to honor two predecessors who called councils of the church; this pope loves such symmetry. But he has already canonized 1,047 individuals and beatified an additional 475–a record that may never be superseded. Thus, he has given what was once a rare form of recognition the appearance of an ecclesiastical assembly line. In the case of Pio Nono, though, the result is likely to produce an odor of something other than sanctity.
