The Church of Rome reached a state of extreme tension in 1968, amid the sexual revolution taking place in Western culture, when Pope Paul issued his encyclical Humanae Vitae , condemning the use of artificial methods of contraception. He put his authority on the line, making his decision against the overwhelming majority of his birth control commission. The whole affair precipitated one of the most serious crises for papal authority since Luther. Gradually a strong body of opinion emerged critical of the pope for not acting in cooperation with the bishops in issuing his encyclical.
From the beginning of that brisk October, when 2,540 out of 2,908 eligible cardinals, patriarchs, bishops, and abbots arrived in Rome, it was apparent Vatican II would be a council unlike any other. The sheer weight of numbers showed that. There had been only six hundred to seven hundred fathers at the First Vatican Council, which proclaimed the infallibility of the pope in 1869–70. At the eighteen-year-long Council of Trent, which condemned the Protestant Reformation, only about two hundred members voted on the decrees. This time there were 230 fathers from a country that had been mission territory until 1908—the United States. The American group was second only to the Italian, which had 430 members. There were 230 Africans and more than 300 from Asia.
Pius XI drafted the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (“With Deep Anxiety”). It was the first major church document to criticize Nazism. Smuggled into Germany, it was read on Palm Sunday from every Catholic pulpit—before a single copy had fallen into Nazi hands. As Richard Pierard explains, the encyclical protested the oppression of the church and called on Catholics to resist the idolatrous cult of race and state, to stand against the perversion of Christian doctrines and morality, and to maintain their loyalty to Christ, his church, and Rome. Hitler reacted furiously at first, but then decided to avoid a break with Rome by treating the encyclical with silence. Knowing that he had the support of the German Catholic laypeople, Hitler simply stepped up the pressure on the churches to eliminate the possibility of organized resistance.
In June 1871 Victor Emmanuel transferred his residence to Rome, ignoring all protests and excommunications of the pope. The new government offered the pope an annual subsidy together with the free and unhindered exercise of all his spiritual functions. But Pius angrily rejected the offer and continued his protests as the “prisoner of the Vatican.” He forbade Italy’s Catholics to participate in political elections. But this only left a free field to the radicals. The result was an increasingly anticlerical course in the Italian government. This unpleasant condition, the Roman Question, reached no solution until Benito Mussolini concluded the Lateran Treaty in February 1929. In the treaty, the pope renounced all claims to the former Papal States and received full sovereignty in the small Vatican State.
Liberals initially welcomed Pope Pius IX (1846–78). He was a warm, kindly, well-meaning man, and the liberals took him for a true reformer. Some dreamed of an Italian federation under the pope. But Pius suddenly changed his mind about the Papal States when revolutionaries assassinated the first papal prime minister, Count Pellegrino Rossi. Revolution broke out in Rome, and Pius was forced to flee. With French military help, he regained Rome and the Papal States, but this time Pius insisted on a return to the old absolutist rule.
After a wide-ranging study of conditions in the Church of Rome, the commission issued in 1537 a formal report, Advice . . . concerning the Reform of the Church . Disorder in the church, the report said, could be traced directly to the need for reform. The papal office was too secular. Both popes and cardinals needed to give more attention to spiritual matters and stop flirting with the world. Bribery in high places, abuses of indulgences, evasions of church law, prostitution in Rome: these and other offenses must cease.