Quanta Cura & The Syllabus of Errors

This encyclical letter of Pope Pius IX was promulgated in 1864 and issued with the attached Syllabus of Errors. The document was dispatched to all the bishops of the Catholic world “in order that these same bishops may have before their eyes all the errors and pernicious doctrines which he [Pius IX] has reprobated and condemned.” The Syllabus is a catalogue of eighty propositions, which the pope condemned as erroneous, and which are considered to form the basis of the heresy of Modernism, which has been anathematized by a number of succeeding pontiffs.

By : Pope Pius IX (1792 - 1878), translated by Archbishop Martin Spalding (1810 - 1872)

01 - Quanta Cura 02 - The Syllabus of Errors

In August 1863, Count Charles Montalembert, a proponent of Liberal Catholicism gave a series of speeches in Mechelen, Belgium in which he held forth on his views concerning the future of modern society and the Church. His first speech aimed to show the necessity of Christianizing the democracy by accepting modern liberties. His second speech dealt with liberty of conscience, and the conclusion he drew was that the Church could be in perfect harmony with religious liberty and with the modern state which is founded on that liberty, and that everyone is free to hold that the modern state is to be preferred to the one which preceded it. While supported by Engelbert Sterckx, Archbishop of Mechelen and Félix Dupanloup, Bishop of Orléans; Louis-Édouard-François-Desiré Pie, Bishop of Poitiers; the papal nuncio at Brussels, Bishop Mieczysław Halka-Ledóchowski; and the Jesuits who edited the "Civiltà Cattolica" were alarmed at these declarations. At the end of March, 1864, he received a letter from Cardinal Antonelli, Papal Secretary of State, finding fault with the Mechelen speeches.

Quanta cura was prompted by the September Convention of 1864 agreement between the then newly emerging Kingdom of Italy and the Second French Empire of Napoleon III. France had previously occupied Rome with French troops in order to prevent the Kingdom of Italy from defeating the Papal States with the Capture of Rome, thereby blocking an Italian military action that would complete the unification of the Kingdom of Italy on the Italian Peninsula. While viewed a necessary component of Italian Unification by Italians supporting the Risorgimento, France agreed to the complete withdraw its military garrison from Rome primarily as defensive movement of her troops back into France in anticipation of a military conflict on French soil that would later become known as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Pius IX closed the Quanta cura encyclical with a plenary indulgence by declaring a Jubilee year for 1865.