Friday, March 29, AD 2024 5:02am

Pio Nono: First Pope to be Photographed

A liberal pope, that’s the most egregious thing I can imagine!

Metternich’s reaction upon hearing of the election of Pius IX

 

Pio Nono is often regarded in secular histories as a hopeless reactionary.  That is as misguided as the Metternich quote above, when the Pope was regarded as a liberal at the beginning of his reign.  Pio Nono was Pio Nono, and it is mistaken to attempt to place him into a secular box.

In regard to technology, and the 19th century was in many ways a time period when technology was changing in a more revolutionary fashion than our own day, Pius tended to eagerly embrace it.  Photography was a prime example of this.  Before the reign of Pius, the pope to almost all Catholics outside of the hierarchy was a fairly shadowy and mysterious figure.  Most had little idea of what the pope looked like, and while his office was understood as important, the man behind the office was a question mark.

Pionono

 

Pio Nono changed that.  He used the new science of photography to form a link between himself and the average Catholic.  The first Pope photographed, Pio Nono sent out many autographed photographs of himself.  It was a rare rectory by the end of the reign of Pio Nono that did not have a picture of the Pope.

Pio Nono understood the value of what we call public relations.  He once acknowledged that he was the number one attraction for tourists in Rome.  He also had a sharp sense of humor, telling the Anglican bishop of the Mediterranean that he found himself living in the bishop’s diocese!  We can see this understanding of the attraction of his personality in some of his photographs:

412px-Pius_ix

Where a pope less attuned to popular tastes might have regarded this picture as too casual, Pio Nono understood that this pose would appeal to Catholics who wished to see that their Pope, with a smile half formed on his lips, was not some forbidding monarch, but a friend who wished to share with them his love of Christ.

I have long regarded Pio Nono, with his great flaws and great strengths, leavened with wit and humor, as one of the most fascinating men ever to wear the shoes of the Fisherman.  He was the Pope who saw the ending of the role of Pope as a temporal monarch, an event he fought futilely against, and the Pope who at Vatican I established the modern Papacy.  We see in his photographs the complexity of the man who reluctantly bid farewell to the past of the Papacy, while simultaneously establishing a much greater role for the pope in the modern world.

 

Pope Pius IX

0 0 votes
Article Rating
5 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
WaywardSailor
WaywardSailor
Monday, September 30, AD 2013 9:53am

Pius IX was also the first pope to set foot on United States territory on August 1, 1850 when he, along with King Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, visited USS Constitution at anchor in the harbor of Gaeta, Italy. He was received on board with a 21-gun salute and gave his benediction to the eighty Catholic members of the crew. He stayed aboard for about three hours (becoming seasick in he captain’s cabin!) and departed to a second 21-gun salute. He later sent rosaries to those crew members he had blessed.

Fabio P.Barbieri
Fabio P.Barbieri
Wednesday, October 2, AD 2013 2:48pm

Pius IX had two papacies, not one. As a spiritual leader he was continuously successful, leading the Church against all the odds from triumph to triumph. As a king and political leader – the last king-Pope – he made every mistake he could possibly make (even being seen together with the abominable Ferdinand II was an incredible error of judgment, since even reactionary powers like Austria could not bear that mindless brute) and made the end of temporal power a certainty. It is my view that when God has some end in mind, He may cause a Pope to be made who is not necessarily bad, but is the wrong one to fight a certain battle in a certain position. In 1870, it is my view, the time had come for temporal power to come to an end – for reasons too long to argue here, but I will defend this view if I have to – and a Pope came to power who was the right man to lead the spiritual power of Peter against the mightiest powers on the earth, but absolutely the wrong one to keep even a shred of the Pope’s old kingdoms. Likewise, nothing is more evident than that the wrath of God was over Europe and the word from the last years of the Victorian age, and that the terrible consummation we have seen in nation after nation during the twentieth century was the terrible punishment for the arrogance and godlessness of man in this age. And so, just as the disaster was unfolding, the Holy Spirit sent us two saints – Pius X and the still uncanonized Benedict XV who were, each, absolutely the wrong saint at the wrong time in purely political terms. Pius X all but went to war against France, and made the Church alien, and therefore irrelevant, to modern culture; Benedict XV added a streak of fanatical pacifism hitherto alien to the Papacy, which led him to condemn the struggle against German aggression as a “useless slaughter”, infuriating the patriotic leaders who knew that they were trying to save their nations against German assault, while gaining zero points from the Germans, who hated him on principle. The result is that the Vatican was completely excluded from the politics of Versailles – where every other delegation, concerned or not with the war, was received, the Pope alone being left out – and left the politics of Europe to unfold essentially with no kind of input from St.Peter.

trackback
Tuesday, October 8, AD 2013 5:30am

[…] (Hattip to The American Catholic commenter Wayward Sailor who first alerted me to this incident.) […]

trackback
Tuesday, October 8, AD 2013 5:32am

[…] (Hattip to The American Catholic commenter Wayward Sailor who first alerted me to this incident.) […]

Discover more from The American Catholic

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Scroll to Top