From Cletus
You are bound to find more than "some" Catholics at a Traditional message board who will be offended by Pope Pius IX's being referred to as "Mr Infallible."
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You got that one right Cletus.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01EED71030F93BA15755C0A9669C8B63&partner=rssnyt&emc=rssItalian Jєωs Denounce Vatican's Decision to Beatify Pius IX
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: June 28, 2000
To Vatican historians, Pius IX was the pope who locked papal infallibility and the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary into church doctrine.
But to Italian Jєωs, Pius IX was the pope who in 1858 abducted 6-year-old Edgardo Mortara from his Jєωιѕн parents in Bologna, then a papal state, and raised him in Rome as a Catholic -- an act that was the Elian Gonzalez case of its era and became an international cause celebre.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Italian Jєωs are in a fury over the Vatican's decision to beatify Pius IX in September. Beatification is the next to last step to sainthood.
At a symposium on Pius IX held today in Rome, Amos Luzzatto, president of the Union of the Italian Jєωιѕн Communities, said, ''The Mortara case is a wound in the body and spirit of Italian Jєωs that has yet to be healed.''
The cause of Pius IX is a fainter echo of the controversy over the Vatican's effort to put Pope Pius XII, who has been accused of not speaking out forcefully enough about the h0Ɩ0cαųst during World War II, on the path to sainthood. As with that issue, the cause of Pius IX is a battle of irreconcilably clashing memories. To Vatican officials Pius IX was a martyr to 19th-century anticlericism who is being unfairly judged by contemporary mores.
But to many Jєωs he symbolizes the open anti-Semitism of the Roman Catholic Church before the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65.
Pope John Paul II, who in May prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, has made reconciliation with Jєωs a hallmark of his papacy. For many Jєωs the beatification of Pius IX represents a baffling step backward. After lobbying by Jєωιѕн groups worldwide, the Vatican quietly put aside plans to beatify Pius XII this year alongside Pope John XXIII, who is revered by Catholics and Jєωs alike as the pope who ushered in the reforms and interfaith reconciliation of the Second Vatican Council.
Instead, in February the Vatican announced the beatification of Pius IX, who ordered the First Vatican Council in 1869. His beatification process was begun in 1907 and preparation was completed in 1984, but it was put on hold because the Vatican felt that he could be seen as a symbol of opposition to Italian unity.
Msgr. Carlos Liberati, the Vatican official overseeing the cause of Pius IX, denied that the 19th-century pope's beatification had been revived to provide political balance to John XXIII, a pope championed by liberal Catholics.
''The church does not use scales like a pharmacist or a goldsmith,'' Monsignor Liberati said. The two popes, he said, ''represent different modes of sanctity.''
But Pius IX is certainly a conservative's pope. His 32-year-reign is the longest in the church's history, and in some ways it was the last of a vanished world order.
The papacy was stripped of its temporal powers, states and most of its property in 1870 under the Risorgimento, the 19th-century movement that united Italy from a quilt of tiny kingdoms, republics and foreign-occupied territories. Pius IX, who died in 1878, spent his last years a prisoner behind Vatican walls, reviled by Italian nationalists.
His reign began in 1846 on a more progressive note. One month into his papacy, he declared an amnesty for political prisoners. In 1848 he ordered that the gates to the Jєωιѕн ghetto in Rome be knocked down.
But Europe at that time was swept by revolutionary movements that threatened the power of the Roman Catholic Church. Pius IX wrote his first encyclical in 1846, condemning Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ and communism.
It was the Mortara case of 1858 that most marked his papacy outside the church. On June 23, papal guards arrived at the home of the Mortara family and took away Edgardo, one of their eight children. The parents bitterly objected, but the church contended that an illiterate Catholic servant had secretly baptized Edgardo when he was gravely ill.
Canon law at that time required the church to take religious charge of any person baptized in the Catholic faith, regardless of the parents' wishes.
The boy was taken to a Catholic boarding school in Rome and was adopted by Pius IX, who adamantly refused to return him to his family, despite a fervent international campaign.
David I. Kertzer, who wrote a book in 1997 about the scandal, ''The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara'' (Knopf), argued that the backlash against Pius IX's act was a critical element in the collapse of support for papal rule. The boy, who entered a seminary at age 13, became a Catholic priest, and he died in Belgium in 1940.
''I have a direct knowledge of Pius IX's nefariousness,'' said Elena Mortara, a professor of American literature at the University of Rome and a great-granddaughter of one of Edgardo's sisters. ''It's not just about Edgardo. It's a question of the objective situation of depriving Jєωs of their civil rights in Rome. That in itself is serious enough to stop this beatification.''
Monsignor Liberati said that Pius IX had merely followed church doctrine of his time and that the event had been used by 19th-century Masons and nationalists to discredit the church.
''If we focus on this minor fact, we cannot understand this great pope,'' he said. ''The church has tried everything to improve relations with the Jєωs. But they don't forgive us the slightest thing.''
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p.s. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Remember Pius IX's
example being used by the nєω ωσrℓ∂ σr∂єr as they
take custody of Christian children and adopt them into an
antichrist society.
Topic: "He who hears you, hears Me..." (Read 9553 times)