Forgotten Treasures
A Saintly Shepherd for Modern Man

by Peter A. Kwasniewski

With his first encyclical, E Supremi, of October 4, 1903, Pope Pius X eloquently outlined the program of his pontificate: instaurare omnia in Christo, “to restore all things in Christ.” As subsequent years proved, Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto (1835–1914), who succeeded to the venerable Leo XIII and reigned as Pope Pius X from 1903 to his death eleven years later, committed himself bravely and energetically to this mission. Like the Good Shepherd he imitated, Pius X looked with tender love on his own flock, ready to guide it into pastures of sound doctrine and holiness, while he gazed out with anguish upon the ever-growing multitudes of unbelievers, sheep without a shepherd, for whom he felt only compassion.

The first pope in many centuries to have been canonized, Pius X was singlemindedly dedicated to the reform of the Church, above all in her liturgical and devotional life, where he led as much by example as by instruction and discipline. His writings indicate that he always considered the internal strengthening and consolidating of the Church, the deepening of her life of prayer and sacrifice, her best and really her only safeguard against depredations from without and dissensions from within.

Like Pope Benedict XVI today, Pius X knew the fundamental importance of preserving and preaching Catholic identity, the irreducible uniqueness of our faith, without which the Church has nothing salvific to offer mankind. No matter how much the world changes in its structures, no matter what technology is developed and deployed, the human condition is ever the same: man the sinner is always in need of God’s mercy, always in need of the salvation Christ and He alone offers to us through the ministry of the Church He founded on earth. It is in light of this blessedly stubborn adherence to the very essence of the Catholic faith that we must understand Pius X’s battle against the modernists.

“The Synthesis of All Heresies”

Much has been written about the movement called modernism, which was exceedingly complex in its circumstances. Nevertheless, something of the spirit behind it can be discerned in this typical quotation from the most famous intellectual among them, Alfred Loisy: “It appears evident to me that the notion of God has never been more than a sort of ideal projection, a replication of the human personality, and that theology has never been, nor could it ever be, more than a mythology that becomes with time more and more sanitized.”

The modernist program in general could be described as an effort to reinterpret and reformulate Christian doctrine and practice in accordance with the (perceived) new needs and discoveries of the modern age or the spirit of the times (Zeitgeist). This in turn implies that Christianity is not a revealed religion but a product of human minds, subject to the vicissitudes and evolution of human thought and experience. For the modernist, religion as such is an organized social expression of personal, immanent, subjective experiences of the divine. This expression can be more or less refined according to time and place, so that one might attempt to rank religions by the clarity and purity of their assorted conceptions of the divine. Doctrinal formulations, moral standards, acts of worship, all of these emerge from, correspond to, and follow the lead of, the “religious sense” that is an inner exigency or urge of the human spirit.

For these errors and still others, St. Pius X in his mighty encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (“On the Doctrines of the Modernists”) of September 8, 1907, condemned the entire system of modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies.” It was declared altogether incompatible with the first truth of the Catholic faith, namely that God, in the freedom of His love, willed to reveal Himself to man, to whom He also provided the gift of faith and reasonable motives of belief so that man may freely and reasonably respond to that revelation and base his life upon it. When St. Thérèse of Lisieux spoke her memorable words “all is grace,” she might as well have been summing up the Pope’s objections to modernism. That God made us; that He reached out to us; that He was made flesh and died for us; that He poured His Spirit of love into our hearts; that He offers us His risen life in the sacraments of the Church—all this is pure grace, pure gift, coming down to us from the Father of Lights, the giver of every good gift, to whom we make a gift of ourselves through obedience, filial love, and adoration. For the modernist, everything is upside down; one is in a hall of mirrors where all is self, welling up from self, trapped in time, ever evolving, a confusion of becomings, a cacophony of opinions.

Behind the catechetical, liturgical, doctrinal, and moral chaos of the Catholic Church today, it is easy to detect the lingering influence of modernist ideas that even Pius X’s strict disciplinary efforts were unable to eradicate. Given the enormous (though today largely denied) influence of modernism in the Church, Pascendi is an encyclical that no educated Catholic can afford to ignore, even if it does not make for light reading. Page by page, line by line, the encyclical distinguishes, defines, and dismantles each integral part of the modernist system, showing how one warped idea leads of necessity to the next, and how they all contradict the teaching of the faith (and often that of sound philosophy). All teachers of religion, whether parish priests, catechists, school teachers, or homeschooling parents, should study Pascendi in order to learn to recognize and respond to some of the key ingredients of the crisis of the last forty years. There are other ingredients, to be sure, but modernism is more than just salt and pepper, it’s the beef in the stew.

Church and State in the Modern World

As one might have gathered from the foregoing, St. Pius X was not a man to mince words. In 1905, France’s Chamber of Deputies passed the infamous Law of Separation, which sought to abolish, dissolve, and altogether negate the diplomatically hard-won mutual jurisdiction of Church and state in that country. In February of 1906, the Sovereign Pontiff had this to say, in his encyclical Vehementer Nos (“On the French Law of Separation”) addressed to all the people of France:

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cultus, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cultus, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object, which is man’s eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man’s supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it.

Such words could hardly be mistaken for a timid capitulation to the dominant trend of liberalism. The oft-hailed “principle of secularity” whereby it is now taken for granted that civil states should be “religiously neutral” was scoffed at by Pius X, who understood that it is impossible, after the Incarnation, for peoples that have been touched by the Gospel to adopt neutrality towards the Gospel. Either their rulers will hate it, and their supposed neutrality will become a subtly effective instrument for marginalizing and privatizing religion, leading to its irrelevance and eventual extinction, or they will support it by legislation that consistently favors the interests of family and church, without which no just society can exist or endure. “He who is not with me is against me,” says Our Lord, and for Pius X this became: “A nation is with Christ and the Church, or against them.” When one reads Vehementer Nos, one quickly sees that the Pope is not advocating theocracy or monarchy, he is rather emphasizing the inherent supremacy of religious concerns over temporal ones, the necessary subordination of secular rulership to ecclesiastical, with the corollary that the civil order must not only refrain from interfering or minimizing the Church’s ministry in society, but also actively support the Church’s work. (This is not to say, of course, that secular rulers are not relatively autonomous in their own sphere, that is, in strictly political governance; it is to say that they are by no means absolutely autonomous, even as neither is obedience to God’s law and revelation optional for human freedom.)

A Call to Priestly Holiness

A quite different type of document from the foregoing “firebrand” encyclicals is the beautifully worded apostolic exhortation Haerent Animo of August 4, 1908. Haerent Animo is a heartfelt appeal to all Catholic clergy that Pius X wrote out entirely by hand, as part of his observance of the golden jubilee of his ordination. In its pages, the Pope first urges priests and bishops to pursue priestly sanctity above all other goals in this world, so that they may render fitting service to the Lord and promote the Church’s genuine good, which depends intimately and directly on the spiritual resources that her ministers can place at her disposal. The Pope then speaks of the nature of priestly holiness, the means of acquiring it (prayer, meditation, spiritual reading, and examination of conscience), and priestly virtues. This moving document, so rich with practical advice and timeless wisdom, makes superlative reading for seminarians as they advance to the priesthood and for clergy as they periodically take stock of their lives and renew their commitments.

Music to Adorn God’s Temple

Again, while not an encyclical per se, few documents have had so lasting an impact on the liturgical movement and the cultivation of sacred music as did Pius X’s motu proprio Tra le Sollecitudine (“On Sacred Music”; in its Latin title, Inter Sollicitudines), promulgated on the Feast of St. Cecilia, November 22, 1903. The Pope’s purpose in releasing this motu proprio was to set in motion a general reform of sacred music in the life of the Church. As in other areas, however, his notion of reform was never to jettison the past and usher in novelties (as would appear to be the notion of “renewal” entertained by many Catholics over the last forty years), but rather to return resolutely to the wellsprings of Tradition and to let the rushing flow of that clean water clear away the debris that had gathered in decadent periods. And by decadent, Pius X did not mean the Middle Ages, the glorious era of Christendom. Regardless of what he might have thought about, say, Haydn’s or Mozart’s music just as music, St. Pius X judged the ornately operatic styles of the classical and romantic periods to be poorly suited in spirit to the awesome mysteries of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. As Tra le Sollecitudine explains, God has provided for the liturgy of the Roman Rite an intensely contemplative music proper to it, Gregorian chant—a music that grew up organically with this rite, has always adorned it, and must always set the tone of all sacred music fit for use in the temple of God.

Pius X’s teaching decisively shaped the subsequent Magisterium of the Church, from Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium down to John Paul II’s 2003 chirograph for the centenary of Tra le Sollecitudine and the extensive writings of our present Pope on sacred music and the liturgy. Although there are many hopeful signs that Catholic liturgical music, after decades of lucrative secularization and horizontal banality, is finally beginning to experience a true renewal in continuity with the Church’s tradition, the way the music is done at most parishes sadly indicates that we are still very far from a universal implementation of the sound principles of St. Pius X. (And while we are speaking of sacred music ad mentem ecclesiae, I cannot pass up the opportunity to recommend a newly-published hymnal, or more accurately a missal-hymnal, called The Parish Book of Chant, which is quite simply the best resource ever produced for the dignified celebration, in Latin, of both the Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms of the Roman Rite. For more information, please see http://www.musicasacra.com/pbc.)

Leading Children to Christ

I recently read an article from L’Osservatore Romano by Gianpaolo Romanato on how intrepid a reformer of the Church St. Pius X was, particularly in his mighty effort to systematize canon law; Romanato goes so far as to speak of a “cyclone of reform such as had rarely appeared before in the entire history of the papacy.” The same mentality of reform showed itself on a humbler and more touching level in this Pope’s decision to lower significantly the age when children may receive the Holy Eucharist. He said that as soon as a child can make an act of faith distinguishing between simple bread and the Eucharist, confessing the latter to be the true Body of Christ, then he is ready to receive.

In this simple decision that has affected countless children for the past hundred years, the pope of humble origins disclosed what was, after all, uppermost in his mind: the love God shares with us in the Bread of Life, that we may have life in abundance. This overwhelming reality of the divine love and the response it deserves from us is the reason why he had to be absolutely unyielding against the modernists, the liberal French agnostics, the profanation of the house of God. Let us fervently ask St. Pius X to obtain for us a share in the zeal that consumed him as he strove to restore all things in Christ—a mission that, in the end, belongs to each and every member of the Mystical Body.

Peter Kwasniewski is an associate professor of theology at Wyoming Catholic College and a visiting professor at the International Theological Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Gaming, Austria. He received his BA in liberal arts from Thomas Aquinas College in California and his MA and Ph.D. in philosophy from The Catholic University of America.

Kwasniewski has published extensively in scholarly and popular journals and directs Gregorian chant and other sacred music. He and his wife, Clarissa, have two children and are lay members of the Order of Preachers.

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