Saint Pius X

That Pope of children was Saint Pius X — born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto. Born into a desperately poor peasant family, he climbed every rung of pastoral life: country assistant priest, exemplary parish priest, seminary rector, diocesan bishop and cardinal patriarch, and finally the chair of Saint Peter. That was a rare path compared with most of his predecessors, who came from the nobility or the Holy See’s diplomatic service. In a time when Modernism was trying to erode the roots of the Catholic faith from within, he raised the banner of steadfast reform under the motto: “To restore all things in Christ” — Instaurare omnia in Christo. He was also the first Pope in nearly four centuries, since Saint Pius V in the sixteenth century, to be canonized by the Church.

Throughout his childhood the Sartos never had enough. To attend the secondary school in Castelfranco, seven kilometers from home, young Bepi had to get up at dawn every morning, tie his old leather shoes around his neck or sling them over his shoulder, and walk barefoot the whole way along a rough, stony road. Only when he was near the school gate did he stop to wash his muddy feet and put his shoes on — a way of keeping the precious shoes, perhaps the only pair he owned, from wearing out too fast. That poverty taught him lessons he carried all his life: to value every drop of his parents’ sweat and tears, and to understand from the inside the hardship of the poor. He never forgot it, even on the chair of Saint Peter.

In 1850, through the intervention of the Patriarch of Venice, a fellow Venetian, the boy received a full scholarship to the major seminary of Padua. Bepi was an outstanding seminarian, always at the top of his class in philosophy, theology and canon law, yet he stayed humble and cheerful. On September 18, 1858, he was ordained a priest in the cathedral of Castelfranco, just after turning twenty-three.

For the first nine years, from 1858 to 1867, he was assistant priest at Tombolo, a small parish, serving as the right hand of an elderly parish priest whose strength was already failing. He opened night classes to teach illiterate adults in the parish to read — not uncommon in rural Italy at the time — loved teaching catechism to the children, and did not hesitate to give away his own food and clothes to the poorest and hungriest people of the parish.

For the next nine years, from 1867 to 1875, he was parish priest at Salzano, where he thoroughly renewed the moral and liturgical life of the whole parish. He organized model catechism classes, and set up a makeshift hospital to care for hundreds of victims of the terrible cholera epidemic that broke out across northern Italy in 1873. It took many lives in the region, and more than a few priests kept their distance for fear of infection. Father Sarto did the opposite: he carried the bodies and buried the dead himself, with no thought for the risk. He even borrowed against his own small life insurance policy to buy wheat and feed his parishioners in the years of bad harvests.

In 1875, he was appointed a canon of the Cathedral of Treviso and rector of the diocesan major seminary. In that post, he formed seminarians into holy priests, solid in doctrine and steeped in the spirit of the liturgy — a foundation that would shape his approach to reforming the Church many years later.

In 1893, Leo XIII made him a cardinal and appointed him Patriarch of Venice. Though he headed one of the most splendid and cultured cities in Europe, Cardinal Sarto kept the frugal life of a peasant: he wore a simple black cassock and carried a cheap nickel pocket watch tied with a coarse cord instead of the silver chain customary for prelates of his rank.

He often walked through the poor alleys of Venice, chatting with the gondoliers — the ordinary working people of that city of canals — opened soup kitchens, and encouraged the Catholic Action movement to defend the rights of workers, carrying on the social spirit Leo XIII had launched with the encyclical Rerum Novarum. He was also passionate about reforming sacred music, working hard to restore the purity of Gregorian chant in the liturgy after a century in which all kinds of worldly music had crept into churches.

But in the conclave, after an event rare in the history of the Church — the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph I used an ancient right of veto to exclude Cardinal Rampolla, the candidate many expected to be elected — the cardinals began to shift their votes to Cardinal Sarto. Stunned and trembling, he begged his fellow cardinals in tears:

“Brothers, have pity on me! Do not choose me, I am completely unworthy and not capable!”

At the same time, he fought resolutely against Modernism — a current of thought spreading among Catholic scholars at the time, which sought to reduce supernatural revealed truths to subjective religious feelings and to adjust doctrine to the secular philosophical currents of the day. He called it “the synthesis of all heresies”. In 1907, he issued the decree Lamentabili and the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, firmly upholding the unchangeable nature of the apostolic faith against attempts to reinterpret doctrine in a modernist direction.

He also launched the work of compiling the first unified Code of Canon Law in the history of the Church — the Code of 1917, though it was only formally promulgated after his death. At the same time, he himself compiled the “Catechism of Pius X”, in a concise, easy-to-understand question-and-answer format, which nourished the faith of generations of Catholics around the world, Vietnam included. In the liturgy, in 1903 he issued the motu proprio Tra le Sollecitudini, restoring the place of Gregorian chant and classical sacred polyphony, and banning worldly or theatrical music from church — a question he himself had cared deeply about since his days as Patriarch of Venice. He also reformed the Breviary and the general liturgical calendar of the whole Church.

He refused to give titles or benefices to any of his relatives, though not a few of his predecessors had done so. His sisters went on living in poverty in a small apartment in Rome, with no privileges from their brother’s position. Every Sunday afternoon, he opened the Courtyard of San Damaso in the Vatican and taught simple catechism himself to poor children and to the people of Rome who came to listen. When the terrible earthquake struck Messina in 1908, flattening almost the entire city and taking tens of thousands of lives, he threw open the papal palace to take in and feed thousands of homeless victims, turning the Pope’s own residence into a temporary refugee shelter.

He tried every possible diplomatic path to prevent the war that was looming. When the ambassador of the Austro-Hungarian Empire came to ask him to bless their army before it went into battle, the gentle Pope flatly refused:

“I bless only Peace, I will never bless war!”

But every effort failed. On July 28, 1914, the First World War officially broke out. Watching humanity rush headlong into a slaughter such as the world had never seen broke the old man’s heart. He fell gravely ill with bronchitis soon afterward.

In Vietnam, Pope Saint Pius X is the patron of a great many seminaries — among them the Pontifical College of Pius X in Đà Lạt, renowned in the history of priestly formation in Vietnam — as well as Eucharistic Youth associations and many parishes, a natural outgrowth of the love for the Eucharist he awakened in children all over the world.