Maybe every century is a difficult one for the Catholic Church, maybe for all churches, but it seems that the 19th Century was particularly so. The Enlightenment had challenged with science many of the long-held beliefs, and the philosophies promoted by Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke and many more thinkers threatened to shake the foundations upon which the Church was built. The French Revolution of 1789 resulted in the confiscation of much Church property on the continent, some of it owned by the Scottish and Irish Catholic Churches. During the subsequent Napoleonic Wars the Papal States – an area of some 17,000 square miles in central Italy and, as the name implies, ruled by the Pope – were annexed by the French. These served as a warning to The Church as to what could happen when liberal democratic concepts and progressive thought were allowed to run amok.

The further revolutions or rebellions against the establishment which occurred across Europe throughout the first two thirds of the 19th Century were based on liberalism and nationalism in their various guises, and any threat to the status quo was viewed by the Vatican with suspicion. Thus the uprisings in 1830, 1848, 1867 were considered threatening to the existing political order, of which the Catholic Church outside the United Kingdom had traditionally been a part.

In 1861 all the former papal territories, with the exception of Rome itself and its surrounding region, joined the new Kingdom of Italy. In Ireland, the Catholic bishops had been instrumental in raising a battalion of some 1300 men who were sent to defend the Pope against the Italian nationalists, little recognising the irony that the Italians only desired a version of what many in Ireland wanted for themselves: a self-ruling nation state. They were defeated within a year, and many ended up in the USA fighting for the Union. Rome and its patrimony remained separate only because they were protected by French troops, who eventually withdrew in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. Italian troops entered Rome on September 20, 1870 and after a plebiscite in October of that year, it became the capital of Italy. The Papal States were no more.

So, it was little wonder that the Vatican had a paranoia with what it saw as destabilising liberal movements; these had cost her both her lands and her secular influence in Italy. Perhaps as a reaction, whilst its origins pre-date the period in question, what became known as Ultramontanism flourished in the Catholic Church. The movement essentially promoted a highly centralised Church run by the Vatican where, irrespective of location, canon law took precedence over civil law in case of conflict. Supporters of the alternative model, often referred to as Recusants – including many of the old Scottish Jacobite families, and the prominent and influential Irish Archbishop McHale of Tuam – favoured a more decentralised model with closer links to the nation state within whose borders the Church was permitted to exist, and whose laws and culture they adopted.

It was during this period that the idea emerged that a formal declaration be made that the Pope was infallible. On the cusp of being dethroned as ruler of the Papal States, Pope Pius IX called the First Vatican Council in 1869 where he attempted to buttress his own spiritual authority. Though many cardinals allegedly believed it dangerous to try to define quite how and when the Pope might speak infallibly, an agreement was finally reached.

The declaration stated that the Pope ‘when he speaks ex cathedra, that is when discharging the office of Pastor and Doctor of all Christians’ is ‘possessed of infallibility’, when ‘he defines... a doctrine concerning faith and morals to be held by the Universal Church, through the divine assistance promised to him in Blessed Peter’.

In a later chapter in Edinburgh’s First Hibernian, we see that the ‘imprisoned’ status of the Pope was a dominant subject of conversation amongst the Edinburgh Catholic community in the 1870s, with the League of San Sebastian in particular promoting the cause of releasing him. This was displaced in the hot topic league table by Irish Home Rule in the decade that followed, and by the threat of Socialism as the 1890s approached.

Appendix 2 The Demise of the Papal States