Prisoner in the Vatican

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A prisoner in the Vatican is the description given to the popes from Pope Pius IX through Pius XI, after the invading armies of King Victor Emmanuel II captured the Papal States and ended the millenial temporal rule of the popes on September 20, 1870 (see Italian unification). Early in the following year, 1871, the Italian capital was moved from Florence to Rome. The Italian government intended to allow the pope to keep that part of Rome called the Leonine City as a small remaining Papal State, but Pope Pius IX would not accept that arrangement. For the next 59 years, the popes refused to recognize the new Italian state and refused to leave the Vatican. The Italian Law of Guarantees required the pope to be accorded honors similar to those given the king, and guaranteed him the right to send and receive ambassadors.

Following the fall of Rome, no diplomatic relations existed between the popes and the Italian State. The Italian rulers took up residence in the pope's Quirinal Palace, and seized church property throughout Rome and Italy, but did not have the political support to seize the Vatican. Even prior to the fall of Rome, Italian republicans had sought to eliminate the papacy, with Giuseppe Garibaldi seeking international support for that end at an 1867 congress in Vienna, where he proposed "The papacy, being the most harmful of all secret societies, ought to be abolished." (Giuseppe Guerzoni, Garibaldi: con documenti editi e inediti, Florence, 1882, Vol. 11, 485.) However, unlike the earlier invasions of Italy by Napoléon, when Pope Pius VI died in French captivity, and Pius VII was taken captive for six years, the tension between the Italian state and the Papacy continued for 59 years, during which time the popes claimed to be unable to leave the Vatican. While some of the Italian revolutionaries thought that the papacy would disappear without the continuance of the papal states, the popes, relieved of their temporal concerns, grew in stature during their years of "imprisonment." Eventually, it became impossible for the Italian state not to recognize the independence of the Vatican, and on February 11, 1929, the Lateran treaties established political relations between Italy and Vatican City.es:Prisionero en el Vaticano