Pope Pius

The designation Pope Pius does not identify a single historical person. Twelve bishops of Rome in the Catholic Church have taken the papal name Pius, from Pius I in the second century to Pius XII in the twentieth. The Latin name means pious or dutiful. Because the subject is not further specified by number, secular name, century, or see, no unique year of birth, place of birth, place of death, burial site, feast day, or list of patronages can be verified for one individual. Assigning any of those fields would be an arbitrary substitution of one pontiff for another.

The earliest bearer, Pius I, appears in the traditional Roman lists as bishop of Rome in the mid-second century, commonly placed around the 140s to 150s. Later compilations such as the Liber Pontificalis associate him with Aquileia in northern Italy and present him as a contemporary of Marcion and of Justin Martyr, but almost nothing about his family, exact birth year, or death can be confirmed from documents of his own time. A long gap followed. No medieval pope used the name. It was revived in the fifteenth century by Enea Silvio Piccolomini as Pius II and then used repeatedly in the early modern and modern periods.

Later popes of the name had fully documented careers that cannot be collapsed into one life. Pius IV and Pius V belong to the age of the Council of Trent and the Catholic Reform; Pius V, a Dominican, is associated with the Roman Catechism, the Roman Missal, and the Holy League victory at Lepanto. Pius VI and Pius VII confronted the French Revolution and Napoleonic domination of Italy and the Papal States. Pius IX, elected in the nineteenth century, defined the Immaculate Conception, presided over the First Vatican Council and the definition of papal infallibility, and lost temporal rule over the Papal States. Pius X is remembered for liturgical and canonical reform and for the campaign against Modernism. Pius XI concluded the Lateran Treaty with Italy. Pius XII governed during the Second World War and the early Cold War. Each had a known secular name, birthplace, and pre-election career; none of those particulars belongs to an undifferentiated Pope Pius.

Several of these men were later beatified or canonized, including Pius I in ancient cult, Pius V, and Pius X, each with a distinct feast and patronage. Others were not. Some were members of religious orders; most were secular clergy. Later Latin-rite popes were bound to clerical celibacy; the marital status of the second-century Pius I is not securely documented. The Coptic Orthodox Pope of Alexandria is a different office; the Coptic succession does not contain a comparable numbered series of pontiffs named Pius, and the name does not denote a patriarch or catholicos of an Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, or Church of the East see. The biographical fields that require one person therefore remain empty. Reliable history can describe the papal name and the twelve men who bore it; it cannot invent a single birth year, city, or tomb for Pope Pius as such.