The war he now branded as UNJUST AND HURTFUL, had been preached in his own dominions, with his full knowledge and consent, as a new crusade; his condemnation of it stamped him as Austria's vassal. The acts and deeds which had been a steady protest against the principles and the supremacy of the Cabinet of Vienna were at once and for ever annulled. His conscience had taken alarm: he remembered that above his obligations as an Italian king were those of Universal Bishop, and the conflicting principles of the temporal and spiritual attributes of the Papacy were brought into open antagonism.
From the encyclical may be dated the beginning of the end. The warnings, the threatenings, so long bravely resisted, all appeared suddenly to take effect. As if aroused to the conviction that the innovations he had sanctioned clashed with the independence of the Church, his mind now bent itself solely to repair the evil into which he had been led by the sympathies and weakness of the man usurping the higher duties of the priest. The Constitution especially clashed with the hierarchical polity; and hence the summer of 1848 was passed in unseemly contentions between the Pope and his lay-ministers, zealous on their side to maintain inviolate the power and attributes of the Chambers. These dissensions were no secret in the country, and unhappily opened a door to Mazzini, the chief of the republican party in Italy, and his adherents, who previously, in the enthusiastic confidence inspired by Pius IX., had found no hearing. Side by side with these revolutionists were agents of the Austrian police, and the reactionary party, seeking, under the disguise of the most fanatical democracy, to urge the population into excesses which should speedily justify an Austrian intervention. “We can all remember,” writes Massimo d'Azeglio to the inhabitants of the Legations, cautioning them against being this time the dupes of similar intrigues, “we can all remember, in 1848-9, certain journalists and street orators, who were only too successful in dragging the most ignorant and inflammable of the population into extravagant lengths; and whom afterwards, on the return of the Austrian army, we saw impudently walking about arm-in-arm with the officers, and sneering in the face of those they had led into error.”[13]