Although Roman Catholics never considered themselves a nationality as such, the struggle of the papacy with the emerging force of nationalism in and around Italy meant that the 19th-century popes did assert the independent sovereignty of the Papal States (shrunk to the Vatican territory after 1870) and conducted a certain amount of “cultivation of culture” within their Roman domain.

Early Christian churches and monuments had always been maintained for reasons of religious piety. To these were added, in the 19th century, the Roman Colosseum, as a site of martyrdom, and the catacombs, some of which had initially come to light around 1600; the catacomb excavations of Giovanni Battista De Rossi (1822-1894) were among the most important ones conducted on European soil in the 19th century (La Roma sotterranea Cristiana, 3 vols, 1864-77). Following Napoleon’s annexation of Rome (1809) and the French looting of the Vatican art collections, Pius VII (r. 1800-23), who had been imprisoned by Napoleon between 1809 and 1814, sent Canova on a mission to retrieve the looted artworks. Conversely, he donated the larger part of the “Palatinate” manuscripts from his Vatican Library to the University Library of Heidelberg, from which city these manuscripts had been looted in the 17th century. This marked the beginning of the papacy’s more consciously historicist policy concerning the cultural heritage of the Eternal City. Pius and his successors (especially Gregory XVI and Pius IX) restored Roman triumphal arches, aquaducts and other pagan-imperial remains, and enlarged the museal function of their art and antiquities collections. (The excavation of the Forum Romanum was not systematically undertaken until after 1870, however, i.e. after the end of papal rule.) Architectural maintenance became more historicist in orientation, aiming to preserve or restore older features rather than adjusting them to contemporary taste.

Meanwhile, the official art sponsored by the papacy (mainly statues and paintings of saints, religious scenes and altarpieces, and portraits of the popes themselves) was following the general Romantic-Academic taste developed by European luminaries gathered in the city, like Thorvaldsen and the Nazarenes. The Nazarene style, combining Biedermeier sentimentalism with fresco-derived bright or pastel coloration and clear outlines, would dominate all religious art well into the 20th century. Conversely, the institution of the Prix de Rome (awarded to promising artists in France, Holland and Belgium) and the presence of artistic and scientific academies from all over Europe would ensure Rome’s continuing transnational function as a concentrated European Parnassus; in the later century, the Villa Borghese gardens gradually acquired the function of a Walk of Fame for representative Great Men from many European countries and beyond.

The papal aegis for Rome’s urban-metropolitan culture-cultivation vanished with the popes’ loss of temporal power and the city’s conquest by the nationalist forces of the new Italy in 1870. Since Napoleon, and especially since 1848, the papacy had viewed national self-determination and nationalism with apprehension, denouncing and condemning it as one of the errors of modernity and firmly placing the pope’s authority on the side of the reactionary monarchies in the Metternich system. This led to some frictions in areas where Catholicism reinforced an ethnonational opposition to the state (in Ireland, Brittany, Poland); some prelates, like the Croatian and Irish archbishops Strossmayer and MacHale, for that reason were ill at ease with the papacy’s condemnation of nationalism. Elsewhere, that papal policy led to frictions between a more radical lower clergy and their more conservative episcopal superiors, who followed the Roman line.

In a countermove against the rising tide of nationalism (which had briefly driven Pius IX out of Rome in 1848), the papacy intensified the loyalty of Catholics at large, also outside Italy (the policy being known, hence, as Ultramontanism). This took the form of devotional campaigns such as those around the Marian apparitions at Lourdes, the Sacred Heart or Christ the King; a noticeable trend towards a beatification or canonization of “national” saints emerged (the Martyrs of Gorcum, Peter Canisius; Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher; Oliver Plunkett; Joan of Arc, Theresia of Lisieux, the “Curé of Ars” John Vianney, Bernadette of Lourdes). The pope’s central authority amongst his bishops was bolstered by a Council in 1870, when Pius IX defined the dogma of the pope’s infallibility when addressing doctrinal matters ex cathedra. Resistance against the notion of papal infallibility was strong among those prelates who played a nation-building role within their own countries; the anti-infallibility minority was led by Dupanloup and included Strossmayer and MacHale.

Ultramontanism intensified the confessionalization of politics in secularist or Protestant countries with large Catholic populations, such as  France, Britain, Prussia and the Netherlands. The papacy’s claim to Catholic citizens’ loyalty was experienced as a threat by national governments, and had the effect of thwarting, among a sizeable section of the population, the state’s ambitions to impose a “secular religion” (i.e. to assume charismatic authority by invoking a divinely-sanctioned identity). As a matter of principle, Ultramontanism challenged the Protestant foundations and self-image of the Dutch, British and Prussian states; in actual practice, it led to conflicts over public worship, education or divorce legislation. In the British case, the development played into a growing medievalist historicism in the Anglican Church, in church design and use of sacramentals, which was repugnant to more evangelically-minded “Low Church” Protestants; this came to a head in the mid-century “Oxford Movement” and the Catholic conversion of its leader John Henry Newman. In the German case the conflicts of the 1840s escalated into what is known as the Kulturkampf. In Ireland, it drove Catholics towards the separatist-nationalist end of the political spectrum. In the Netherlands it deepened regional, social and party-political divides.

Ultramontanism mimicked nationalistic mobilizing policies, and amounted, in effect, to a “papal nationalism”. It inspired cultural production (devotional effigies, statuettes, etc; novels like Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis?, 1895), monumentalism, mobilization through sociability, literacy schemes through popular periodicals and book clubs, and large-scale festive demonstrations. In France, the cult of Joan of Arc began as a Catholic anti-secular campaign but developed into a national state-church consensus policy; but the building of the Sacré-Cœur was an Ultramontanist challenge to the secularism of the Third Republic. In the 20th century, Ultramontanist activism drifted, at least in its stylistic repertoire and self-presentation, towards corporatist anti-individualism in the style of the Action française and of the movements around authoritarian leaders of the interwar period; with these the Catholic Church shared, at least in those decades, an overriding anti-Communism and a mistrust of liberal democracy. This type of Ultramontanism culminated under Pius X (r. 1903-14), took on tinges of a personality cult around Pius XII (r. 1939-58) and went into a steep decline after that pontiff’s death.