Life (1835-1914)
In the 1960s, everybody was captivated by the winning charm of the rotund, outgoing, shrewd Pope John XXIII. Because of his lack of solemnity, Pope John was thought to be unique among popes. Actually, two generations before him, Pope Pius X had been admired for much the same reasons. “He was one of those chosen few men,” wrote one who knew him well, “whose personality is irresistible.”
If John XXIII proved to be a “pastoral” pope, Pius X had had even more extensive experience as a parish priest. He, too, was a native of northern Italy: Giuseppe Sarto, the second of ten children of a poor village postman. When little Giuseppe walked to school each day – a five-mile trip – he used to carry his shoes over his shoulders until he reached the schoolhouse so as to save the leather. Called to the priesthood, he was ordained a year early and then spent 17 years as an assistant pastor and pastor, learning the skills of shepherding from the ground up. He did so well that in 1884 he was named bishop of Mantua, and then, in 1892, promoted to Archbishop of Venice and created a cardinal.
When the cardinals met in 1903 to elect a pope to succeed Leo XIII, they were sharply divided along political lines. To achieve consensus, they looked for a nonpolitical candidate, settling on Cardinal Sarto. It was a providential compromise.
Taking the name Pius X, the new pope brought his skills as a country pastor into play as “parish priest of the whole world.” The motto he adopted was: “To renew all things in Christ.” Pius took a pastoral approach even to political issues. Thus, he forbade any future interference by monarchs in papal elections. He allowed Italian Catholics to vote in the local elections of the Kingdom of Italy, despite this government’s earlier offenses against the Church. Also, when the anticlerical government of France proclaimed separation of Church and state in order to further harm the Church by withdrawing public funding, Pius X turned defeat into a victory. He personally consecrated 14 French bishops hitherto impeded by government finagling.
St. Pius is remembered particularly for his prompt efforts to uproot the heresy that he termed “theological modernism.” Basically, this was an outlook which, by the imprudent application of new scientific methods to religious studies, reached the radical conclusion that what is a truth of faith today may cease to be so tomorrow. It is unfortunate that this necessary campaign against modernistic errors became, in the hands of some lesser enforcers, a sort of witch hunt. During the campaign, unwarranted charges were registered against, or even worse, whispered about, some perfectly orthodox churchmen. One victim of these accusations was the Lithuanian bishop George Matulaitis. Pope John Paul II would beatify him in 1987. Another victim of character assassination was Angelo Roncalli, the future (Saint) John XXIII!
Other phases of Pius’ renewal of the Church were the codification of Church law and the adoption of a worldwide catechetical program. But he became best known as the “pope of the Eucharist.” He launched a reform of church music. He initiated a revision of the Latin bible. Most of all, he encouraged frequent communion. For a couple of centuries, the rigoristic heresy of Jansenism had produced among Catholics the custom of infrequent communion. Pius X countered this attitude by urging frequent communion and by allowing children to receive the Eucharist as soon as they had reached the age of reason. Today we automatically accept this idea. But it was a novelty to our grandparents in the first decade of the 1900s.
Pius, a man of simple life, was not fond of the ceremonious aspects of the papal court. Thus it had been customary for earlier popes to confer noble titles on their families. This rural mailman’s son refused to make his three spinster sisters princesses. He insisted that the just be called “the sisters of the pope.” But even he could not prevent his master of ceremonies from referring to them as “Their Excellencies, the Sisters of the Pope.”
During his regime as pope, people attributed cures to this witty, kind and deeply spiritual pontiff. He died at the outbreak of World War I, and perhaps even as a result of the shock that it caused him. From the time of his entombment in St. Peter’s, pilgrims visited his grave to leave flowers and pray for his intercession. Pope Pius XII canonized this pastoral successor of St. Peter in the Holy Year of 1950. He was the first pope to be declared a saint since 1672.
--Father Robert F. McNamara
Scripture (1 Thess. 2:2b-8)
(Year C). Could not God have given us, in another way than through the Virgin the Redeemer of the human race and the Founder of the Faith? But, since Divine Providence has been pleased that we should have the Man-God through Mary, who conceived Him by the Holy Ghost and bore Him in her breast, it only remains for us to receive Christ from the hands of Mary. Hence whenever the Scriptures speak prophetically of the grace which was to appear among us, the Redeemer of mankind is almost invariably presented to us as united with His mother. The Lamb that is to rule the world will be sent — but He will be sent from the rock of the desert; the flower will blossom, but it will blossom from the root of Jesse. Adam, the father of mankind, looked to Mary crushing the serpent’s head, and he dried the tears that the malediction had brought into his eyes. Noe thought of her when shut up in the ark of safety, and Abraham when prevented from the slaying of his son; Jacob at the sight of the ladder on which angels ascended and descended; Moses amazed at the sight of the bush which burned but was not consumed; David escorting the arc of God with dancing and psalmody; Elias as he looked at the little cloud that rose out of the sea. In fine, after Christ, we find in Mary the end of the law and the fulfillment of the figures and oracles.
And that through the Virgin, and through her more than through any other means, we have offered us a way of reaching the knowledge of Jesus Christ, cannot be doubted when it is remembered that with her alone of all others Jesus was for thirty years united, as a son is usually united with a mother, in the closest ties of intimacy and domestic life. Who could better than His Mother have an open knowledge of the admirable mysteries of the birth and childhood of Christ, and above all of the mystery of the Incarnation, which is the beginning and the foundation of faith? Mary not only preserved and meditated on the events of Bethlehem and the facts which took place in Jerusalem in the Temple of the Lord, but sharing as she did the thoughts and the secret wishes of Christ she may be said to have lived the very life of her Son. Hence nobody ever knew Christ so profoundly as she did, and nobody can ever be more competent as a guide and teacher of the knowledge of Christ.
Hence it follows, as We have already pointed out, that the Virgin is more powerful than all others as a means for uniting mankind with Christ. Hence too since, according to Christ Himself, “Now this is eternal life: That they may know thee the only truly God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent” (John xvii., 3), and since it is through Mary that we attain to the knowledge of Christ, through Mary also we most easily obtain that life of which Christ is the source and origin.
And if we set ourselves to consider how many and powerful are the causes by which this most holy Mother is filled with zeal to bestow on us these precious gifts, oh, how our hopes will be expanded!
For is not Mary the Mother of Christ? Then she is our Mother also. And we must in truth hold that Christ, the Word made Flesh, is also the Savior of mankind. He had a physical body like that of any other man: and again as Savior of the human family, he had a spiritual and mystical body, the society, namely, of those who believe in Christ. “We are many, but one sole body in Christ” (Rom. xii., 5). Now the Blessed Virgin did not conceive the Eternal Son of God merely in order that He might be made man taking His human nature from her, but also in order that by means of the nature assumed from her He might be the Redeemer of men. For which reason the Angel said to the Shepherds: “To-day there is born to you a Savior who is Christ the Lord” (Luke ii., 11). Wherefore in the same holy bosom of his most chaste Mother Christ took to Himself flesh, and united to Himself the spiritual body formed by those who were to believe in Him. Hence Mary, carrying the Savior within her, may be said to have also carried all those whose life was contained in the life of the Savior. Therefore all we who are united to Christ, and as the Apostle says are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones (Ephes. v., 30), have issued from the womb of Mary like a body united to its head. Hence, though in a spiritual and mystical fashion, we are all children of Mary, and she is Mother of us all. Mother, spiritually indeed, but truly Mother of the members of Christ, who are we (S. Aug. L. de S. Virginitate, c. 6). (Ad diem illum laetissimum; On the Immaculate Conception)