from Mario Mattei and co-consecrators Ludovico Tevoli and Luigi Maria Cardelli. Sforza assumed possession of his new see via a procurator on 7 May before taking his oath of allegiance to the king on 12 June; his formal entrance into his diocese was celebrated on 21 June. 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. This appointment was confirmed after Ferdinando II proposed him to the Pope to take the Naples see on 6 September. The pope sent him the pallium as the archbishop on 24 November while naming him the archdiocese's head. He was enthroned in his new archdiocese at a formal Mass held on 8 December 1845. The culmination to his rise through the ranks came in 1846 after the pope elevated him into the cardinalate; he received a special dispensation for having an uncle who was a cardinal since the rules did not allow relations to both act as cardinals. He received the red hat and his titular church of Santa Sabina on 16 April 1846. The pope sent him the red biretta via the "ablegato" Count Annibale Moroni. The "ablegato" gave the biretta to Ferdinando II to bestow upon Sforza on 5 February 1846. It was in the following months in 1846 that Sforza founded the "Academia de filosofia Tomista". He participated in the papal conclave in 1846 that elected Pope Pius IX. 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. The work of that commission resulted in the declaration and definition of the dogma in the pope's apostolic constitution Ineffabilis Deus. In 1855 he refused the pope's offer to become the newest Archbishop of Bologna. Sforza distinguished himself in the two cholera epidemics in 1854-55 and 1873 in tending to the ill while tending to victims of the 1861 eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Sforza became titled "Borromeo redivivo" since people associated his pastoral qualities as reminiscent to those of Saint Carlo Borromeo. The Neapolitan episcopate gifted Sforza with a stole that had once belonged to Borromeo on 2 February 1862. Sforza was exiled following the collapse of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from 21 September