A Life, for his feast on the third day of September — III classis
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 the people; with my holy oil I have anointed him: that my hand may be always with him, and my arm may strengthen him.” — Introit of the Mass, from Psalm 88
I. The house of the village postman
He was born on the second of June, 1835, at Riese, a village of the Venetian plain in the diocese of Treviso, and baptized the next day Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto. He was the second of the ten children of Giovanni Battista Sarto, the cursore or municipal messenger of the commune — a man who carried the post, kept the register, and served the village at the modest wage such offices carried — and of Margherita Sanson, who worked as a seamstress. The house still stands: two rooms and a loft, a kitchen with a hearth, and beside it the small plot of land which was the whole of the family’s capital. Of the Sarto poverty nothing need be invented; it was of the plain and undramatic kind that a great part of Christendom has always known, and it was never at any point in his life a subject of shame to him or of romance.
The parish priest of Riese, Don Tito Fusarini, taught the boy his first Latin and saw what he was. He walked each day the four miles to the ginnasio at Castelfranco Veneto, carrying his shoes over his shoulder to spare them and putting them on at the town gate; the detail is attested by his contemporaries and is not the kind of thing a hagiographer invents, because it is too small. In 1850 the Cardinal-Patriarch of Venice, Jacopo Monico, himself a native of Riese, gave him a free place in the seminary of Padua. He was fifteen.
II. Padua, and the country curacy
At Padua he was, by the record of the seminary, the first of his class in nearly every year, and he was, by the testimony of his fellows, the least conscious of it. He was ordained priest on the eighteenth of September, 1858, at Castelfranco, by the Bishop of Treviso, and said his first Mass at Riese. He was twenty-three; a dispensation of some months had been needed for his age.
He was sent as curate to Tombolo, a village of farmers and cattle-dealers between Castelfranco and Cittadella, and stayed nine years. The archpriest was old and in poor health, and the curate did most of the work of the parish: the school for the poor children which he opened in the evenings, the catechism in the church, the sick at night, the accounts of the parish, the choir which he taught to sing chant instead of the operatic pieces then in fashion. He was known to have given away his own supper, and more than once the family’s, and his sister, who kept house for him, learned to hide what could not be spared. He studied on alone — theology, and the Fathers, and St. Thomas — in the hours the village left him.
In 1867 he was made parish priest of Salzano, a larger and richer town near Venice, and there he remained eight years. The pattern was the same, at a larger scale. In the cholera of 1873 he was found in the houses of the dying and at the burials, and the town remembered it. He restored the church, founded a night school, and reduced the parish to something that approached the norm of the Council of Trent. He was, in Salzano as in Tombolo, a man who did the whole of the work in front of him and looked for nothing beyond it.
III. The cathedral, the seminary, and Mantua
In 1875 the Bishop of Treviso brought him to the city as canon of the cathedral, spiritual director of the seminary, and chancellor of the diocese, offices which he held together for nine years. The seminarians of Treviso in those years afterward described his direction with a consistency that is itself evidence: he was exacting about prayer and about study, distrustful of everything that was merely brilliant, and unfailingly kind to the slow and the poor. He taught them the Summa and he taught them the confessional, and he held that the second is useless without the first.
In November of 1884 Leo XIII named him Bishop of Mantua. He accepted, by his own account, under obedience and with dread, and he was consecrated in Rome on the sixteenth of that month. Mantua was a diocese in ruin — a seminary nearly empty and badly taught, a clergy demoralized and in part disaffected, parishes long unvisited, a laity drifting between anticlerical liberalism and a newer socialism. He went through the diocese on foot and by cart, parish by parish; he took the seminary in hand and taught in it himself when there was no one else; he held a diocesan synod in 1888, the first in many years; he preached, and he catechized, and he answered every letter. The historians of the diocese date its recovery from his nine years, and the Instaurare omnia in Christo of the later motto was already the program, though not yet the phrase.
IV. Cardinal and Patriarch
On the twelfth of June, 1893, Leo XIII created him Cardinal-Priest of San Bernardo alle Terme, and three days later named him Patriarch of Venice. The Italian government, asserting a right of nomination to the see inherited from the old Republic, withheld the exequatur for eighteen months, and Sarto waited at Mantua until November of 1894, saying to those who were indignant on his behalf that a bishop does not need a permit to pray for his people.
At Venice he was what he had been at Mantua, in a city that noticed more. He walked. He taught the catechism in the churches himself. He gave to the poor everything he had and a good deal that he did not, so that his sisters and his secretary kept the accounts of the Patriarchate with a certain anxiety. He reformed the seminary and its studies, and he set his face against the state of sacred music in the churches of Venice — the theatrical Masses, the solo voices, the orchestras — and issued a pastoral on the subject in 1895 that is the direct ancestor of the motu proprio of 1903. He fostered the Catholic press and the social works of the laity, and in the municipal politics of the city he showed a practical shrewdness which those who thought him merely a pious country priest had not expected.
V. The conclave of 1903
Leo XIII died on the twentieth of July, 1903, in his ninety-fourth year, after a pontificate of twenty-five. Cardinal Sarto went to Rome with a return ticket.
The conclave which followed is remembered for an event which he himself was to make impossible for the future. The candidate of the majority was Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, Leo’s Secretary of State. On the second day, Cardinal Jan Puzyna, Prince-Bishop of Kraków, rose and read, in the name of the Emperor Franz Joseph, the formal veto of Austria-Hungary against Rampolla’s election — the last exercise of the ius exclusivae which the Catholic crowns had for three centuries claimed. The cardinals protested; Rampolla protested; and the votes, in the ballots that followed, moved nevertheless. Whether they moved because of the veto or because they had already begun to move, the historians dispute, and the question does not need to be settled here. On the fourth of August, at the seventh scrutiny, Giuseppe Sarto was elected with fifty votes of sixty-two. He had begged the electors, in tears, not to do it. He accepted, and took the name Pius, in memory, he said, of the Popes of that name who had suffered for the Church in the last century. He was crowned on the ninth.
One of his first acts as Pope was the constitution Commissum Nobis of the twentieth of January, 1904, by which he abolished the ius exclusivae forever, under pain of excommunication for any cardinal who should convey such a veto again. He had been elected under it; he would not have any successor so elected.
VI. Instaurare omnia in Christo
His first encyclical, E supremi of the fourth of October, 1903, gave the pontificate its motto, taken from the Epistle to the Ephesians: instaurare omnia in Christo, to restore all things in Christ. The phrase is sometimes read as a slogan. It was in fact a program, executed with a country priest’s practicality across eleven years, and its parts belong together.
The altar. On the twenty-second of November, 1903, the feast of St. Cecilia, he issued the motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini on sacred music, restoring Gregorian chant to its place as the proper music of the Roman rite, subordinating polyphony to it and excluding the theatrical, and setting down the phrase which has had a long afterlife: that the faithful are to draw the true Christian spirit from its first and indispensable source, the active participation in the sacred mysteries and the public and solemn prayer of the Church. The Vatican edition of the chant books followed under his authority. In 1911, by the constitution Divino afflatu, he reformed the Roman Breviary, redistributing the psalter so that the whole of it should again be said in a week and the ferial office should not be perpetually displaced by feasts — the largest single change to the Office since St. Pius V.
The Eucharist. The decree Sacra Tridentina Synodus of the twentieth of December, 1905, declared that frequent and daily Communion is open to all the faithful in the state of grace with a right intention, and swept away in a page the residues of Jansenist rigor which had kept the greater part of Catholic Europe from the altar-rail for two centuries. The decree Quam singulari of the eighth of August, 1910, admitted children to Communion at the age of discretion, about the seventh year, rather than at the twelve or fourteen which had become customary. He is called the Pope of the Eucharist for these two acts, and the title is just.
The catechism. The encyclical Acerbo nimis of the fifteenth of April, 1905, on the teaching of Christian doctrine, laid on every parish priest the obligation of catechizing children and adults and of founding the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine in every parish. The Catechism of Pius X, issued for the diocese of Rome in 1905 and revised in 1912, was the work of a man who had himself taught the catechism in a village church for twenty years and who knew what a question and answer must be if a child is to keep them.
The law and the Curia. In 1904, by the motu proprio Arduum sane munus, he set in hand the codification of the whole canon law of the Latin Church, a work which no Pope had dared and which was completed under his successor in 1917. By Sapienti consilio of 1908 he reorganized the Roman Curia, whose offices had accumulated for four centuries without design, and by Vacante Sede Apostolica he regulated the conclave itself. He founded the Pontifical Biblical Institute in 1909 and entrusted it to the Society of Jesus.
The seminaries and the study of Scripture. He reformed the seminaries of Italy and their curriculum, prescribed St. Thomas as the master in philosophy and theology, and, by the motu proprio Praestantia Scripturae of 1907, gave the decisions of the Biblical Commission binding force.
The parts belong together because they were, in his mind, one thing. A people that sang the chant, received the Body of Christ, knew the catechism, and was governed by a clergy formed on St. Thomas and a clear law, was a people restored in Christ. It was the program of Tombolo and Salzano and Mantua, applied to the world.
VII. Pascendi, and the Modernist crisis
The best-known acts of the pontificate were also, in his own judgment, the most necessary and the least welcome.
By the end of the nineteenth century there had grown up within the Church, chiefly in France, Italy, and England, a movement of thought which sought to reconcile Catholicism with the historical and philosophical criticism of the age by relocating the ground of faith from the objective revelation of God to the religious sense of the believer — dogma becoming the changing symbolic expression of an interior experience, Scripture a purely human record of that experience, the Church an evolving product of it. Its most gifted exponents — Loisy in France, Tyrrell in England, and others — were priests and scholars of learning and, some of them, of undoubted sincerity.
Pius X named it Modernism and judged it, in the words of the encyclical, the synthesis of all heresies, because it did not deny this or that article but the possibility of any article at all. The decree Lamentabili sane exitu of the third of July, 1907, condemned sixty-five propositions drawn from the writings of the movement; the encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis of the eighth of September, 1907, set out its system in a long analysis of remarkable philosophical penetration, and prescribed remedies: the primacy of Scholastic philosophy in the seminaries, vigilance over professors and over the Catholic press, diocesan councils of vigilance, and the exclusion from teaching of those who held the condemned opinions. In 1910, by the motu proprio Sacrorum antistitum, he imposed on all clergy before ordination and before the assumption of office an oath against Modernism, which remained in force for fifty-seven years.
That this was a work of the shepherd and not of the policeman is shown by the encyclical itself, which reads throughout as the argument of a man who has understood what he condemns. It is also shown by the prior history: the parish priest who had taught the Summa to seminarians at Treviso for nine years did not discover Thomism in 1907, nor did he need to be told by his advisors what happens to a faith which loses its object.
Honesty requires, however, that the shadow of these years be named, because the Church canonizes heroic virtue and not the impeccability of every instrument a saint employs. Alongside the ordinary machinery of vigilance there grew up, under the protection of the Pope’s approval, a private network directed by Monsignor Umberto Benigni, an official of the Secretariat of State, called the Sodalitium Pianum — a society of correspondents who gathered and forwarded to Rome reports on the orthodoxy of bishops, professors, and priests, sometimes on slender evidence and sometimes with a zeal that had passed over into something else. Men of sound faith and real learning were denounced, delated, and in some cases removed; Lagrange at Jerusalem and Duchesne at Rome were among those who suffered, and the Catholic historical and biblical scholarship of a generation was, in places, frightened into silence. Pius X knew of the Sodalitium and gave it his blessing; whether he knew the whole of its methods is doubtful, and the tribunal of his canonization examined the matter and concluded that he had acted in good faith and in defense of the faith. Benedict XV dissolved the society in 1921. The judgment of history is that the disease was real and the remedy was in some hands a harsh one; the judgment of the Church is that the physician was a saint. The two judgments are not in contradiction, and a hagiography that concealed the first would make the second less credible, not more.
VIII. The nations
The pontificate fell in an age of open hostility from the states. In France the Law of Separation of December 1905 abrogated the Concordat of 1801, confiscated the property of the Church, and proposed to vest her churches in lay associations answerable to the government. Rampolla’s policy had been to conciliate; Pius X, by the encyclicals Vehementer Nos and Gravissimo officii of 1906, refused the associations outright and chose the loss of every church and rectory and seminary in France rather than the surrender of the bishops’ authority to the state. The French clergy, stripped of everything, were poorer and freer, and most of them came to think him right. In Portugal the revolution of 1910 brought a like persecution, and he answered it in Iamdudum of 1911. In Italy, where the Pope was still the prisoner of the Vatican and the non expedit still barred Catholics from the polls, he permitted, case by case, a cautious re-entry of Catholics into political life for the defense of the Church and the social order.
He was a father to the poor in the manner of a village priest raised to a throne. After the earthquake of Messina in 1908, which killed some seventy thousand, he filled the Vatican with the homeless and spent what the treasury had. He received the humble as he received ambassadors, and there are stories — the child brought to him by a mother, the paralyzed man told to rise — which the processes of his canonization examined and in some cases admitted. He detested the ceremonial of the court, ate what a parish priest eats, and kept his two sisters in a flat near the Vatican rather than in it, because he would not have his family raised by his elevation.
IX. The August of 1914
He had said, more than once, that a great war was coming and that he would gladly give his life to prevent it. On the twenty-eighth of July, 1914, Austria declared war on Serbia; within a week the whole of Europe was in arms. The Austrian ambassador asked him to bless the Emperor’s armies; he answered that he blessed peace. On the second of August he issued the exhortation Dum Europa fere omnis to the Catholics of the world, calling them to prayer, and it is said that he added, to those about him, that he would have given his life to spare his children the war and that God had not accepted the offer. He fell ill on the fifteenth of August, the Assumption; the illness became pneumonia; and he died at a quarter past one in the morning of the twentieth of August, 1914, in the seventy-ninth year of his age and the twelfth of his pontificate.
His will, dictated some years before, begins: I was born poor, I have lived poor, I wish to die poor. He forbade the embalming of his body, and it was not embalmed. He was buried in the crypt of St. Peter’s in a plain tomb which became at once a place of pilgrimage.
X. The vindication
The cause was introduced in 1923, and when the body was exhumed in 1944 it was found remarkably preserved. Two cures — of a religious sister in France in 1928 and another in Italy in 1938, both of cancer — were admitted as the miracles required for beatification, which Pius XII pronounced on the third of June, 1951. Two further cures being admitted, the same Pope canonized him on the twenty-ninth of May, 1954, before a crowd which filled St. Peter’s Square and the streets beyond. He was the first Pope raised to the altars since St. Pius V, and the first to be canonized whose pontificate fell within the memory of the living.
His body lies in St. Peter’s under the altar of the Presentation, in a crystal and bronze reliquary, the face covered with a mask of silver. His feast was assigned in 1955 to the third of September, and is kept on that day in the traditional Roman calendar with the Mass Extuli electum; the reformed calendar transfers it to the twenty-first of August, the day after his dies natalis.
XI. What the life teaches
Three things, chiefly.
That the office of Peter is a parish writ large. The Gospel of his Mass is the threefold Pasce oves meas, and the Church chose it because it describes what he did. He did not become a different man at Mantua or Venice or Rome; he did in each place what he had done at Tombolo, with the same hands, and the reforms which changed the face of the Church in the twentieth century — chant, frequent Communion, children’s Communion, the catechism in every parish — are the reforms of a curate who had watched what happens to a people that is starved of them. Greatness, in him, was not a change of kind but of scale.
That the defense of the faith is an act of charity. The Epistle of his Mass has St. Paul say that he was among the Thessalonians as a nurse cherishing her children. It is placed beside Pascendi deliberately. The man who condemned Modernism did so because he loved the poor who would be robbed of their faith by it, and the severity was the severity of a father. That some who served him were harsher than he was does not alter the principle; it illustrates, as Calasanz’s Cherubini illustrates, that a saint’s instruments are not sanctified by his use of them.
That poverty is not a phase but a state. He was poor at Riese, poor at Tombolo, poor as a cardinal in a palace on the Grand Canal, and poor on the throne of the Fisherman, and he arranged to die poor. The Church has since had occasion to learn how difficult that is; he did not find it difficult, because he had never at any point believed that what he was given was his.
Practice
Examine. The oath which he imposed on the clergy asked, in substance, one question: whether a man holds that the faith is a thing received from God or a thing produced by himself. Ask it of your own prayer and your own reading. Where, in the last year, have you quietly reshaped a teaching to fit what you would prefer to be true?
Do. Receive Holy Communion this week with the frequency he opened to you, and prepare for it as he asked — in the state of grace, with a right intention, and with a few minutes of thanksgiving afterward that are not hurried. If you have children or godchildren under your care, teach them one question and answer of the catechism, by heart.
Pray. 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, to defend the Catholic faith and to restore 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.”
Devote. The Glorious Mysteries, with attention to the Descent of the Holy Ghost upon Peter and the Apostles; or, for those who sing, a single Gregorian antiphon learned by heart — the Salve Regina in the simple tone will do — sung at the end of the day.
If you wish to go deeper: the Sacred Liturgy path treats the reforms of St. Pius X — chant, the Breviary of 1911, the Eucharistic decrees — and their place in the history of the Roman rite; the Theology and Doctrine path takes up Pascendi and the nature of faith as a supernatural assent to revealed truth; the Church History path continues with the Popes of the twentieth century and the crisis of the Church and the states.
Sancte Pie Decime, gloria sacerdotii, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the New Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Pius X, Pope, St.”; the Encyclopædia Britannica; the Acta Sanctae Sedis and Acta Apostolicae Sedis for the documents of the pontificate cited above; and the biographical literature on the pontificate, including the depositions of the diocesan processes of Treviso, Mantua, Venice, and Rome as summarized in modern scholarship. Dates of the pontifical acts follow the official promulgation.