Pope Pius

The designation Pope Pius does not identify a single historical person. From the second century through the twentieth, twelve bishops of Rome took the papal name Pius, from Pius I, placed by the earliest papal catalogues in the mid-second century, through Pius XII, who reigned from 1939 to 1958. The query gives no numeral, no family name, no Wikidata identifier, and no other disambiguating mark. A unique year of birth, birthplace, death date, burial site, religious order, feast day, or list of patronages therefore cannot be assigned without substituting one man for another, which a careful historical method does not allow.

The name itself is Latin for pious or dutiful. It first appears with Pius I, whom the Liber Pontificalis describes as an Italian, in some recensions from Aquileia, holding the Roman see in the age of the Antonine emperors. Later bearers include the humanist Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini) in the fifteenth century; Pius IV and the Dominican Pius V in the Tridentine sixteenth century, the latter subsequently canonized; Pius VI and Pius VII, whose pontificates ran through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars; Pius IX, whose long nineteenth-century reign included the First Vatican Council; Pius X, a pastoral pope later canonized; Pius XI, who concluded the Lateran Treaty; and Pius XII, whose pontificate covered the Second World War. These men were born in different towns, died in different years, and were buried chiefly but not identically in the Vatican or in Roman basilicas. Several became saints with distinct cults; others were never beatified. No single feast day or patronage list can cover them all without conflation.

Marital status, children, and religious profession likewise cannot be predicated of the name as a class. After the early centuries, Latin bishops of Rome were expected to live as celibates; some Piuses were members of orders (Pius V was a Dominican) and others were secular clergy. Documented wives or offspring are not a uniform fact across the twelve. Patronages attached to individual canonized Piuses, such as those associated with Pius V or Pius X, belong to those saints alone.

What can be stated with confidence is limited and formal. Every historical Pope Pius was male and held the Catholic bishopric of Rome, and therefore counts as pope in the sense used here. None is defined by tenure as patriarch or catholicos of an Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Coptic, or Church of the East see. Further biographical precision requires specifying which Pius is meant.