Conclusion

Abstract

In 1861, not long after Feletti’s release, the secular Kingdom of Italy was established on the Italian peninsula; the pope managed to maintain temporal control only of Rome and the lands surrounding it. Like the trial of Bologna’s Inquisitor, this latest blow to papal hegemony simply illustrated to Pius IX and Vatican supporters the many evils of revolution, modernization and secular government. In an attempt to enforce Inquisition law in the last remnant of the Papal States, Rome’s Jews were still forced to live in the ghetto and forbidden to employ Christian servants; the boundaries crossed in the controversial article of Andreuccio and Antonio had yet to touch Rome. Similarly, the archives of Rome’s House of the Catechumens show that conversions continued to occur, even if in drastically reduced numbers. In 1864, Pius IX responded definitively against the newly established secular governments of Europe with his encyclical Quanta Cura, accompanied by his Syllabus of Errors, a list of the errors produced by modern advances in the political, social, and scientific worlds. Pius IX’s edicts reflected his determined attempt to cling to the temporal power jeopardized by the revolutions sweeping across Europe, just as they reflected the germination of a reactionary political line already visible in the early nineteenth century.