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The long Pontificate of Pius the Ninth came to a close almost simultaneously with the reign and the life of Victor Emmanuel, first King of United Italy, after the Pope and the King had faced each other during nearly a third of the century, two political enemies of whom neither felt the slightest personal rancour against the other.
Many a time, too, Pius IX. would descend from his coach and walk upon the Pincio, all clothed in white, stopping sometimes to talk with those who accompanied him, or to lay his gentle hand on the fair curls of some little English child that paused from its play in awe and admiration as the Pope went by.
He then determined to become a priest, and in the ministry he attained great sanctity. He founded the well-known Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, commonly called the Redemptorists; and for his voluminous doctrinal writings, Pius IX declared him a Doctor of the universal Church. The story of the entrance of St. Stanislaus Kostka into religion reads like a romance.
In advance, and by the very fact of the violent pressure exercised over a captive, old, sick, and alone, the emperor found himself in reality disarmed in face of the Council which he had just convoked; the concession which he had snatched from Pius VII became null, for the pope was protesting from the depth of his prison.
Their very men of most talent and fame, such as Quintus Metellus Pius and Lucius Lucullus, practically abdicated and retired, so far as they could at all do so with propriety, to their villas, in order to forget as much as possible the Forum and the senate-house amidst their gardens and libraries, their aviaries and fish-ponds.
It is impossible briefly to describe the various conflicts between Pius VII. and Napoleon. Though now kept in captivity by Napoleon, the Pope refused to ratify these and other ukases of his captor; and the credit which Napoleon had won by his wordly-wise Concordat was now lost by his infraction of many of its clauses and by his harsh treatment of a defenceless old man.
To the two Italian armies, the great capitalists, and the democracy, which thus came forward in league for the overthrow of the Sullan constitution, the senate had nothing to oppose save perhaps the second Spanish army under Quintus Metellus Pius.
Yet these displays were alien to the nature of Pius; and, even through the tyranny of custom, he had been so little changed, that to the last he continued to turn aside, as often as the public ritual of his duty allowed him, from these fierce spectacles to the gentler amusements of fishing and hunting. His taste and his affections naturally carried him to all domestic pleasures of a quiet nature.
They worked without wages or reward of any kind, purely out of their devotion to their Faith, giving up most of their leisure to this voluntary labor. Ten years after Bishop Griffith's appointment, Pius IX. separated Natal and the eastern districts of Cape Colony from Cape Town, and erected the Eastern Vicariate Apostolic.
Rabid Gallophobe, he never pardoned his old general the campaign of Dijon any more than he forgave Victor Emmanuel for having left the Vatican to Pius IX. "The house of Savoy and the papacy," said he, when he was confidential, "are two eggs which we must not eat on the same dish." And he would tell of a certain pillar of St.
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