ABSTRACT
Italian anticlericals had a unique problem: they were on the enemy’s home ground. However, this did not seem to be a disadvantage during the liberal period. Even if other emerging nation states had been faced with the opposition of the Church, nowhere else but in Italy could the Papacy be identified as the chief obstacle to the achievement of national unity. By 1860 it was clear that the hope of having the Church as an ally was an illusion. Neo-Guelfism was dead; and the Syllabus of Errors virtually killed liberal Catholicism. In the next decade a series of conflicts, culminating in the capture of Rome, widened the gap between Church and state. The liberal governing class was forced by papal intransigence into a more anticlerical stance than it had originally intended to adopt.
