When in 1857 an assassin’s blade felled Marie-Dominique-Auguste Sibour, then Archbishop of Paris, some parts of the Catholic press were quick to proclaim the slain prelate a martyr for the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. His murderer, a censured and mentally unbalanced priest, had cried “down with the goddesses!” as he attacked; the killer’s hatred for Blessed Pius IX’s dogmatic definition of 1854 would be spelled out at trial.
Yet those who sought to cast the murdered archbishop as a martyr had to reckon with the fact that he was one of those who had counselled the pope against defining the dogma. This was not because he had considered it untrue, but simply inopportune. When the bull Ineffabilis Deus came, he accepted it with docility and clearly expected as much from his clergy. It was an expectation which in at least one case proved ill-founded.
