I agree, I think Pope Pius IX was an exemplary Pope, I'd rank the First Vatican Council the crowning glory of his pontificate - a most salutary and necessary exposition of the divine institution of the Papacy and its supreme prerogatives, most timely and necessary condemnations of errors like pantheism, agnosticism, rationalism and the like, and excellent and precise definitions on the relationship between faith and reason, the motives of credibility for belief in God, Christ and His Church marvelously laid out, and which would later become the basis for the Oath against modernism under Pope St. Pius X.