A reflection for Thursday within the Fourteenth Week after the Octave of Pentecost — S. Pii X Papæ Confessoris, III classis (3 September)
The Introit of today’s Mass is God speaking of a man He has chosen: Extuli electum de populo, oleo sancto meo unxi eum: ut manus mea sit semper cum eo, et brachium meum confirmet eum — “I have exalted one chosen out of my people: with my holy oil I have anointed him, that my hand may be always with him, and my arm may strengthen him” (Ps. 88:20-22). The Church sets these words over the feast of a pope, and in doing so she says something quietly definite about the papacy: the man is chosen out of the people, not raised above them by his own hand; he is anointed, not self-appointed; and what makes him stand is not his arm but God’s. Everything that follows in this Mass — the Epistle in which St. Paul describes an apostle as a nursing mother, the Gospel in which the Lord asks Peter three times whether he loves Him — is a commentary on that Introit. Today the faithful are taught what a shepherd is, by being shown how one is made.
I. Not as pleasing men
The Epistle (1 Thess. 2:2-8) is St. Paul’s own account of how he came among the Thessalonians, and it is remarkable chiefly for what he insists he did not do. He did not preach “of error, nor of uncleanness, nor in deceit.” He did not speak “as pleasing men, but God, who proveth our hearts.” He was never found “in the word of flattery,” nor under any “pretext for covetousness,” nor “seeking glory of men.” The catalogue of refusals is long, and it is the negative image of a very particular temptation: the temptation of the man whose office is to speak for God to trim what God says so that men will like him for saying it.
St. John Chrysostom, in his second homily on this Epistle, presses the point that flattery and the love of glory are the two corruptions proper to the teacher, because the teacher’s whole work is done with words, and words are the easiest thing in the world to bend toward the hearer’s pleasure. The apostle who seeks to be approved by God rather than by men has, Chrysostom observes, put himself beyond the reach of that bending: he cannot be bought, because he wants nothing the buyer has; he cannot be frightened, because his judge is not in the room. The freedom of the true preacher is not a temperament. It is the consequence of whom he is trying to please.
And then the passage turns, and its tone changes entirely. “Whereas we might have been burdensome to you, as the apostles of Christ: but we became little ones in the midst of you, as if a nurse should cherish her children.” Facti sumus parvuli in medio vestrum, tamquam si nutrix foveat filios suos. The man who has just refused to flatter now describes himself as a wet-nurse. There is no contradiction. Chrysostom sees in the image precisely the tenderness that the refusal of flattery makes possible: a nurse does not flatter the child; she feeds it, she bears with it, she speaks to it in its own small language, and she does all this because she loves it and not because she wants anything from it. Paul could be gentle exactly because he was not for sale. “We would gladly impart unto you not only the gospel of God, but also our own souls: because you were become most dear unto us.” Theodoret of Cyrus, commenting on the same verses, draws the moral plainly: the apostle’s authority was real — he might have been burdensome — and its mark was that he laid it down.
This is the exitus of the apostolic office: the word goes out from God, through a man who has become small enough to carry it without adulterating it. What the Gospel will show is the reditus — how the flock is brought back, and by what power.
II. Simon, son of John, lovest thou me?
The Gospel (John 21:15-17) is the scene by the lake after the Resurrection, and the Church reads it on the feast of a pope because the Fathers read it as the constitution of the pastoral office. Three times the Lord asks: Simon Ioannis, diligis me plus his? Three times Peter answers. Three times the Lord commands: Pasce agnos meos. Pasce agnos meos. Pasce oves meas.
St. Augustine, in his hundred-and-twenty-third tractate on St. John, will not let the number pass. The threefold question answers the threefold denial in the courtyard of Caiaphas: what fear had thrice unsaid, love must thrice confess. Peter was not being tested for information — the Lord knew the answer, and Peter says so, tu scis quia amo te — but being healed; the confession was itself the medicine. And Augustine notices that Peter grieved at the third asking, contristatus est Petrus, and reads the grief as the proper sorrow of a man who remembers what his own confidence had cost him the last time, and who no longer says “I will lay down my life for thee” but only “thou knowest.”
Then Augustine gives the sentence that governs the whole passage: feeding the sheep is the office of love, and Peter is told to feed them as the answer to whether he loves Christ. The Lord does not say, “Lovest thou me? Then rule.” He says, “Lovest thou me? Then feed.” The pastoral charge is not a reward for love; it is what love is commanded to do. And Augustine adds the warning that follows from this: whoever feeds the sheep so as to make them his own, and not Christ’s, is convicted of loving himself and not Christ — and has become, in the Apostle’s phrase, one who seeks his own things and not the things of Jesus Christ. Here the Gospel joins hands with the Epistle. Non quasi hominibus placentes: the shepherd who wants the flock to love him has already begun to flatter it.
St. John Chrysostom, in his eighty-eighth homily on St. John, adds the note of restoration. Peter had been the first of the Apostles and had fallen; the Lord now publicly gives back the primacy that the fall might have seemed to forfeit, and gives it not in private but before the others, so that no one should think Peter diminished. St. Cyril of Alexandria reads the passage in the same sense: the threefold confession renews the apostolic dignity, and the charge over the sheep is the visible sign that the renewal is complete. And St. Leo the Great, in his sermons for the anniversary of his own elevation, teaches that what was given to Peter in this way is not exhausted in Peter, since the Lord takes care of His flock through Peter’s successors, and the firmness that Christ gave to Peter is transmitted to those who hold his chair.
St. Gregory the Great, in the Regula Pastoralis, had already drawn out what “feed” must mean in practice: that the ruler of souls must be pure in thought and exemplary in deed, discreet in silence and profitable in speech, near to each in compassion and above all in contemplation — and that he must not, from love of being loved, refrain from correcting what ought to be corrected. St. Thomas gathers the whole into the order of charity: the pastoral care of souls is an act of the love of God overflowing into the love of neighbour, and the greatest work of mercy is to feed the mind with truth as one feeds the body with bread (cf. Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 32, on almsdeeds spiritual and corporal; q. 185, on the episcopal state).
III. To restore all things in Christ
Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto (1835-1914) was born the son of a village postman at Riese in the Veneto, and he never lost the manners of the place. Curate, parish priest, spiritual director of a seminary, chancellor of a diocese, bishop of Mantua, patriarch of Venice: he climbed no ladder, and at each step he was chiefly remembered for two things — that he taught catechism himself, in person, to children and to adults, and that he gave away everything he had. When he was elected pope on the fourth of August, 1903, he wept, and took the name Pius, and took for the motto of his pontificate a line from the Epistle to the Ephesians: instaurare omnia in Christo — to restore all things in Christ (Eph. 1:10). The Collect of his Mass quotes it back to him: ad tuendam catholicam fidem et universa in Christo instauranda.
What he did in eleven years the Church is still living on. He opened the Eucharist to the faithful: in 1905 he swept away the Jansenist scruples that had kept ordinary Catholics from the altar rail, and in 1910, with Quam singulari, he admitted children to Holy Communion at the age of reason — a decree that is nothing other than pasce agnos meos read literally and carried out. He restored the Church’s song, calling the faithful back to Gregorian chant and to what he named “active participation” in the sacred mysteries, and he restored the Church’s prayer, rebuilding the Roman Breviary so that the whole Psalter should again be prayed in a week. He ordered the codification of the Church’s law, which his successor completed. He wrote a catechism in his own name, plain enough for a child, that is still in use.
And he did the harder thing that the Epistle describes: he refused to flatter. In 1907, with Lamentabili and Pascendi, he named Modernism — the dissolving of revealed truth into religious feeling and historical process — as “the synthesis of all heresies,” and he acted against it with a severity that cost him the goodwill of the learned and the fashionable and that he never, to the end of his life, sought to recover. He was called harsh. He was called narrow. He had read St. Paul: non quasi hominibus placentes, sed Deo. A shepherd who will not correct because he wishes to be loved has, in St. Gregory’s judgment, already begun to abandon the sheep.
He died on the twentieth of August, 1914, in the first weeks of a war he had seen coming and had begged the powers to avert, and the tradition of the Roman people is that it was grief that killed him. Pius XII canonized him on the twenty-ninth of May, 1954 — the first pope raised to the altars since St. Pius V — and his feast was fixed on the third of September in the traditional calendar, where it remains; the reformed calendar moves it to the twenty-first of August.
Extuli electum de populo. He was chosen out of the people, and the people knew it: a postman’s son who was seen, as pope, still teaching catechism on Sunday afternoons in a courtyard of the Vatican. Facti sumus parvuli in medio vestrum. The Epistle and the Gospel meet in him. He was small enough to be trusted with the word, and he loved Christ enough to feed the lambs.
IV. A word for practice
The Mass of St. Pius X asks two questions of everyone who hears it, whether or not they have any flock to feed.
The first is the Epistle’s: whom am I trying to please? Every one of us speaks for God to someone — a child, a spouse, a friend who has asked a hard question — and every one of us knows the small dishonesty of softening the truth so as to stay liked. The apostle’s freedom is available to anyone willing to want God’s approval more than the other person’s.
The second is the Gospel’s, and it is simpler and more searching: lovest thou me? Not “do you believe,” not “have you served,” but the question Peter was asked three times on the shore. The Lord asks it of each soul, and the answer He wants is Peter’s, without the old bravado: Domine, tu scis quia amo te.
Three practical steps for this feast:
First, go to Holy Communion, and go with St. Pius X’s own reasons: not because you are worthy, but because you are weak and it is bread. If there is a child in your care who has reached the age of reason and has not yet been prepared for the altar, make today the day you begin.
Second, teach one truth of the faith plainly to one person, without softening it, this week. St. Pius X held that no work is beneath a bishop, or a pope, or a parent, so long as it is catechism.
Third, examine yourself on flattery — the sermo adulationis that St. Paul renounces. Where have I told someone what they wished to hear about God, or about themselves, because the truth would have cost me something?
Suggested prayer: the Collect of the day.
Deus, qui ad tuendam catholicam fidem et universa in Christo instauranda, sanctum Pium, Summum Pontificem, cælesti sapientia et apostolica fortitudine replevisti: concede propitius; ut, eius instituta et exempla sectantes, præmia consequamur æterna.
“O God, who for the defence of the Catholic faith and the restoration of all things in Christ didst fill Saint Pius, Supreme Pontiff, with heavenly wisdom and apostolic fortitude: mercifully grant that, following his ordinances and example, we may attain the everlasting reward.”
Or this brief aspiration, made after the manner of Peter’s answer: Domine, tu omnia nosti: tu scis quia amo te; fac me pascere quos mihi dederis, non ut meos, sed ut tuos. “Lord, Thou knowest all things: Thou knowest that I love Thee; make me feed those Thou hast given me, not as mine, but as Thine.”
Suggested devotion: a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, in thanksgiving for the decrees that opened the altar rail to the faithful and to children; and the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary, with attention to the Descent of the Holy Ghost, the moment at which the man who denied became the man who fed.
If you wish to go deeper, this feast opens onto three of our paths. The Sacred Liturgy path takes up the reforms of St. Pius X — frequent Communion, the chant, the Breviary — and what “active participation” meant in his own mouth. The Theology and Doctrine path treats the Petrine office as the Fathers read it in John 21 and Matthew 16, and the nature of the Modernist crisis he confronted. The Church History path follows the pontificate itself, from Riese to the summer of 1914.
Sancte Pie Decime, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 Thessalonians (Hom. 2) and on St. John (Hom. 88); St. Augustine, Tractates on St. John (Tr. 123); St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on St. John (on ch. 21); St. Leo the Great, Sermons on the anniversary of his elevation; St. Gregory the Great, Regula Pastoralis; St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae; the encyclical E supremi (1903), the decrees Sacra Tridentina Synodus (1905) and Quam singulari (1910), the motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini (1903), the decree Lamentabili and the encyclical Pascendi (1907), and the apostolic constitution Divino afflatu (1911). Patristic material is given in paraphrase with its locus pending verification against critical editions.