How the "Roman Question" was Settled: Explained by the POPE Himself

In How the "Roman Question" was Settled, Pope Pius XI (1857-1939) gives a brief overview of the Lateran Treaty of 1929 between the Catholic church and the Italian government which led to the creation of the Vatican City State. The preamble to the Pope's addresses reads as follows:

"The 'Roman Question,' as men have known it for the past fifty-nine years, took its final shape when the Piedmontese troops on 20th September, 1870, entered Rome and completed the seizure of the States of the Church. Thenceforward the Pope, by pressure of circumstances, was confined to the Vatican, whilst a civil monarch ruled Italy from the Palace of the Quirinal. It became then a question how, without, on the one hand, dissolving Italian unity again, or, on the other, abolishing the supra-national status of the Papacy, to devise a means of reconciling both claims. The Popes have never wavered in their assertion of the essential independence of the Papacy; the Italian State, for its part, has grown more and more 'unified' with the lapse of years."

First published by the Catholic Truth Society in 1933, this new edition has had the text reset.