In some ways, the man who did most as pope to carry on Pio Nono’s legacy was his successor’s successor, Pius X, a realist who recognized that further recriminations between the Church and the Italian state were going to produce very little for either side. He stopped publicly calling the state a usurper of the Church’s rights (though what he privately thought of the matter is unknown). Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto (1835–1914) was a man of humble origins, one of ten children fathered by a village postman in the Veneto. By no stretch of the imagination could he have been called an intellectual, but this proved not to matter much, and may even have been an advantage: he had a sure instinct for religious populism, and used it to the full. He saw himself as a “pastoral pope,” in direct contact with his flock. He was, in fact, a sincerely charitable man; when a disastrous earthquake hit Messina in 1908, he opened the doors of the Vatican to its homeless victims, putting the secular government of Italy to shame. Perhaps his most famous saying was “I was born poor, I have lived poor, and I wish to die poor.”
Pius X’s special mission, as he saw it, was to expand the living church by recruiting the devotion of children, through participation in the sacraments. In a pastoral letter written as patriarch of Venice, he complained, “God has been driven out of public life through the separation of Church and State, now that doubt has been raised to a system.… He has even been driven out of the family, which is no longer considered sacred in its origins.” The remedy for this was divine obedience. “When we speak of the Vicar of Christ, we must not quibble. We must obey; we must not … evaluate his judgments, or criticize his directions, lest we do injury to Jesus Christ himself. Society is sick.… The one hope, the one remedy, is the Pope.” He wanted Catholic doctrine to impose conformity on the Church, and he would have nothing to do with “modernism,” meaning any kind of synthesis between late-nineteenth-century currents of thought and the supposedly immutable teachings of the traditional church. The only theology eligible to be taught in Catholic schools and seminaries was that of the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas. Hence he would not back the nascent Catholic Action movement, a society of lay Catholics attempting to propagate Catholic influence on society, because even that suggested too much independence by the faithful. Theological debate within the Church was stifled until the reign of Pius XII, when it began to make a shy and tentative reappearance.
In the past, children had been ten to twelve before making their First Communion and lisping out the record of their tiny sins to the priest in the confessional. Pius X decreed the lowering of this age to nine or even seven, thus replicating the traditional boast of the Jesuits, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.” Boys at their First Communion must wear sashes and rosettes; girls, white dresses and veils. It was a very popular “reform,” increasing the sacramental theater of childish faith and pleasing all devout parents. It also increased the frequency with which Catholics went to Confession, a necessary prelude to Holy Communion.
Pius X, like his namesake Pio Nono, saw no reason to accommodate simple faith to scientific theories, or to Biblical interpretation. He made his views, and the conservative policy of his church, clear in 1907 in an encyclical letter, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, and the decree Lamentabili, and the effects of his conservatism would be felt by the Church for some fifty years, right through the papacy of Pius XII. The use of the Index of Forbidden Books now became common, indeed general, throughout the teaching and administration of the Church. All in all, Pius X’s papacy spelled hard times for Catholic intellectual life. The threat of excommunication hung menacingly over it. “Liberal Catholics are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Therefore the true priest is bound to unmask them. The Church is by its very nature an unequal society. The hierarchy alone moves and controls.… The duty of the multitude is to carry out in a submissive spirit the orders of those in control.”
Pius X urged his flock to “be proud” of being called “papists, retrogrades, and intransigents.” He refused to accept France’s 1905 Law of Separation between church and state—which eventually deprived the French Catholic Church of all government funding, and ended with an official diplomatic break between the French government and the Vatican. His chief intellectual foe within the Church was Father Alfred Loisy, principal theologian at the Institut Catholique in Paris, whose widely circulated book The Gospel and the Church argued that the findings of radical Biblical criticism dissolved the Protestant threat to faith by dismissing Biblical literalism as merely naïve, because they implied that there was no getting back behind the tradition of the Church to an “unmediated” Christ.
He did, however, spell certain liturgical reforms which the Church needed. Italian church music had been invaded by opera, stressing bravura passages and ensemble instrumentation. Pius would have none of this secular stuff, and in 1903 he called for a return to the ancient tradition of plainsong and the classical polyphony of the Counter-Reformation, especially in the Kyriale, Graduale, and Antiphonary. Pius favored a return to Gregorian chant. He also explicitly forbade women to sing in church choirs.
This was all very well, and he backed it up with a program of restoration of dilapidated churches—always a problem in the Eternal City, which by now was beginning to seem not very eternal—that did little but good.
Initially, he even forbade Italian Catholics to vote, on the grounds that the Italian state, being secular, had made the pope a “prisoner in the Vatican,” and that to vote at all for a secular state which had confiscated the enormous papal domains would be to acquiesce in it. But later, when it became obvious that neither Victor Emmanuel nor any elected Italian politicians who valued their votes were going to tolerate backsliding on the issue, this was relaxed. From now on, the size of the papal domains would remain tiny—although the numerical size of the Catholic Church would be enormous, and ever-growing.
This softening on the voting issue did not imply a softening in papal doctrine. In 1907, Pius X formally condemned some sixty-five propositions regarding the nature of the Church and the divinity of Christ as wrong and heretical, and soon afterward compelled all priests to take a sacred oath against modernism in general. “Modernism” was an extremely wide-ranging term. As understood by Pius X and his curia, it meant any effort to square the ideas of more recent philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, with the traditional teachings of the Church. Such attempts were viewed with horror by theological traditionalists like Pius X, because they implied that the Church’s teachings on faith and morals were neither eternal nor immutable. Gradually the battle lines between church orthodoxy and modernism were firming up.
1 Victor Emmanuel II (1820–78), eldest son of Charles Albert of Sardinia and Maria Theresa of Austria, had assumed the throne of Piedmont-Sardinia in 1849, following the abdication of his defeated father.
2 The narrative of gods versus giants probably symbolized the Pergamene conception of its own dynasty defending the Hellenic ethos against “barbarian” invaders from the North.