TalkingHistoryPodcast dot com - The Italian Unification

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Tis_Bearself

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While looking for something else, I totally randomed onto this podcast by two brothers who are actually PhD scientists but do history as a hobby, and with apparently zero background decided to make a podcast about The Italian Unification based on their research.


I can’t stand most podcasts, but I am impressed by this one, especially since they started it in 2013 and it took 51 episodes, released approximately monthly, to get to the end in 2019. It’s also helpful that they don’t have visuals because I can listen to it while I’m doing something else or taking a nap and not feel like I’m missing anything. Also, they describe stuff like geography of a region so I can picture it in my head.

Just thought I’d share in case anyone else was interested in 51 episodes of Italian Unification…now I’ll finally understand exactly what happened to the Papal States 🙂
 
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The vast majority of the ones I’ve checked out, usually in the areas of true crime or the unexplained, contain a lot of the presenter’s personality and opinions, and sometimes extraneous chat, especially if it’s two presenters doing the podcast together . I don’t have the patience.

The worst one was a true crime series by two early 20s girls where they drank wine and talked about true crime. The first 15 minutes was basically them drinking, squee-ing and giggling, and when they finally got into talking about the particular serial killer case they were just as annoying. I was listening because I had just found out that a kid I grew up with who lived a block away and his family all went to our church and knew my parents and came over our house, etc years ago had been killed by this killer. When these drunk girls got to his murder they dispensed with it in 10 seconds.

On the plus side I did find one good “just the facts maam” true crime podcast recently but it’s the exception rather than the rule.
 
Yesterday was September 20, the anniversary of the fall of Rome, and a compatriot of mine wrote more or less: “Italy finally took what was hers!”

I felt like smiling, because I imagined someone shouting: “The Pope says that the Papal State belongs to the Church by the will of God, while I, who am not a stupid clerical bigot, affirm that it belongs to Italy by the will of God!”

Of course, the unification of Italy was largely a robbery of the “Savoia” - but don’t say it in Italy, it’s better 😉
It was a valid goal but it had to be pursued in another way and with more patience.

But history is one thing and his legacy is another thing.

It is clear that today I would defend the unification of Italy as resolutely as you do yours.
 
I just accept it as God telling the Church it needs to stay more out of secular affairs, and be more pastoral.

I avoid saying anything in other countries about any history, unless it involves something like said country trying to genocide my ancestors, in which case I will have much to say of course.
 
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What are kids taught in school about this period in their history? Gregory XVI, for example, is said to have busied himself with his secular duties as the ruler of the Papal State to such an extent that he didn’t have much time left over for governing the Church. Can the Papal State be considered a well-governed country? Are questions of this kind addressed in history classes in high school?
 
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I answer:

• In public schools the “Risorgimento” is generally taught with a prejudice favorable to the “Savoia” and their men (Garibaldi etc.)

• I think the papal administration was mediocre, not necessarily because of the popes

• Yes, in public high schools the issues are considered, but never to the point of fully re-establishing historical reality in its brutality, not so much in the Papal States as in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (all of the South). There is a way to soften things up, and to present them as “accidents along the way”, which prevents the full truth from being restored.
 
From what you say here, I presume it’s safe to say that the South enjoyed better government after reunification than before. Would you say the same about Lazio and Emilia-Romagna?
 
I don’t know about Lazio and Emilia Romagna, frankly.

In the South I have the impression that overall he has lost, not gained.
 
I find it an interesting time from a Catholic perspective. There’s a lot of apocalyptic-type writings about it. For example, this part of the lengthy St. Michael exorcism was about it:
These most crafty enemies have filled and inebriated with gall and bitterness the Church, the spouse of the Immaculate Lamb, and have laid impious hands on her most sacred possessions.

In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the See of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety, with the iniquitous design that when the Pastor has been struck, the sheep may be scattered.
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This being Victor Emmanuel II driving the Pope out of Rome proper (making him a prisoner of the Vatican) and setting himself up in the Quirinal Palance (imagine what it would be like today if the President of Italy drove the Pope out of the Vatican and started ruling from the papal throne in St. Peters).

In general, the point of the Leonine prayers after Mass was to return the Pope’s temporal authority (Pius XI changed the intention to the freedom of the Church in Russia after the Lateran Treat in 1929).

Some of Anne Catherine Emmerich’s prophecies likely apply to this time as well with the imagery of the Church and the Masonic anti-Church in Rome and the two opposing “Popes” (remember, at the time the king of Rome and Pope had been inseparable offices for centuries–another making himself king of Rome seemed akin to an antipapacy to many).

I also think the embellished version of La Salette was likely an attempt to connect it to this event. The reference to Rome losing the faith and becoming the seat of the Antichrist refers again to the excommunicated Victor Emmauel II establishing his seat there and replacing the Catholic ethos of the Roman government with a Liberal, irreligious one. The “churches of the evil spirits” are the masonic lodges established there. The evil spirits transporting people around refers to the regime’s national railroad system (the railroad had previously been banned in the Papal States by Pope Gregory XVI, due to how it could be used to further the Liberal Italian unification cause–it’s being built there was one of Bl. Pius IX’s early concessions to the Liberals), etc.
 
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Genesis315 said:
Some of Anne Catherine Emmerich’s prophecies likely apply to this time as well with the imagery of the Church and the Masonic anti-Church in Rome and the two opposing “Popes” (remember, at the time the king of Rome and Pope had been inseparable offices for centuries–another making himself king of Rome seemed akin to an antipapacy to many).
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Assuming Anne even prophecied anything of the sort. Sounds more like something Clemens Brentano would have “embellished”.
I also think the embellished version of La Salette was likely an attempt to connect it to this event. The reference to Rome losing the faith and becoming the seat of the Antichrist refers again to the excommunicated Victor Emmauel II establishing his seat there and replacing the Catholic ethos of the Roman government with a Liberal, irreligious one.
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This embellished version wasn’t the one approved by the Church, right?
 
Tis_Bearself said:
This embellished version wasn’t the one approved by the Church, right?
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Right–the original, approved one came out before the events I described, and the unapproved, embellished one afterward (lending even more credence to my theory the latter was an attempt to by an overzealous person to relate it to those events). I just mentioned it to show the kind of apocalyptic imagery the annexation of Rome inspired.
 
Genesis315 said:
(remember, at the time the king of Rome and Pope had been inseparable offices for centuries–another making himself king of Rome seemed akin to an antipapacy to many).
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Well, yes and no. Don’t forget that 1870 wasn’t the first time a pope had been forcibly removed from office as the temporal ruler of the Papal State. Just yesterday I posted this on another thread:

https://forums.catholic-questions.org/t/are-there-any-martyrs-of-the-unification-of-italy/626052/5?u=bartholomewb
 
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