In 1869, the beleaguered pope called the First Vatican Council. The liberal philosophies and increased nationalism had encouraged freer thinking in the church. Many priests and bishops had begun to question the pope’s power. In a world that was no longer uniformly Catholic, the papacy had also lost political influence. The church needed to address itself to the challenges of liberal thought and the undermining of the importance of tradition in the church. In 1854, Pius had pronounced that the Virgin