Sisto Riario Sforza (5 December 1810 – 29 September 1877) was an Italian Roman Catholic cardinal who served as the Archbishop of Naples from 1845 until his death.
[3] He used this time in exile to travel and to set up a private network to create periodical publications to oppose the anticlerical press coming from his archdiocese.
[3][4] His beatification process was launched in the 1920s and culminated on 28 June 2012, after Pope Benedict XVI recognized his heroic virtue and titled him as Venerable.
[3][4] Sforza's baptism was celebrated on the date of his birth in the San Giorgio Genovesi church and he was baptized with the names "Sisto Gaetano Ambrosio".
He served as a papal legate in Paris in 1836 to present the red biretta to new Cardinal Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus, returning from France that 27 June.
[2] He contributed to the conversion to Roman Catholicism of the count Ernst von Stackelberg and the return to the Church of prince Augustin Petrovich Galitzin.
Sforza received his episcopal consecration as a bishop one month later on 24 May in a side chapel in Saint Peter's Basilica from Mario Mattei and co-consecrators Ludovico Tevoli and Luigi Maria Cardelli.
Sforza was made an Assistant at the Pontifical Throne one month after his episcopal appointment on 17 May and was promoted to the metropolitan archdiocese of Naples on 24 November, concluding a rapid ascension through the ranks.
[5][2][4] Pius IX later named Sforza as a member of the cardinalitial commission that he created and charged with preparing a definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
Upon Giuseppe Garibaldi's entrance into Naples on 7 September 1860, the cardinal issued a letter expressing his opposition to Italian unification.
[3] During his exile he lived in Genoa and Marseille (where he resided with the bishop Patrice-François-Marie Cruice) for a time before moving to Hyères and Civitavecchia before settling in Rome.
In 1865, he was consulted in Rome about plans to convene a council where he presented a project for the reform of the local church in the south with 37 other southern Italian bishops.
[4] In June 1875, the diplomat Emilio Visconti Venosta sent a letter to his ambassador to Paris in which he expressed his concern that the French might be pushing Sforza as a potential papal candidate in a conclave that would be held outside of Rome according to him.
He continued in expressing his hope that Sforza as a potential pope would model his pontificate on the same line of conduct as Pius IX.
Venosta stated that "the likelihood of the election of Cardinal Riario repels me" while pointing to Gioacchino Pecci as the candidate who deserved to be pope.
The beatification process opened in Naples in an informative phase of an investigation that Alessio Ascalesi inaugurated on 10 May 1927 in the metropolitan cathedral and closed at a solemn Mass on 12 July 1936.