Word: papally
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...perpetuated...an act of unacceptable intolerance," declared a professor named Elena Mortara in Rome. Pio Nono, it turns out, had a Jewish problem of his own. Mortara is the great-grandniece of Edgardo Mortara, who was taken from his Jewish parents at age six in 1858 by the papal police and raised--in part by Pius himself--as a Catholic. The incident typified Pius' ham-fisted treatment of the Jews, and many feel his beatification contradicts Pope John Paul II's embrace of that people and his apologies for their treatment by church members. Israel's Ambassador to the Holy...
Pius, in fact, is one of the modern church's problematic giants. His papacy as a whole was far more controversial than Pius XII's. He was the longest-serving Pope since St. Peter, reigning 32 years from 1846 to his death. He lost the Papal States, the Vatican's worldly kingdom. He promulgated two of Catholicism's most triumphal doctrines--the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary and papal infallibility. He pioneered the papal personality movement that John Paul embodies so brilliantly. Many historians believe he created the modern papacy...
...death and continues to color its present. A true reactionary who saw the secular state, and indeed civil rights, as satanic manifestations, he made it difficult for generations of believers to claim intellectual independence or integrity. Says journalist-historian Garry Wills, who savages Pius in his best seller Papal Sins: "He was a disaster, and his influence has been bad ever since. If you beatify him now, there will be a whitewashing of him, which will involve the church in more dishonesty." Pius is the heavy in the well-reviewed The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, by Brown University historian David...
...girdling the boot approximately from Naples to Venice, playing survival politics amid what historian Kertzer describes as "a patchwork of duchies, grand duchy, Bourbon and Savoyard kingdoms [and] Austrian outposts." Would-be nation builders plotted Italy's unification from the south and the north. Revolutionaries, writes Kertzer, goggled across papal borders at those who regarded "the notions that people should be free to think what it pleased them to think [as] heretical...
...Papal politics, unlike presidential politics, is never a winner-takes-all scenario. And that makes the Vatican unlikely to abandon its effort to beatify Pope Pius IX, despite protests by liberal and Jewish groups. The latter are incensed that the current pontiff, so deeply committed to healing the church's relationship with the Jews, would propose sainthood for a man who in the mid-19th century forced Rome's Jews back into the ghetto and stripped them of their civil rights after having initially allowed them greater freedom. Further fueling the protests is the case of Edgardo Mortara...