Blessed Pius IX and Jefferson Davis

In the New Orleans Confederate Civil War Museum there is a crown of thorns, weaved for Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, by Blessed Pope Pius IX. At the behest of an Irish priest, who had befriended Davis and who often visited him during his two-year imprisonment after the war, the Pope sent the veteran general and statesman this sign of compassion.Pius was himself a “prison of the Vatican” after the fall of the Papal States under the forces of the freemason Garibaldi. The thorns in this crown are two inches long. As a token of respect to the beleaguered pontiff, the city of Macon, Georgia, named a street in his honor. They even put it in Italian: Pio Nono Avenue.