c. 2000 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ In a solemn ceremony clouded by controversy, Pope John Paul II on Sunday (Sept. 3) beatified Pope John XXIII and his “much loved but also hated and slandered” 19th century predecessor, Pius IX.

Some 100,000 pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square on a warm, sunny morning for the Mass at which the Roman Catholic pontiff declared the two popes and three other prelates blessed, the step below sainthood.

Most of those attending carried banners hailing the beatification of John XXIII, one of the most beloved popes in the history of the church. Large groups traveled to Rome from as far away as Japan, Argentina, Brazil, Lebanon and Spain and from the pope’s native northern Italy.

Critics attacked the Vatican for joining the beatification of Pius IX with that of and John XXIII, whom Italians call “the good pope.” They accused the pope of bowing to pressure from conservatives attempting to turn back the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which John XXIII convened on Oct. 11, 1962.

John Paul acknowledged in his homily that controversy still surrounds the 32-year papacy of Pius IX, the longest in history. Pius IX is best remembered today for fighting the unification of Italy and causing international outrage by ordering papal gendarmes to kidnap a 6-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo Levi Mortara, who had been secretly baptized by a maid during an illness in his infancy.

Despite appeals from the United States, France, Britain, the Netherlands and Spain, the pope refused to return the boy to his family in Bologna. Raised as a papal ward, Mortara became a priest and was among the first to call for Pius IX’s canonization.

“He was much loved but also hated and slandered,” the pope said of Pius IX.

Left-wing Italian politicians joined Jewish groups in protesting the beatification of Italy’s last “pope king,” who ruled over the papal states of central Italy until deposed by the unification of Italy in 1870. They charged that he had rejected freedom of worship and the separation of church and state by imposing Catholicism as the sole state religion.

After the “Risorgimento” that united Italy, Pius IX lived the rest of his life as a so-called prisoner of the Vatican. When his body was being moved to Rome’s Verano cemetery three years after his death in 1878, an angry mob attacked the cortege and almost succeeded in throwing the coffin into the Tiber River.

Jewish groups recalled that after a brief period of tolerance, Pius IX closed the gates of Rome’s Jewish ghetto and referred to Jews, who had lived in Rome since before the birth of Christ, as “dogs,” saying that “there are too many of them present” in the city.

“In the midst of the turbulent events of his time, he was an example of unconditional adhesion to the immutable deposit of the revealed truth,” John Paul said. “Faithful in every circumstance to the obligations of his ministry, he always knew how to give absolute primacy to God and to spiritual values.

“His very long pontificate, indeed was not easy, and he suffered more than a little in carrying out his mission in the service of the gospel.”

The pope praised Pius IX for proclaiming the dogma of the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception and for calling the First Vatican Council, which issued a declaration of papal infallibility “confirming the harmony between faith and reason.”

John XXIII, a Vatican diplomat and patriarch of Venice, who reigned from Oct. 28, 1958, to June 3, 1963, “impressed the world with the affability of his comportment, which showed through his singular goodness of spirit,” John Paul said.

“The image of Pope John that remains in everyone’s memory is of a smiling face and of two arms thrown wide to embrace the entire world,” he said. “So many people were conquered by the simplicity of his spirit, joined to a wide experience of men and events.”

“The wind of change that he carried certainly did not regard doctrine but rather the way of expressing it,” John Paul said.

“His style of speaking and acting was new, and the affection with which he approached the common people and the powers of the earth was new. It was in this spirit that he called the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, which opened a new page in the history of the church.”

The Polish-born John Paul, who attended the council as a young bishop from Krakow, said it helped Christians “to announce the gospel with renewed courage and more watchful attention to the signs of the times.

“The council was indeed a prophetic intuition of this elderly pontiff, who inaugurated it, not without difficulty, in a season of hope for Christians and for humanity,” he said.

John Paul also beatified Tommaso Reggio (1818-1901), an Italian bishop who founded the Congregations of the Sisters of St. Marta; Guillaume-Joseph Chaminade (1761-1850), a French prelate who founded the Marianist Family movement, and Columba Marmion (1858-1923), the Irish-born abbot of the Benedictine Maredsous Abbey in Belgium, noted for his spiritual writings.

DEA END POLK