Commentary
While Lower and Upper Canadians were grappling with the 1840 Constitution that forced them together in an unpopular Union, Pope Pius IX, 6,500 kilometres away in Rome, was planning a Confederation of the Italian states with himself as president.
But Italian nationalists had other plans. One extremist assassinated the Pope’s prime minister, Pellegrino Rossi, in 1848. The nationalists proceeded to conquer Italy piece by piece from 1859 to 1866 until, in 1870, the Pope himself fell under siege, the Vatican walls guarded by French and Spanish troops or, as the English priest and convert John Henry Newman put it, “protected from his own people by foreign bayonets.” Later that year, when Pius IX officially declared the dogma of Papal Infallibility (mostly to remind the world that, in spiritual matters, the church is not subject to the authority of secular governments), Father Newman compared Pius’s action to “nothing less than shooting Niagara,” perhaps in a papal canoe….