Count Mastai-Ferretti, Bishop of Imola, the 254th pope since
the inception of St. Peter’s primacy, who had been elevated to the apostolic
throne two years after the Declaration of the Báb, and the duration of whose
pontificate exceeded that of any of his predecessors, will be permanently
remembered as the author of the Bull which declared the Immaculate Conception
of the Blessed Virgin (1854), referred to in the Kitáb-i-Íqán, to be a doctrine
of the Church, and as the promulgator of the new dogma of Papal Infallibility
(1870). Authoritarian by nature, a poor statesman, disinclined to conciliation,
determined to preserve all his authority, he, while he succeeded through his
assumption of an ultramontane attitude in defining further his position and in
reinforcing his spiritual authority, failed, in the end, to maintain that
temporal rule which, for so many centuries, had been exercised by the heads of
the Catholic Church.
- Shoghi Effendi (‘The Promised Day Is Come’)
