Infallibility is a problem for me, because it only entered into official doctrine after the First Vatican Council in 1870. The College of Cardinals, after acknowledging that none of its members was inerrant, by majority vote determined that Papal Infallibility was inerrant fact. Unless one accepts that the College of Cardinals as a whole is itself inerrant, its determination that someone else is inerrant is purely a matter of faith: If you think it’s true, that’s what you think; If you don’t no argument is sufficient to convince you.

My opinion on this is colored by two major factors: I don’t believe that any man is infallible – ever; and I believe that Pope Pius IX, the Pope at the time of the determination by the Cardinals, was a disturbing fellow in his private and political life. As well as being very negative about the prospect of the creation of an Italian nation, he also was party in 1858 to the kidnapping of a six year old Jewish child, Edgardo Mortaro, from his parents, after a Catholic servant had secretly taken the child to be baptized into the Catholic faith. His argument was essentially this: 1. This child is a Catholic, because he has been baptized. 2. This child’s parents are not Catholic, because they are Jewish. 3. It is not appropriate for a Catholic child to be brought up by, or as, a Jew. Therefore: 4. I must send the Papal Guard to take this child, which I will raise in my own household. QED!
As his favorite sport with the child was to have him hide under his own cassock (which Pius was wearing at the time. He was 66, and the boy was 6: Although it continued for some time, the 60 year age difference/adult-child dynamic remained constant.), I’m not sure the priestly pedophilia crisis is entirely new to the 20th-21st Centuries. This fellow makes it doubly hard to credit Papal infallibility.

It is intriguing that she could persist under harsh conditioons in an evangelism to a faith she suspected was incorrect – but it is very likely the reading of her diaries suggests more spiritual doubt, or one less limited in duration, than was actually the case.