PIE, LOUIS. - Apologist and cardinal, b. at Pontgenin (diocese of Chartres), Sept. 26, 1815, d. at Poitiers, May 18, 1880. A student of St. Sulpice, a priest from 1839, bishop of Poitiers from Sept. 28, 1849, and cardinal from May 12, 1879.
His oratorical and pastoral works, in Oeuvres, (Paris 1887, 9th ed., 9 vols.), excel for force of reasoning and for majestic eloquence.
Anti-Gallican in the manner of the early Lamennais (v.), P. was recognized as the head of the militant French Catholics gathered around the Univers. He reestablished the Roman liturgy in his diocese (1856), after having had it adopted by his confreres at the provincial Council of Bordeaux (1850).
He opposed the liberal Catholics and contributed to the formation and promulgation of the Syllabus, of which he defended a positive interpretation against political naturalism. He founded hopes of religious restoration on Napoleon III, which collapsed after the Congress of Paris of 1856. The Emperor's attitude in the face of the annexation of a part of the Papal States to the Kingdom of Italy (1861) was stigmatized by him as a Pilate-like act. This earned him a condemnation by the Council of State. A friend of the Count of Chambord, in 1873 he drew up a draft of a monarchical constitution similar to the Charter of 1814. An opponent of Dupanloup and of Maret, whose famous book on the Council he judged worthy of the gravest theological censures, P. had great influence at the Vatican Council because of his knowledge of Sacred Scripture, of the Fathers and of theology. He was one of the twenty-four members of the Deputation of the Faith and, within it, he also belonged to the restricted Commission of Three. He delivered two reports at the Council, the first on the amendments proposed by Ginhouliac to ch. 4 of the constitution Dei Filius, which were rejected although they were taken into account; the second, a general one, on the Pastor Aeternus, with an appeal to concord, in defense of the urgency of the discussion concerning pontifical infallibility and in praise of the exactness of the proposed formula. Faithful to the directives of Pius IX, he softened them under Leo XIII, to whom he served as an unofficial intermediary with the government of the Republic.