The Unification of Italy was welcomed for it finally seen the end of the detested Papal States. During the Pope’s dictatorship, violence was the rule of the day. The territories were just lining Church coffers and the poor languished. People were put in jail for minor offences such as blasphemy and heresy and speaking against the pope and left there in conditions of abject horror. As the plaque says, the unification “emancipated human thought from the tyranny of the papacy”.
The papacy was responsible for demanding recognition and obedience from Catholics in every nation. Allegiance to this foreign monarch was forced on children by parents and parishes and schools. It caused untold suffering and discrimination. Sadly people would not walk away from the papal totemism to save themselves from all that. Children died and families starved all because an evil old man was their totem, their Vicar of Christ. And most know that if Christianity got its social and political power back they would be trapped in a genocidal theocracy. The papacy if it still had the states would remain a cause of long and persistent and twisted wars.
Pope Pius IX in his Syllabus condemned freedom of religion. It did not exist under his evil rule.