Pope Pius X

• 1. Introduction

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  Pope Pius X spent the days before his election insisting that he did not want the office. Before the conclave of 1903, the man then known as Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto is said to have remarked, "rather dead than pope."

  In one of the last meetings before the vote, Cardinal Victor-Lucien-Sulpice Lécot spoke to him in French. Sarto answered in Latin that he was afraid he did not speak French. Lécot replied that without French he had no chance, because the pope must speak it. Sarto's answer was "Deo Gratias! I have no desire to be pope."

  He was elected anyway, and he led the Catholic Church until his death in 1914. How did the son of a village postman reach that chair? Why did a pope known for plain habits wage war on an intellectual movement he feared? What did his stands do to the Church's dealings with governments? And what did examiners find when they opened his coffin thirty years after he died?

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• 2. The Postman's Son

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  Riese, a village then under Austrian rule, is where Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto was born on the 2nd of June 1835. He was the second of ten children. His father, Giovanni Battista Sarto, delivered the village post, and his mother was Margherita Sanson. Money was short, but both parents prized learning, and young Giuseppe walked 6 km to school every day.

  His mother called him "Bepi," and his energy was such that his teacher sometimes caned him for it. Even so, he was a strong student who finished his homework before play. After games with friends, he spent ten minutes in prayer before going home. By the age of ten he had completed the two elementary classes of the village school, along with some Latin taught by a local priest. Further classes in Castelfranco Veneto meant a four-mile walk, and he often carried his shoes to save the leather. Other boys teased him about his thin lunches and shabby clothes, and he never complained to his teachers.

  In 1850 his parish priest gave him the tonsure and wrote to the Cardinal of Venice to win him a scholarship at the seminary in Padua. Giovanni Antonio Farina, Bishop of Treviso and later a canonized saint, ordained him on the 18th of September 1858. His first post was chaplain at Tombolo, where he did much of the work of the sickly parish priest, Constantini. Constantini once called one of his early sermons "rubbish." Even so, the villagers began to call the young chaplain "Don Santo."

  In 1867 he became archpriest of Salzano. He restored the local church and enlarged the hospital, paying with his own begging, wealth and labour. When cholera struck in the early 1870s, he earned the people's affection by caring for the sick. A story from those years tells of a hay stack burning beside a cottage. Sarto told the frightened villagers that the fire would be put out and the house saved, and the flames reportedly turned the other way.

  Later he served as canon of the cathedral, chancellor of the Diocese of Treviso, and rector of its seminary. As chancellor he arranged religious instruction for public school students. When Bishop Federico Maria Zinelli died in 1879, Sarto governed the diocese as vicar capitular until a new bishop arrived in June 1880.

  On the 10th of November 1884, Pope Leo XIII appointed him bishop of Mantua, and he was consecrated six days later in Rome. One obstacle stood in the way. He had no doctorate, so Leo XIII had to grant a dispensation. That made him the last pope to lack the degree before Francis.

  On his way home from Rome, he went straight to his mother. She kissed his ring again and again, then showed him her own wedding ring. "But you would not have this fine ring, son, if I did not have this," she said.

  Leo XIII named him a cardinal in a secret consistory on the 12th of June 1893 and appointed him Patriarch of Venice. A quarrel followed. The government of united Italy claimed the right to name the Patriarch, because the Austrian emperor had once held it. Rome and the Italian state had been on poor terms since the annexation of the Papal States in 1870, and vacant sees had piled up to 30. Sarto was not allowed to take the post until 1894. He told a local newspaper that the red hat left him "anxious, terrified and humiliated."

  Before leaving for Venice, he visited his mother again. She was overcome and asked, "My son, give your mother a last blessing." She sensed that they would not meet again. He was enthroned on the 24th of November 1894.

  In Venice he avoided politics and spent his energy on social works and parish credit unions. Yet his first pastoral letter to the Venetians demanded "only obedience" where the Pope's rights were concerned. In April 1903, Leo XIII reportedly told the choir director Lorenzo Perosi: "Hold him very dear, Perosi, as in the future he will be able to do much for you. We firmly believe he will be our successor."

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• 3. The Veto Conclave

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  Pope Leo XIII died on the 20th of July 1903, and the cardinals gathered at the end of that month. Historians name Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, the late pope's secretary of state, as the favourite. The first ballot gave Rampolla 24 votes, Cardinal Gotti 17 and Sarto 5. On the second, both Rampolla and Sarto gained five.

  The next day, it seemed that Rampolla would win. Then the Polish Cardinal Jan Puzyna de Kosielsko of Kraków rose and, in the name of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary, proclaimed a veto against Rampolla. This was the jus exclusivae. Many in the conclave protested, and some even suggested ignoring it.

  A third vote had already begun, however. It produced no winner, but Sarto climbed to 21 votes. On the fourth, Rampolla had 30 and Sarto 24, and the cardinals plainly were drifting toward Sarto. The fifth ballot the following morning gave Rampolla 10, Gotti 2 and Sarto 50. On the 4th of August 1903, Sarto was elected. It was the last known exercise of a papal veto by a Catholic monarch.

  At first, it is reported, he refused, feeling unworthy. The veto had also saddened him deeply. He vowed to abolish such powers and to excommunicate anyone who passed on a veto during a conclave. As the cardinals urged him to reconsider, he withdrew to the Pauline Chapel. After deep prayer he accepted. Cardinal Luigi Macchi announced the result at around 12:10pm.

  For his papal name he chose Pius X, honouring his recent predecessors with that name. He singled out Pius IX, who held office from 1846 to 1878 and had fought theological liberals while defending papal supremacy. "As I shall suffer, I shall take the name of those Popes who also suffered," he explained. The traditional coronation followed on Sunday, the 9th of August 1903.

  With the tiara came a set of offices. He became Grand Master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, prefect of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, and prefect of the Sacred Consistorial Congregation.

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• 4. Simple Habits

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  A cross of gilded metal hung on Pius X's chest on the day of his coronation. His entourage was horrified. He told them he always wore it and had brought no other. He went on to cut back papal ceremonies, and he ended the custom, dating from Pope Urban VIII, of the pope dining alone. Friends were now invited to his table.

  Rome's social leaders scolded him for not making his peasant sisters papal countesses. His reply was, "I have made them sisters of the Pope; what more can I do for them?" His brother stayed a postal clerk, and his favourite nephew remained a village priest. His three unmarried sisters lived together in modest circumstances in Rome. He belonged to the Third Order of Saint Francis, and he preached from the pulpit himself, which was rare at the time.

  Children drew out his warmest side. In Mantua and Venice he had carried sweets in his pockets for street children and taught them the catechism. As pope, he gathered children around him during audiences and talked about the things they cared about. His weekly catechism lessons in the courtyard of San Damaso in the Vatican always set aside a place for them.

  He claimed that nothing about him had changed except his white cassock. Aides had to keep reminding him not to wipe his pen on it, a habit from his black cassock, which hid the stains.

  His days ran on a fixed schedule. He rose at 4:00am and celebrated Mass at 6:00am. By 8:00am he was at his desk receiving private audiences, with statues of John Vianney and Joan of Arc standing before him. He beatified both during his papacy. At noon he received pilgrims, and at 1:00pm he lunched with his two secretaries or any guest he invited. After a short rest he returned to work, dined at 9:00pm, and worked a little more before sleep.

  Stories of cures followed him even in life. One man with a paralyzed arm begged for help, and the Pope took the arm and said, "have confidence in the Lord... only have faith and the Lord will heal you." The man could suddenly move it. When he cried out with joy, the Pope put a finger to his lips to keep the moment quiet.

  Another tale concerns a Roman schoolgirl who had been crippled by a foot disease since the age of one. A friend obtained one of the Pope's socks, and she was told that wearing it would heal her. The moment she put it on, the story goes, the foot was healed. Pius X laughed when he heard. "What a joke! I wear my own socks every day and still I suffer from constant pain in my feet!"

  His charity reached beyond his own household. After the 1908 Messina earthquake, he filled the Apostolic Palace with refugees, long before the Italian government acted.

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• 5. Chant, Communion and Law

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  "Instaurare omnia in Christo," meaning "to restore all things in Christ," became the motto of his papacy in 1903. His first encyclical, E supremi apostolatus, appeared on the 4th of October 1903 and stated his overriding policy: "We champion the authority of God. His authority and Commandments should be recognized, deferred to, and respected."

  Within three months of his coronation, he issued the motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini. For a long time, Classical and Baroque compositions had been preferred to Gregorian chant in church music. Pius announced a return to older styles. Lorenzo Perosi, director of the Sistine Chapel Choir since 1898, championed the change, and the Pope upgraded his title to "Perpetual Director." Joseph Pothier, chosen to supervise new editions of chant, brought about the official adoption of the Solesmes edition. On the 23rd of November 1903, another motu proprio banned women from singing in church choirs. The same document declared that "The primary and indispensable source of the true Christian spirit is participation in the most holy mysteries and in the public, official prayer of the Church."

  "Holy Communion is the shortest and safest way to Heaven," Pius said. He urged frequent reception of it, together with frequent confession so that Communion would be received worthily. He extended it to children who had reached the age of discretion. He did not, however, accept the ancient Eastern practice of giving Communion to infants.

  The decree Quam singulari of 1910 lowered the age for First Communion from 12 to 7. He wanted the event to leave a deep impression on children and to stir their parents to fresh religious practice. Some places received the decree coldly, fearing that parents would pull children out of Catholic schools sooner once First Communion came earlier. He once gave First Communion to a four-year-old boy, the day after the child had been presented to him and had shown a remarkable grasp of the sacrament. To critics he answered with the words of Jesus, "let the little children come to me." Devotees still know him as the "Pope of the Blessed Sacrament."

  His letter Acerbo nimis of 1905 ordered a Confraternity of Christian Doctrine in every parish worldwide. In 1908 came the Catechism of Pius X, a brief and plain text issued in Italian. It served the province of Rome and, for some years, other parts of Italy, but it was never prescribed for the whole Church. Its English translation runs to 115 pages. Pope Benedict XVI praised its simplicity of exposition and depth. Today the Society of Saint Pius X recommends it over the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church.

  Canon law then varied from region to region. On the 19th of March 1904, Pius named a commission of cardinals to draft one universal code. Two future popes worked on it, Giacomo della Chiesa, later Benedict XV, and Eugenio Pacelli, later Pius XII. Benedict XV promulgated the code on the 27th of May 1917. It took effect on the 19th of May 1918 and stood until Advent 1983, when John Paul II issued the current law.

  The Roman Curia was reorganized by the constitution Sapienti consilio on the 29th of June 1908. Seminaries got attention too. Pius strengthened a bishop's oversight of them, founded regional seminaries while closing some smaller ones, and issued a new plan of study. He also barred clergy from running social organizations. In 1906 he raised the College of St. Thomas to pontifical status, making its degrees equal to those of other pontifical universities.

  In 1914 he established the first World Migrant Day, which is now the World Day of Migrants and Refugees.

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• 6. War on Modernism

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  Louis Duchesne, a French scholar, applied modern critical methods to Church history, combining archaeology and topography with written sources and the setting of social history. His student Alfred Loisy went further and denied that some parts of Scripture were literally true rather than metaphorical. They and others argued that an unbridgeable gap separated natural from supernatural knowledge, against Thomas Aquinas. Their critics saw such work as a road to relativism and scepticism, and they saw an attempt to absorb philosophers like Immanuel Kant into Catholic theology.

  Leo XIII had sought to revive the heritage of Aquinas as an answer to the secular Enlightenment, in what has been called a marriage of reason and revelation. Under Pius X, neo-Thomism became the blueprint for theology. He condemned the movement he named Modernism, which he regarded as a heresy endangering the faith.

  On the 3rd of July 1907, the decree Lamentabili sane exitu, or "A Lamentable Departure Indeed," condemned 65 propositions. Most came from Loisy's writings and touched the nature of the Church, revelation, biblical interpretation, the sacraments, and the divinity of Christ. The encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis, or "Feeding the Lord's Flock," followed and called Modernism the "synthesis of all heresies."

  Pius then required every cleric to swear the Anti-Modernist oath, Sacrorum antistitum. The campaign caused some disruption, yet only about 40 clerics refused. Scholarship with Modernist leanings was strongly discouraged, and theologians who pursued such lines of inquiry faced sanctions as severe as excommunication.

  The Sodalitium Pianum, or League of Pius V, was an anti-Modernist network of informants. Monsignor Umberto Benigni ran it from the Department of Extraordinary Affairs in the Secretariat of State. It distributed propaganda and gathered information on suspected culprits, and critics condemned its charges of heresy on thin evidence. In Benigni's secret code, the Pope went by the name "Mama." Among those investigated was a church history teacher named Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII. The Holy Office cleared him of every charge.

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• 7. Rome Against Governments

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  Rafael Merry del Val, appointed Cardinal Secretary of State, became the face of a sharp change of course. Pius reversed the accommodating approach of Leo XIII toward secular governments. He still refused to accept Italy's annexation of the papal territories. So when French president Émile Loubet visited the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel III, the Pope reproached him and declined to receive him.

  A diplomatic break with France followed, and then the 1905 Law of Separation between church and state, which ended the Church's government funding in France. Pius denounced it in the encyclicals Vehementer nos, dated the 11th of February 1906, and Gravissimo officii munere. He removed two French bishops for recognizing the Third Republic. Support reached him from around the world. In Calcutta, on the 5th of May 1907, the missionary bishop Peter Joseph Hurth joined a public gathering of Indian Catholics backing the Pope and the Catholics of France. In the end, France expelled the Jesuits and cut diplomatic ties with the Vatican.

  His stance toward Italy was subtler. He began by keeping to the posture of a prisoner in the Vatican. As socialism rose, he allowed the ban on Catholics voting, the Non Expedit, to relax. In 1905 the encyclical Il fermo proposito let bishops permit voting when "the supreme good of society" was at stake. He never recognized the Italian government, though. He also suspended the Opera dei Congressi, condemned the French movement Le Sillon, and opposed trade unions that were not exclusively Catholic.

  In Ireland, Protestants feared that Home Rule would bring "Rome Rule," given the Pope's uncompromising line. Then came the 1908 decree Ne Temere on mixed marriages. It declared marriages not performed by a Catholic priest valid in law but sacramentally invalid. Priests could refuse mixed marriages or set conditions, commonly that children be raised Catholic. The decree divided Ireland and set off debates in the British House of Commons. Over time, Irish Unionism, once present across the island, shrank to what is today Northern Ireland.

  Theodor Herzl, father of modern political Zionism, met Pius X in an audience on the 26th of January 1904, hoping for Vatican support. The Pope was respectful but would not back a Jewish state, citing the refusal of the Jewish people to accept Jesus as the Messiah.

  In Russia, Nicholas II had promised religious freedom to Catholics in a decree of the 22nd of February 1903, and again in a constitution two years later. Yet the Russian Orthodox Church felt threatened, papal decrees stayed banned, and contact with the Vatican remained outlawed. Pius also tried to open relations with China, but France, claiming a religious protectorate there, blocked him.

  America brought friendlier business. In 1903 Pius agreed to a deal with the United States for the land held by Catholic friars in the Philippines, for a total of $7 million. Philippine Governor-General William Howard Taft reached it after talks with Leo XIII had failed. In 1908 Pius lifted the United States out of missionary status. Fifteen new American dioceses were created, and he named two American cardinals. In 1910 he refused an audience to former Vice President Charles W. Fairbanks and former President Theodore Roosevelt, because both planned to address the Methodist association in Rome.

  On the 8th of July 1914, he approved Cardinal James Gibbons's request to place the construction site of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., under the patronage of the Immaculate Conception. He would live for six more weeks.

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• 8. Death and Sainthood

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  A heart attack in 1913 left Pius X in poor health, and in 1914 he fell ill on the Feast of the Assumption, the 15th of August. The approach of the First World War reportedly sank the 79-year-old into melancholy. Serious symptoms appeared on the 19th of August. Drifting in and out of consciousness, he said, "In ancient times, the Pope by a word might have stayed the slaughter, but now he is impotent." He received the Last Rites, and an old bronchial infection returned and spread into pneumonia.

  He died at 1:20am on Thursday, the 20th of August 1914, only hours after the death of the Jesuit leader Franz Xavier Wernz. That was also the day German forces marched into Brussels. In a moment of clarity he is reported to have said: "The Almighty in His inexhaustible goodness wishes to spare me the horrors which Europe is undergoing." His sister Anna was praying at his bedside. His last act, at around 1:15am, was to kiss the small crucifix in his hands.

  He was buried in a plain tomb in the crypt below Saint Peter's Basilica. Papal physicians had routinely removed organs to help embalming, but he had forbidden it, and later popes have kept to that. His first tombstone read: "Pope Pius X, poor and yet rich, gentle and humble of heart, unconquerable champion of the Catholic Faith, whose constant endeavor it was to renew all things in Christ." The conclave that followed ran from the 31st of August to the 3rd of September and chose Giacomo della Chiesa, who became Benedict XV.

  By the 24th of September 1916, a bishop's letter already called him "a great Saint and a great Pope." So many pilgrims came that the crypt could not hold them. A small metal cross reading Pius Papa X was set into the basilica floor so they could kneel above the tomb. On the 12th of February 1943, he was declared Venerable.

  On the 19th of May 1944, his coffin was exhumed and taken to the Chapel of the Holy Crucifix for canonical examination. The examiners found the body remarkably well preserved, thirty years after death, though he had wished not to be embalmed. His body was displayed for 45 days, while the Allies liberated Rome. In 1959, with the permission of John XXIII, a former Patriarch of Venice, the remains went by train to Venice. They lay for veneration at St Mark's Basilica from the 12th of April to the 10th of May.

  Two miracles opened the way to beatification. The first involved the nun Marie-Françoise Deperras, cured of bone cancer on the 7th of December 1928 during a novena with a relic on her chest. The second involved the nun Benedetta De Maria, cured of cancer after a novena begun in 1938. Pius XII approved both on the 11th of February 1951. The beatification took place on the 3rd of June 1951 before a crowd of 100,000.

  Two more cures were recognized: a Naples attorney, Francesco Belsami, who had a pulmonary abscess, and the nun Maria Ludovica Scorcia, who had a serious neurotropic virus. On the 29th of May 1954, Pius X was canonized before about 800,000 people. He was the first pope canonized since Pius V in 1712. Television news crews, NBC among them, recorded the ceremony. His birth town was later renamed Riese Pio X, and his feast is observed on the 21st of August.

  The poet Guillaume Apollinaire, in the poem "Zone," called this pope L'Européen le plus moderne, meaning the most modern European.

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