More info on Pius IX

http://www.population-security.org/19-CH11.html#1

PIUS IX, THE MAN - Index
To understand what really brought about proclamation of the dogmas of papal primacy and infallibility, we must take a close look at the man himself. Hans Küng describes Pius IX as follows: "Pius IX had a sense of divine mission which he carried to extremes; he engaged in double-dealing; he was mentally disturbed; and he misused his office."118

Hasler describes Pius IX in detail. In 1850, Pius IX branded freedom of the press and freedom of association as intrinsically evil. He determined that liberalism (out of which American democracy grew) was the mortal enemy of the Papacy and the Church. His rule was reactionary and dictatorial. His followers' practices bordered on papolatry. The most eminent bishops of the time viewed him as a great disaster for the Catholic Church.119 He struck "many people as dangerous above all because he wished to dogmatize a teaching which, from a historical standpoint, was worse than dubious and which overturned the Church's basic organization."120 In their eyes, these dogmas "would deprive the Catholic Church of the last shred of credibility."121 In the end, it looks as if this assessment of these bishops is proving to be correct. (More on credibility later.)

According to Hasler, Pius IX had surrounded himself with mediocre, unbalanced, sometimes even psychologically disturbed people.122 His fury in private audiences would become so violent that older prelates might suffer heart attacks. He was described as having a heart of stone and at times normal feelings of affection, gratitude, and appreciation would be totally absent -- heartless indifference.123

Hasler describes a series of bizarre incidents: "In all these episodes Pius IX showed quite clearly how out of touch he was with reality.124 Many bishops had the impression that the pope was insincere, that he was striving to get infallibility approved by the use of trickery and cunning. In the presence of many witnesses, one bishop called him false and a liar.125

The historian Ferdinand Gregorovius noted in his diary, "The pope recently got the urge to try out his infallibility....While out on a walk he called to a paralytic: `Get up and walk.' The poor devil gave it a try and collapsed, which put God's vicegerent very much out of sorts. The anecdote has already been mentioned in the newspapers. I really believe that he's insane." 126

Hasler states, "Some, even bishops, thought he was mad or talked about pathological symptoms. The Catholic Church historian Franz Xavar Kraus noted in his diary: `Apropos of Pius IX, Du Camp agrees with my view that ever since 1848 the pope has been both mentally ill and malicious.'"127

The most distinguished bishops viewed Pius IX as "the greatest danger facing the Church...." They felt powerless struggling with a pope who was possessed by his monomania and not accessible to rational arguments. "'Oh, this unfortunate pope,' wrote Felix Dupanloup in his diary. `How much evil he has done!...I mean, he has delivered the Church into the hands of these three or four Jesuit professors who now want to inflict their lessons on him!...This is one of the greatest dangers the Church has ever known.'"128

Hasler asked the question: Was the pope mentally competent during Vatican Council I? "Many of his personality traits suggest that this was not the case. The unhealthy mysticism, the childish tantrums, the shallow sensibility, the intermittent mental absences, the strangely inappropriate language...and the senile obstinacy all indicate the loss of a solid grip on reality. These features suggest paranoia."129

THE LEGACY OF PIUS IX - Index

The leadership entrusted the future of the Church to this man. But as we continue to permit papal influence in public policy-making to spread worldwide, we are allowing Pius IX's legacy -- the legacy of an unbalanced man -- to determine the future of our planet even as we approach the end of the 20th century. In significant ways, our behavior today is being determined by the actions of Pius IX of 125 years ago.

Furthermore, the dogmas of infallibility and papal primacy ended any semblance of democracy in the church, and no self correction can be expected, no matter how insane the Church policy on overpopulation has become.

THE DOGMAS' IMPORTANCE TO SOME CATHOLICS - Index
Infallibility made Roman Catholicism even more attractive to many. People often seek religion because of their fear of uncertainty and the unknown in their lives and in death. It provides emotional relief. According to Hans Küng, "Infallibility performed the function of a metadogma, shielding and insuring all the other dogmas (and the innumerable doctrines and practices bound up in them). With infallibility -- and the infallible aura of the `ordinary,' day-to-day magisterium is often more important than the relatively rare infallible definitions -- the faithful seemed to have been given a superhuman protection and security, which made them forget all fear of human uncertainty...In this sense the dogma of infallibility has undoubtedly integrated the lives of believers and unburdened their minds..."130 So now the Church offers a final, unsurpassable guarantee of security to believers. This is a powerful attraction to all who fear insecurity -- which includes most of us. Infallibility provided many believers with a great sense of religious security all through life, imparting stability and freedom from anxiety, relieving emotional pressure and softening the cruel blows of reality.131

On the other hand, the dogma of infallibility is binding on the conscience of the entire Catholic world. According to Hasler, "For the Roman Catholic Church, the dogmas defined by the Council are strictly obligatory. Anyone who doesn't accept them is threatened with excommunication, that is, with exclusion from the Catholic community."132

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http://www.arcticbeacon.com/greg/?p=776

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"was it not The Church whom you despise?"

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  Not true. I believe in the "Chair of Moses" but even the Chair of Moses has commandments of God that it has to follow. What I despise is when people know things are wrong and yet imagine there is honor in supporting the current church in apostasy.  I just believe that Pius IX is the most responsible for today's apostasy.  He severed the link of scriptures and tradition and said " I am tradition". "I am" is a blasphemous statement implying Godhood. (like Satan)

 

Well, we got rid of Mr Landry who thought that all the popes back to Pius IX were antipopes.  NOW we have  Mr Classic CON, who believes that Pius IX is also a bad pope.  When will this nonsense end on this forum? :heretic:

Quote from: Classiccom

Quote

"was it not The Church whom you despise?"

=======================

  Not true. I believe in the "Chair of Moses" but even the Chair of Moses has commandments of God that it has to follow. What I despise is when people know things are wrong and yet imagine there is honor in supporting the current church in apostasy.  I just believe that Pius IX is the most responsible for today's apostasy.  He severed the link of scriptures and tradition and said " I am tradition". "I am" is a blasphemous statement implying Godhood. (like Satan)

 

Well, we got rid of Mr Landry who thought that all the popes back to Pius IX were antipopes.  NOW we have  Mr Classic CON, who believes that Pius IX is also a bad pope.  When will this nonsense end on this forum? :heretic:

will it end? my answer-NOT!

until he leaves or is banned...

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,912037,00.html

Religion: Was Vatican I Rigged?

How the Pope became infallible

As a violent thunderstorm raged above St. Peter's Basilica in Rome on July 18, 1870, the bishops of the First Vatican Council adopted a decree that would alter Christian history. A Pope, they declared, is infallible when he defines doctrines of faith or morals ex cathedra (from his throne) and such dicta are "irreformable" and require no "consent of the church." The bishops' lopsided 533-to-2 vote that day masked a deep division in the council and throughout the church. The immediate repercussions included the schism of "Old Catholics" and a wave of antichurch laws in Germany. Though scholars differ over where infallibility applies, the power has been invoked explicitly only once: in the 1950 declaration that Mary was assumed bodily into heaven. Even so, infallibility remains a fundamental obstacle to the reunion of Christianity.

Could infallibility ever be repealed?

The teaching was reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). But Father August B. Hasler, a Swiss-German scholar at the German Historical Institute in Rome, thinks it could be set aside.

As Hasler sees it, Pope Pius IX and his allies so rigged Vatican I that its actions may not have been valid. If so judged by a future council, the dogma could theoretically be bypassed.

Pursuing the story of what went on behind the closed doors of Vatican I, Hasler mined dusty archives across Europe for nearly eight years. His findings have now been published in German as Pius IX: Papal Infallibility and the First Vatican Council (Anton Hiersemann; $130).

Hasler disputes the contention that most Vatican I bishops went to Rome seeking the infallibility decree. Instead, he asserts, Pius and the bishops supporting him outmaneuvered opponents of infallibility —without ever answering their historical arguments against it—so effectively that the council "degenerated into a ritual, mock discussion." Hasler provides new details on just how the outwardly jovial, accommodating "Pio Nono" plotted to get his infallibility decree.

Ostensibly, the Vatican council was supposed to be like the 1545-63 Council of Trent—a meeting of bishops that would exercise its own powers. But as Hasler tells it, Pius IX, then 78 and determined to complete his struggle to centralize church control in his office, dominated the council from the start. He decided that the less anyone knew about Trent, the better; so when the director of the Vatican Archives ordered a review of the Trent rules, Pius fired him in a "raving scene."

The Pope's nuncios to various countries, Hasler reports, were told to cast aspersions on anti-infallibility churchmen.

The Vatican suppressed opposition periodicals. Alessandro Cardinal Barnabo, the tyrannical head of the Propaganda Fide—the Vatican mission office, which then ran church affairs in Asia, Africa and much of the Western Hemisphere as well as the Eastern Rite Uniates—summoned missionary bishops one by one to remind them that they were employed and paid by the papacy.

The head of the Armenian Antonian order, Archbishop Placidus Casangian, came under especially heavy pressure.

The Pope personally threatened him with dismissal if he did not back infallibility, had Vatican police search his quarters, and ordered him confined. The archbishop fled instead.

Pius, meanwhile, was putting strong pressure on other church leaders in private audiences. In one remarkable council speech, he compared opposition bishops to Pontius Pilate condemning Jesus, and pleaded, "My children, do not leave me. Cleave to me and follow me. Unite with the representative of Christ."

A number of contemporaries of Pius, including the French bishop who was dean of the Sorbonne, wrote that the Pope was mad. Hasler deals with the subject more delicately: "Many aspects of his personality suggest that he was no longer sane." Hasler discovered reports that Pius denounced opponents of infallibility variously as "donkeys," "betrayers" and "sick in the head." Once, in a screaming fit of anger, he put his foot on the head of a kneeling Cardinal, then lifted the man by his ears. Other papal outbursts supposedly caused four churchmen to die of heart failure. Hasler believes that epilepsy might have been part of the problem. Though most historians think Pius outgrew this youthful malady, Hasler found indications that his illness was lifelong.

The triumphant "infallibilists" destroyed much Vatican I docuмentation long ago, and most of what remains was secret until Pope Paul opened the archives on Pius IX in 1970. Even so, Hasler says he had to become a "detective." Though his is the first book based on the long-sealed archives, the church denied him access to much Pius material.

So far, Vatican spokesmen have not commented on Hasler's book. The German bishops, however, swiftly publicized a scathing review by a conservative historian who dismissed it as old stuff, biased and either "simply bad or slyly perfidious." A more friendly opinion, not surprisingly, comes from Father Hans Küng of the University of Tubingen, who wrote a celebrated attack on infallibility seven years ago. Hasler's book, he says, "only confirms that the inquiry into infallibility is not yet closed." The church, Küng asserts, "cannot avoid the issue."

This is a joke. What is this heretic garbage you spew in our faces? Do you honestly believe Vatican II was better than Vatican I? Condemning Vatican I excludes you from the Catholic Church. Your viewpoints are so over the top and heretic that they are hardly worth addressing anymore.

http://www.cathar.info/1209_inquisition.htm

The Roman Inquisition The Roman Inquisition, more correctly the Congregation of the Inquisition, was set up in 1542 by Pope Paul III to help eradicate Protestantism from Italy. It was composed of cardinals, one of whom had proposed its establishment in the first place. He later became Pope himself, taking the name Paul IV. A keen opponent of the free exchange of ideas, he enjoys the distinction of having put even his own writings on the Index.

Procedures of the Roman Inquisition were no more just than those of earlier inquisitions, and executions became more common than in Spain. Freethinkers and scientists were added to the existing categories of victim for torture and execution. It was this inquisition that was responsible for burning the foremost philosopher of the Italian Renaissance, Giordano Bruno, in 1600; and for inducing the foremost scientist, Galileo, to recant under the threat of torture .

Book burning was as popular as elsewhere, but political repression added a new dimension. This persecution too continued for centuries, until the papacy became too far out of step with the rest of Western Christendom. Eventually the Church decided to change its ways, or at least give the appearance of changing them. Pope Pius VII purported to forbid the use of torture in 1816, although in practice it continued to be used for decades to come. Public burnings became something of an embarrassment too. The answer was not to abandon executions but to carry them out more discreetly. Pius IX, in an edict of 1856, sanctioned ‘secret execution’. In the Papal States things had changed little since the Middle Ages – it was for example still a crime to eat meat on a feast day. Political trials were conducted by priests, whose power was absolute. Again, the accused were not permitted legal representation, nor were they allowed to face their accusers. All this came to an end only in 1870, when the Papal States were seized. The last prisoners of the Inquisition were released , and the Pope became a self-confined prisoner in his own palace.

In 1908 the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Inquisition changed its name to the Holy Office. In 1967 it changed it again, this time to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It still functions from a large building near the sacristy of St Peter’s in Rome. Since 1870 its dungeons have been converted into offices. Despite the name change, there is no apparent embarrassment about its history. On the contrary it still conducts heresy trials according to rules that breach what are elsewhere regarded as elementary rules of natural justice .

Despite the methodical destruction of Church torture chambers in modern times there is still evidence of their existence – not only medieval records but the testimony of early penal reformers like John Howard (1726–1790). Museums throughout Europe display instruments of torture carefully designed to inflict the maximum of pain over prolonged periods without shedding blood (a Papal requirement).

Because so many records have been lost, no one knows how many men, women and children were tortured or burned to death over the centuries by the various inquisitions. Similarly undetermined is the number of families dispossessed, children orphaned, communities destroyed. All we can say with certainty is that the pain and suffering that was caused is incalculable. Even sources sympathetic to the Roman Church have accepted estimates in excess of nine million.

One irony is that the Medieval, Spanish and Roman Inquisitions would all have burned Jesus as a persistent heretic if he had appeared before them. They might each have done so on different grounds: for example for advocating absolute poverty, for practicing Judaism, and for criticising St Peter.

Classiccom habitually spews much of the same venom I have had to endure since childhood growing up and living my entire life in a predominantly fundamentalist-protestant anti-Catholic region!  I recognize Classiccom for what he is.  He is an enemy of the true Church; he is an enemy of our Catholic traditions (see his comments about the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Holy Rosary in his thread Pope Pius IX - Mason around pages 7 - 9 of that thread); and he is even an enemy to the entire concept of the Papacy going back, in his quote, to before the days of the Protestant Reformation!!!!!!!

He serves no good on here!  I had not previously kicked up much because I am new here and am just now fully realizing how far outside the realm of any stretched definition of Catholicism he is!  I was starting to think perhaps it may be good that he be allowed to stay that he may be converted.  But he will not be.  He has been on here since 2007!  Has he been spreading his non-Catholic doctrine all this time?  He is head-strong and set on leading souls into something akin to protestantism or worse.  He is hurling insults to the faith and expressing doubts, the nature of which I have only heard (but have frequently heard) from the mouths of anti-Catholic protestants!

Begone with him from this forum for the preservation of the souls of others and may our Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon his soul!

Classiccom,

You apparently share the views or support the piece from the website you quote, and that piece sheds Popes in a most unfavorable light back to 1542.  That is the reason I think you are an enemy of the Papacy going back at least to before the protestant reformation (I agree REVOLT is more accurate).

Now I'm not entirely sure what you meant by quoting that website because you talk in circles and deny me straight answers.  I've asked the following 2 or 3 times in the Crisis section in your Pope Pius IX - Mason thread:

What are your views on praying to the Blessed Virgin Mary and to the saints?  Please give a bold straight answer in your own words to my question, as I did, despite my "problem with the truth," in response to your query as to why I consider you an enemy of the Papacy, rather than referring me to Bayside, etc., and leaving me to surmise your intricate position without full clarity.

I reviewed the cathar.info website you quoted from.  Though quite scholarly (it appears to be a travel guide trying to sensationalize an area to attract tourists), is clearly sympathetic to the non-Christian or heretical Cathars, and portrays the Roman Catholic Church in a bad light generally, and several Popes specifically, back at least to the middle of the 13th century.

Check out the references to Catholics devotion to the "wrong God," the "Bad God," "Roman Catholics were voluntarily worshipping Satan," at http://www.cathar.info/120111_catharviews.htm
Granted, this section supposes the Cathar point of view.  But the entire section is against the Church.  However, the section purported to be the Catholic point of view (http://www.cathar.info/120112_catholicviews.htm) also contains criticism of the Church and puts the Church in a bad light.

Your bringing up the inquisition is more of the same stuff I heard from fundamentalist anti-Catholic protestants upon leaving Catholic elementary school and entering high school!  All of the comments about Catholics drawing and quartering protestants and the steel mummies.

If I'm fortunate enough to get a straight answer about your position regarding the Blessed Virgin Mary, I expect you will be so worked up you won't be able to refrain from hurling another insult commonplace among anti-Catholics by calling us "Mary-worshippers!"