Ave Maria Meditations
Pope St. Pius X
Feast day is August 21st
Pope St. Pius X was born as Giuseppe Sarto to a poor family in 1835. He was ordained to the holy priesthood in 1858 was elected Pope in 1903. One biography says this on his pontificate: He lowered the age of First Communion to the age of 7 and encouraged frequent, even daily Communion. He reformed the liturgy, promoted clear and simple homilies, and brought Gregorian chant back to services. He revised the Breviary, and the teaching of the Catechism. He fought Modernism, which he denounced as “the summation of all heresies”. He reorganized the Roman curia and initiated the codification of canon law. He promoted the reading of Sacred Scripture and the foreign missions. His will read: “I was born poor; I lived poor; I wish to die poor.” He died in August of 1914. He is known as the Pope of the Blessed Sacrament and also as the Pope who suppressed modernism and that suppression lasted for decades until it roared again to life in the turbulent times following the second Vatican Council.
His great encyclical addressing and condemning modernism can be found at
http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10pasce.htm
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excerpts from
PASCENDI DOMINICI GREGIS ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE MODERNISTS ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS X, SEPTEMBER 8, 1907
VENERABLE BRETHREN, HEALTH AND THE APOSTOLIC BLESSING:
1. One of the primary obligations assigned by Christ to the office divinely committed to Us of feeding the Lord’s flock is that of guarding with the greatest vigilance the deposit of the faith delivered to the saints, rejecting the profane novelties of words and the gainsaying of knowledge falsely so called. There has never been a time when this watchfulness of the supreme pastor was not necessary to the Catholic body, for owing to the efforts of the enemy of the human race, there have never been lacking men speaking perverse things, vain talkers and seducers,erring and driving into error.
It must, however, be confessed that these latter days have witnessed a notable increase in the number of the enemies of the Cross of Christ, who, by arts entirely new and full of deceit, are striving to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and, as far as in them lies, utterly to subvert the very Kingdom of Christ. Wherefore We may no longer keep silence, lest We should seem to fail in Our most sacred duty, and lest the kindness that, in the hope of wiser counsels, We have hitherto shown them, should be set down to lack of diligence in the discharge of Our office.
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