Giuseppe Sarto was born on June 2, 1835, in Riese, Italy. He was one of eight children born to a postmaster and his wife. The strong, square face of his mother and sisters, and of Giuseppe himself, evokes words such as, “they are the backbone of the country” and “tough folks, used to tough times.” Giuseppe, or “Beppo,” did come of tough stock; his forefathers worked hard to keep a home and provide for their children. Giuseppe knew from family lore and from his own life what it meant to be poor, and he surely knew what Our Lord meant when he said, “Happy are you poor.” His intimate knowledge of being a nobody with near to nothing carved him a large heart for the poor, and it was a great happiness for him to care for others in the Lord’s name. “I was born poor; I lived poor; I want to die poor” was the extent of Pope St. Pius X’s will. This was a heart near to Our Lord, as we remember Jesus saying in one of His rare, recorded compliments of a Pharisee: “You are near to the Kingdom of God.” Giuseppe Sarto lived in the Kingdom, for he lived the two commandments Our Lord declared all encompassing: love of God and love of neighbor.
Guiseppe Sarto’s life, a path of poverty leading through a small Italian home, a seminary, a poor parish, a second larger parish, a larger seminary, a bishopric, a Patriarch’s palazzo in Venice, and finally the labyrinthine Vatican, is a model of Christlike poverty. His compassion for those who were suffering physically or spiritually was the fruit of his own daily life of material deprivation, and his forgetfulness-of-self was constant, immune to changing circumstances. From the moment that Giuseppe Sarto became Father Sarto, he spent his life, his intelligence, his energy, his earnings, and even the meat right out of his pot for the flock the Lord had given him. Our Lord said that if one can be trusted in little things, then he can be trusted in big things.” The Lord was surely watching Father Sarto’s humble love for his flock, along with his outer and inner poverty, and so he was given larger and larger flocks until, as Pope, the whole world became this poor man’s flock.
Yet what may seem to us a glorious, stellar rise in the ecclesiastical ranks was to Father Sarto a steady martyrdom. He did seem happy in Venice, judging from his writings at this time and the photographs of his robust, smiling face and the lively sweep of his cape. But for the simple man of Christ, the worldly pomp was an almost unbearable burden to his spirit. The best and most revealing photograph of Father Sarto is a close up of his face as he carries Our Lord exposed in the Blessed Sacrament during a Eucharistic procession in Venice. He is enraptured, a mirror reflecting the sun, intense and serious. It is this love that was the water-current moving his life, even through the martyrdom of his Papacy.
It is difficult to imagine the immense burden of becoming Pope at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Pope was nicknamed, “The Prisoner of the Vatican”. He could not leave the walls of the small city-state: ever. Politics in Europe, and in this case, Italy, was very complicated; simply put, the government of Italy wanted to annex what was left of the Papal States. If the Pope left, it would be as if a king left his country while the enemy aimed the battering ram against the gates of his city. The Pope could not leave for the sake of the temporal needs and rights of Holy Mother Church. Also, the Papacy was a mass of protocols and ceremonial duties, which terribly distressed the Poor Man from Reise. There are many amusing stories of the Pope trying to avoid any show of ostentation, but if one looks at his photographs and letters from this time, they appear laden with the sadness of loss, the loss of the freedom he once had to be with simple people. He used to stare at the hills beyond the walls of the Vatican gardens in longing. He must have found it very hard to be a good shepherd being so far removed from the parishes, schools and hospitals full of the people he loved. Rafael Cardinal Merry Del Val, his Secretary of State, remembers the new Pope praying in a small chapel before accepting his election as full of sadness and angst. The Cardinal exhorted him to have courage. He would need it.
As in his other assignments, Pope Pius X showed that even poor people from small villages in Italy could be endowed with great intelligence and foresight. He attacked not only the issues of his day with great acumen, but also helped lay the foundation from which later Catholics could defend themselves against the “great synthesis of all heresies”— modernism. He saw far into the future, saw the auto-demolition of the Church and the disintegration and de-sacralization of the society around Her which modernism would effect if allowed a foothold in the Body of Christ. He wrote encyclicals to inoculate the Church. He girded up the rubrics of the Mass and liturgy (most especially the use of sacred and traditional chant). He lowered the age for reception of the Eucharist and encouraged frequent Communion, even daily, to destroy the last vestiges of Jansenism. He saw the storms coming, even as he sheltered the sheep. He walked slowly, carefully, but steadily forward with Our Lord, never stopping in his trust, walking with a broken heart for the world that was plunging backwards into the abyss of catastrophic war and spiritual suicide.
He died, as Cardinal Merry Del Val surmises, of a broken heart, because of the war, the pain and grief that he saw coming for the Lord’s sheep in the world but could not prevent. He was not a faint-hearted man, but sometimes the very purity and great love of those who attain holiness make them more acutely aware of pain, grief, and loss. A heart of stone does not feel like a heart of flesh; this was his martyrdom, and he bore it with great fortitude. He returned love to those who hated him, a heroic quality impossible to possess without a deep spiritual congress with the Godhead. He was warrior for Christ, a man of peace, and a peaceful man. He reduced many people to silent awe by his mere presence. He was an example of the true witness whom St. Francis of Assisi describes: “Witness, witness by all means—but use words only if necessary.”
Pope Pius X lived in a dark time. We live in the darkest of times. Our time is different from Father Sarto’s because for us, the Perennial Church seems completely shrouded in smoke, and the shepherds are scattered and confused. We need St. Pope Pius X now because we need a shepherd. Priests need his example like never before. We need his love of Christ, Christ in the Mystical Body, Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, Christ in the confessional. We need his devotion to Our Lady. We need his clarity and simplicity of thought and expression, and his absolute seriousness about the highest activity a man can perform on earth, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Pope Pius X loved the Church more than himself. He, like Our Lord, gave himself up for Her. He would carry the monstrance, carry Our Lord to lead His sheep, even though a rabid wolf attack him—even wolves who were his fellow shepherds.
