A Letter to the Pope: Bahá'u'lláh's Tablet to Pius IX

In *The Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh,* Adib Taherzadeh devotes a chapter to the Tablet that Bahá’u’lláh, prisoner in the fortress of ‘Akká, addressed in 1868 to Pope Pius IX in the Vatican.

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The Tablet was one of the most direct of the addresses to the sovereigns of the world. Pius IX in 1868 was not only the spiritual head of the Roman Catholic Church but the temporal ruler of the Papal States in central Italy — territories that had been governed by the Holy See for more than a thousand years. He was the senior religious authority of the Christian world.

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The Tablet opens with the proclamation that constitutes its central message: that the Father whose return Christ Himself had foretold had come. The Word concealed in Christ’s ministry had been *made manifest. It hath been sent down in the form of the human temple in this Day.*

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The Tablet calls Pius IX, by name, to recognise the One Who now addressed him. It calls him to come, in person, into the presence of the Manifestation — to leave the Vatican palaces and the Papal apartments and to come into the prison cell of ‘Akká where the One Whose Return he had pledged his life to prepare for now sat in chains.

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The Tablet did not stop there. It addressed, with great specificity, the temporal arrangements of the papacy itself. The Pope, the Tablet counselled, should renounce his temporal sovereignty. He should leave the palaces. He should sell the gold and the precious things hoarded in the Vatican treasuries. He should live, as Christ had lived, in poverty and in service to his flock.

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> Sell, then, the embellished ornaments thou possessest, and > expend them in the path of God, Who causeth the night to > return upon the day, and the day to return upon the night.

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The Tablet was sent, Taherzadeh records, by the customary means. There is no record that Pius IX read it. There is strong evidence that he did not.

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History, however, did. In the autumn of 1870 — fewer than two years after the Tablet was dispatched — Italian revolutionary forces under Victor Emmanuel II entered Rome. The Papal States were annexed to the new kingdom of Italy. Pius IX retreated into the Vatican, where he proclaimed himself a *prisoner* of the new Italian state. The temporal sovereignty of the papacy that the Tablet had counselled him to renounce voluntarily was taken from him by force, in the event he had foretold.

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The papacy that succeeded Pius IX gradually accommodated itself to the loss. By the twentieth century the principle the Tablet had articulated — that the spiritual mission of the Church was distinct from temporal sovereignty — had become axiomatic in Catholic thought.

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The Tablet to the Pope is, Taherzadeh observes, one of the clearest examples in the corpus of the Tablets to the Kings of the predictive accuracy of their counsels and the unhappy record of their reception.

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*Paraphrased from The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, Vol. 3 — 'Akká, the Early Years (Adib Taherzadeh, George Ronald, 1983); see original for full text.*

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