Pius X Elected Pope

Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto, patriarch and cardinal of Venice from 1893, the son of an Italian village postman, was sixty-eight when he was chosen to succeed Pope Leo XIII. His choice of name was significant, aligning him with Pius IX, who had earlier denounced the idea that ‘the Roman pontiff can and should reconcile and harmonise himself with progress, with liberalism and with recent civilisation.’ A steadfast and outspoken conservative, who would help to revive Gregorian chant, the new pope was immediately confronted with rampant anticlericalism in France, where monasteries and nunneries were closed down, nuns were expelled from hospitals and a new battleship was provocatively named after Ernest Renan, author of a highly unorthodox biography of Jesus. Horns locked, the French government severed relations with the Vatican and in 1905 declared the separation of Church and State. The pope had no time for either socialists or Protestants, and in 1910 refused to receive Theodore Roosevelt unless the former president cancelled his planned visit to a Methodist church in Rome. Roosevelt refused.

The central thread of Pius X’s papacy was his opposition to Modernism, the drive to reinterpret Catholic teaching in the light of modern science, the theory of evolution and critical analysis of the Bible (the ‘higher criticism’). The pope refused to have any truck with it and denounced Catholics who did. Alfred Loisy in France, for example, argued that Christianity should be considered an evolving, not a static faith. He was excommunicated and Modernism was condemned in an encyclical in 1907, which ordered that anyone tainted with Modernism or lending countenance to it, including ‘those who show a love of novelty in history, archaeology or biblical exegesis’, must be removed from any position in government or teaching.

The effect was to stifle Modernism in the Roman Catholic Church at the time when it was gaining ground among Protestants. The pope was inevitably accused of being hopelessly out of touch with the contemporary world, but many faithful Catholics found his attitude a source of reassurance and strength. He was also increasingly regarded as a saint as reports of healing miracles began to spread. Pius died soon after the outbreak of the First World War, aged seventy-nine. He was canonised in 1954.

This article was edited in April 2018 to correct an error stating that Roosevelt was President when the Pope refused to meet with him.