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The election of Pius IX in 1846 aroused great enthusiasm among liberals and nationalists in Italy, and the evidence indicates that for the first two years of his papacy, until the Roman Revolution of 1848, Pius's liberalism was genuine. But his refusal to join the war against Austria in 1848 highlighted the contradiction between his role as an Italian political leader and his office as an international spiritual leader who had to retain the support of conservative Catholics throughout Europe, including Austria. When revolution broke out in Rome and a republic was declared, the pope had to flee to Neapolitan territory, and he was only restored to the papal states by French and Austrian arms. The experience changed Pius's outlook to that of a resolute conservatism as he lost any belief that papal authority could be reconciled with constitutional government. Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli emerged as the dominant figure in papal government.

The 1850s were ’the last years of Catholic power in Europe’. In France the regime of Napoleon III was friendly and presided over a Catholic revival, but this sharpened divisions between Catholics and anti‐clericals. A new Concordat with Austria strengthened the identification of the Habsburg monarchy and the Church and papal influence in the Austrian Church, but this in turn encouraged anti‐papal feeling in the regions of Italy under Austrian rule. Similarly, the position of Catholicism was enhanced in the United States and Britain by Irish immigration and also reinforced in Canada among the francophone population. Pius IX used his power to impose new Church hierarchies in Britain and the Netherlands, to impose the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, and generally to disregard international opinion. The weakness of Catholic power lay in the papal states, where, although government improved, the pope's regime was increasingly seen as an anomaly, out of step with the rest of Europe.

The taking of Rome by the Italian army in 1870 made the pope ’the prisoner of the Vatican’ a situation Pius IX preferred to live with rather than flee, and the new Italian authorities were careful to leave him free to per perform his spiritual duties as head of the Church. The Law of Guarantees of 1871 regulated relations between the pope and the Italian state, but conflict continued due to the attitudes of both Pius IX and Italian radicals. The pope battled with the state over the appointment of bishops, made intransigent speeches, and rejected attempts at reconciliation. The forced acceptance of the Council's decrees on infallibility, the conflict with Italy, and Pius IX's rejection of ’the modern world’ all had the effect of both uniting most Catholics behind the pope and increasing the Church's isolation from liberal and Protestant Europe. This was shown in the controversy in Austria over a new Concordat, the Kulturkampf in Germany, and anti‐Catholic hostility in Britain. The funerals of Pius IX and king Victor Emmanuel in 1878 were seen as symbolic not only of the internal battles of Italian politics but also of the old Europe and the new.

In the 1860s the pope's position in Rome depended on the presence of the French garrison there and, although Napoleon III wished to withdraw, he could not do so unless the Piedmontese promised not to take over the city. His vulnerability contributed to Pius IX's language as head of the Church becoming ever more extreme. His opposition to the modern world was expressed in the Syllabus of Errors, which had the effect of making him an obscurantist in the eyes of Europe, but also strengthened ultramontanism in defence of the pope and his throne. The Vatican Council of 1870 gathered together for the first time bishops from all over the world, and on the issue of papal infallibility an ultramontane majority overcame a liberal minority. The majority of Catholic bishops thus came to support a reinforcement of papal authority and an uncompromising and dogmatic stance against the authority of councils, political liberalism, and the other Christian denominations.

As the movement for Italian unification under the monarchy of Piedmont came to express the aspirations of nationalists and liberals throughout the peninsula, Pius IX showed that he wanted to part of it. Count Cavour's policies, including a partial dissolution of the Piedmontese monasteries, and his treatment of the Catholic party after the elections of 1857, widened the rift between nationalists and the papacy, with the Catholic faithful divided. The events of 1859‐60 leading to the creation of the kingdom of Italy left the pope as ruler only of Rome and a small area surrounding it. The pope saw himself as the sovereign ruler of a sovereign state, and he and his supporters among Catholics everywhere saw the independence of the papal state outside the new Italy as essential for guaranteeing the freedom of the Church.

While the lord lieutenant and the bishops were grappling as best they could with the problems posed by the Famine, European attention was focusing on Rome. By 1847 Pius IX’s position had become the centre of intense diplomacy, a pivotal point in the liberal and revolutionary movements as the events that took place in Italy began to have an impact on other European countries. The British government felt obliged to enter into this world of political manoeuvres. The events that took place in Rome and the decisions taken there were to influence government attitudes up to and beyond the Ecclesiastical Titles Act three years later. The repercussions of the Mahon murder and the wave of violent denunciations it evoked were damaging enough. Other events in the momentous year of 1848 were to affect relations between Britain and Ireland. A revolutionary fever swept Europe and Ireland had not remained immune.

This chapter examines the demise of the Papal States and the Roman Question—the Italian Risorgimento's threat to the territorial sovereignty of the papacy in the 1850s and 1860s. It first considers the lives and the friendship of Pauline Craven and Charles de Montalembert, with particular emphasis on their views regarding the Roman Question. It then explores how Pius IX's growing intransigence forced Craven and Montalembert both to reassess their relationship to the Roman leadership of their church. It also discusses Pius's 1864 Syllabus of Errors, which laid the groundwork for the proclamation of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870. Finally, it analyzes Craven and Montalembert's attitudes toward ultramontanism.

This chapter explores the key developments in Catholic approaches to both the salvation of non-Christians and the growing phenomenon of modern atheism, in the century preceding Vatican II. Special attention is given to Pius IX’s influential statements on the nature of invincible ignorance, and to renewed understandings of the patristic axiom Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus (‘No salvation outside the Church’). Also discussed in depth are a number of initiatives in Catholic–atheist dialogue and engagement, especially in France (e.g. La main tendue, the worker-priest experiment), and the effects these had on theological speculations in the decades prior to the Council (focusing especially on Congar and de Lubac). Finally, Vatican II’s own landmark statement on modern unbelief, Gaudium et Spes 19–21, is analysed in detail.

This chapter addresses among the most critically commented tableaux of the Tentation. It argues against reading the famous ‘Nebuchadnezzar's Feast’ and ‘Queen of Sheba’ set‐pieces as allegedly depicting worldly and sexual temptations. Instead it argues for Flaubert's use of analogy to comment on the worldliness of the nineteenth‐century Roman Catholic Church and its ruler heads of state/heads of churches (‘Nebuchadnezzar’). The ‘Queen of Sheba’ section then takes to task Gothot‐Mersch's genetic readings. It argues that Flaubert's descriptions of her costume/roles is a critical commentary on the Marian sightings recorded in nineteenth‐century France and on the dogma of the Immaculate Conception as instituted by Pope Pius IX.

This chapter discusses the early career of Döllinger, situating his intellectual development in the context of Southern German Catholicism during a time of immense crisis and transition: the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire (1806), the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, and the Restoration as a result of the Congress of Vienna (1814–15). The chapter makes clear the ultramontane commitments of Döllinger in his early career, even as it shows him gradually drifting from Rome in the 1850s and 1860s. The chapter attributes particular significance to two lectures that he gave in 1861 on the Pope’s temporal power and to his involvement in a Congress of German Catholic scholars in Munich in 1863. The 1861 lectures and the Congress of 1863 make clear the difficulty of maintaining concurrent loyalties to the ecclesiastical hierarchy and to modern historical scholarship. This difficulty is seen as adumbrating his later break with Rome.

This chapter focuses on Henry Adams’s novel Democracy (1880) and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and shows that these authors draw on caricatures of the Catholic Church to render their criticisms of U.S. governance. Reading the novels within the context of late-century U.S. reactions to the First Vatican Council of 1870 and Pope Pius IX’s declaration of papal infallibility, the chapter argues that figurations of a rigid and dogmatic Catholicism facilitated Adams’s and Twain’s parodies of democratic praxis. While both Adams and Twain rehearse anti-Catholic rhetoric typical of nineteenth-century U.S. public culture, they do so to critique the absolutism that they viewed as being central to the liberal tradition. If in earlier periods the Catholic stood as that against which the liberal state must define itself, by the end of the nineteenth century it came to represent liberalism’s own exclusionary premises and absolutist tendencies.

The conclusion reassesses the early impact of Newman’s theory of development. Contrary to studies of the last several decades, Newman’s theory was not marginal to nineteenth-century Roman Catholic thought; it played a role in the Church’s attempts to come to terms with history as a field of theological inquiry. The conclusion also offers an account of doctrinal development’s subsequent fall into obscurity. As Newman’s theory reached the pinnacle of influence in the decade after his conversion, a new movement in theology, Neoscholasticism, began to expand among Roman Catholics. Neoscholasticism was, in part, a reaction to political events that punctuated the nineteenth century, and the movement was less amenable than the Roman School to the idea of development. It was in large measure the rise of this movement, and the lack of sensitivity to these events in twentieth-century scholarship, which obscured the early significance of Newman’s theory.

This chapter shows how the end of the war tested the American commitment to the Beecherite synthesis. During the first half of 1848 congressmen turned with renewed vigor to the malleable rhetoric of anti-Catholicism to debate how much Mexican territory should be annexed and whether the treaty signed at Guadalupe should be ratified. Historians, poets, playwrights, and novelists joined the fray, all finding in the war a new reservoir of creative material. Between 1848 and the early 1850s, they popularized a view of Mexico and the war that embodied the racial and civil-religious sentiment that had characterized American opinion throughout the war. Meanwhile, evangelicals continued to refocus their missionary efforts as they sought to take advantage of the American victory. The All Mexico movement is also explored. Remarkably, the war with Mexico led avowed nativists to eschew rational political choices in favor of anti-Catholicism. By doing so, they proved that their movement was strongly grounded in a religious ideology that was far more than just an advantageous political tool. Last, this chapter examines the meaning Americans found in their victory, in light of their civil religion and the liberal revolutions in Europe in 1848.

Chapter 6 focuses on the Errington case: the attempt by Wiseman and Manning to have Errington removed as Coadjutor of Westminster, and Errington’s own attempt, with his supporters, to stop them. Through an analysis of the correspondence of the protagonists and others it is argued that Errington presented a very strong case, and was dismissed not because he was necessarily in the wrong, but because George Talbot, the Pope’s unofficial adviser on English affairs, had thrown his support behind Wiseman and Manning. Talbot’s role is demonstrated to have been crucial, and shows the extent to which personal patronage continued to play a part in the curial administration of the Church. It also considers the issues surrounding the appointment of a new Archbishop of Westminster in 1865.

Chapter 8 assesses Errington’s impact as a Council Father at Vatican I. A critique of his public statements demonstrates his commitment to the relationship of a bishop to his people, and to an understanding of a bishop’s independence within his relationship with the Holy See. Concerned about the potentially damaging implications which a formal definition of infallibility would have for the Church in England, at the Council Errington allied himself with the ‘Inopportunist’ party and was one of the bishops who left Rome before the final vote. It is argued that the First Vatican Council represents a ‘last stand’ of a view of episcopal autonomy—espoused by Errington and those he supported at the Council—which declined after the promulgation of Pastor Aeternus in 1870.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the Council of Ferrara-Florence and the difficult centuries that followed for both East and West—Rome dealing with the challenges posed by the Protestant Reformation while the Constantinopolitans learned how to survive life under the sultan. The Union of Brest brought some local Orthodox churches into communion with Rome, but for most of the Orthodox world the failure of Ferrara-Florence and the rise of the so-called “uniates” were clear signs that the pope’s plans to subjugate the Eastern Church must be resisted. The ensuing centuries contained little by way of fruitful exchange despite the presence on both sides of figures who continued to hold out hope for Church union. By the time Pope Pius IX (1846–78) and the First Vatican Council (1869–70) promulgated the doctrines of the pope’s infallibility and universal jurisdiction it seemed all hope for better relations had disappeared completely.