Prisoner in the Vatican
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A prisoner in the Vatican (
Beginnings
As
For the next 59 years, the popes refused to leave the Vatican in order to avoid any appearance of accepting the authority wielded by the Italian government over Rome as a whole. During this period, popes also refused to appear at
Law of Guarantees
The 13 May 1871 Italian Law of Guarantees, passed eight months after the capture of Rome, was an attempt to solve the problem by making the pope a subject of the Kingdom of Italy, not an independent sovereign, while guaranteeing him certain honours similar to those given to the king and the right to send and receive ambassadors.
The popes—Pius IX (died 1878) and his successors Leo XIII (reigned 1878–1903), St Pius X (1903–14), Benedict XV (1914–22) and (from 1922 until the issue was resolved in 1929) Pius XI—refused to accept this unilateral decision, which, they felt, could be reversed by the same power that granted it, and which did not ensure that their decisions would be clearly seen to be free from interference by a political power. They claimed that total sovereignty was needed so that a civil government would never attempt to interfere in the governance of the universal Roman Church. Therefore, even after the Law of Guarantees, Pope Pius IX and his successors up to and including Pius XI decided not to leave the Palace of the Vatican, so as not to submit to the authority of the Italian State. As a result of the crisis, Pope Pius IX excommunicated the King of Italy Victor Emmanuel II.
Especially in the strongly Roman Catholic rural areas of Italy, there was great tension between Church and State. The newly unified Kingdom of Italy did not recognise the validity of Church weddings, while the Church maintained that the Kingdom was illegitimate and Church weddings were sufficient before God.
Roman question
This section needs additional citations for verification. (January 2009) |
Following the fall of Rome, most countries continued to accredit diplomatic representatives to the
According to Jasper Ridley,[7] at the 1867 Congress of Peace in Geneva, Giuseppe Garibaldi referred to "that pestilential institution which is called the Papacy" and proposed giving "the final blow to the monster". This was a reflection of the bitterness that had been generated by the struggle against Pope Pius IX in 1849 and 1860, and it was in sharp contrast to the letter that Garibaldi had written to the pope from Montevideo in 1847, before those events.
The stand-off was ended on 11 February 1929, when the
See also
- Properties of the Holy See
- Index of Vatican City-related articles
References
- ISBN 978-0-54734716-5
- ^ "The Roman Question: The Pope vs. the New Nation of Italy". TheCollector. 2024-01-15. Retrieved 2024-01-21.
- ^ Kertzer, p. 45.
- ISBN 978-88-548-8300-0.)
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ignored (help)CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link - ^ Kertzer, p. 63.
- ^ Raffaele Cadorna, La liberazione di Roma nell'anno 1870, Torino, 3ª ed. 1898
- ^ Garibaldi, Viking Press, New York (1976) p. 576–77
Bibliography
- ISBN 0-618-22442-4.