Pius VIII

Francesco Saverio Castiglioni was a canon lawyer of European reputation who had spent six years in Napoleon's prisons for refusing an oath of allegiance, and Pius VII, who liked him, is said to have told him he would one day be Pius VIII. The cardinals fulfilled the prophecy on 31 March 1829, choosing a moderate after Leo XII's severity. He was sixty-seven, bent double by a chronic ailment of the neck, and visibly dying; the reign lasted twenty months.

He used them sensibly. His one encyclical, Traditi humilitati (May 1829), rehearsed the standard condemnations of indifferentism, Bible societies, and secret societies, but his practical decisions ran the other way. He welcomed the Catholic Emancipation Act that gave British and Irish Catholics civil rights in April 1829, a victory his predecessors had awaited for a century. He resolved the poisonous dispute over mixed marriages in Prussia with a brief allowing priests to assist passively at weddings between Catholics and Protestants, a compromise that kept the peace for a decade. And when the July Revolution of 1830 overthrew the Bourbon Charles X, the most Catholic king in Europe, Pius recognized the new citizen-king Louis-Philippe within weeks and instructed the French bishops to pray for him, choosing the church's freedom to function over dynastic loyalty. The zelanti were appalled; the decision anticipated by sixty years the policy Leo XIII would make his own.

He died on 30 November 1830, the shortest pontificate of the nineteenth century, and rumor said he had been poisoned; an autopsy found only the diseases he had visibly suffered from. He is remembered, when remembered at all, as proof that a pope could be conservative in doctrine and realistic in politics, and as the last pope until John Paul I to reign for less than two years.