When Blessed Pope Pius IX summoned the First Vatican Council in 1869 the world was somewhat mystified. There had not been an ecumenical council since Trent (1545-1563). The nineteenth century had brought a new factor into the equation of church/state relations: the media. “What was the Vatican up to?” queried the pundits.
“Are all the bishops of the world going to Rome for a secret conference?” Pius IX had already infuriated the modernists in the Church and the Masonic forces outside with his Syllabus of Errors, issued December 8, 1864. In 1846, international freemasonry had hoped that the “liberal” Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti, the newly-elected pope, would quietly go along with their agenda of promoting rationalism, naturalism, separation of church and state, free press, secular state schools, and other anti-Catholic causes. Instead, in his first encyclical, he condemned secret societies, communism, interfaith, religious indifferentism, false philosophy, and the licentious press. Masonic Luciferians protested in the streets with banners proclaiming the reign of Satan and antichrist, and death to the papacy. The revolutionaries managed to have an assassin kill the Pope’s Minister of Justice, Count de Rossi, by slitting his throat as he climbed the steps to his office to the Quirinal. After a series of failed political compromises, in which a peace loving Pius hoped to appease his adversaries and quell the tempest of anti-papal forces by having a more representative government for the papal states, he finally issued his Syllabus of Errors in 1864, which sealed his fate. All of the modern errors of the age were condemned in eighty specific canons. In doing this the courageous act Pius signed his own warrant of proscription, becoming a virtual prisoner of the Vatican, and ending his reign, and that of his successors, as rulers of a temporal state. In such a tense atmosphere perhaps it was not so strange that on hearing about the call for a council Queen Victoria asked Benjamin Disreali, England’s first and only Jewish Prime Minister, if Britain should deploy the military to Italy.
