Saint Pius X, Pope & Confessor

Saint Pius X was born Giuseppe Sarto in 1835 at Riese, in the region of Venetia in northern Italy, the son of poor and devout parents. From his boyhood he was drawn to the priesthood, and he made his way through his studies amid hardship, sustained by faith and by a love of God that marked him all his life. Ordained a priest, he served first as a country curate and pastor, then as a spiritual director and bishop, and at length as Patriarch of Venice, beloved everywhere for his simplicity, his charity to the poor, and his zeal for souls.

Chosen as shepherd of the whole Church

In the year 1903 he was elected to the chair of Saint Peter and took the name Pius. He accepted the burden with reluctance and tears, but governed the universal Church with the same pastoral heart he had shown in every office before. He set over his pontificate the motto Instaurare omnia in Christo — “to restore all things in Christ” — and to this end he laboured for the renewal of Christian life in every part of the Church. The collect of his feast recalls that God filled blessed Pius with heavenly wisdom and apostolic fortitude for the defence of the Catholic faith and the restoring of all things in Christ.

Among the great works of his pontificate, he is remembered especially for encouraging the faithful to receive Holy Communion often, even daily, and for admitting young children to the Holy Eucharist as soon as they have come to the use of reason — for which he has been lovingly called the “Pope of the Eucharist” and the “Pope of the Blessed Sacrament.” He laboured also for the reform of sacred music, the renewal of the breviary and of the chant, the codification of the Church’s law, the formation of the clergy, and the catechetical instruction of the faithful, that all might know and live the faith more fully.

A holy and fatherly pontiff

In all his greatness Saint Pius X remained poor in spirit and humble of heart, a father to the lowly, never forgetting the cottage in which he was born. The sorrows of the world weighed heavily upon him in his last years, and he died on the twentieth of August in the year 1914, as the calamity of a great war began to fall upon the nations he had longed to see united in Christ. He was canonised in 1954, the first pope to be raised to the altars in several centuries.

His feast is kept on the third of September. In Saint Pius X the Church honours a shepherd of singular holiness who used the supreme office to draw souls closer to Christ in the Holy Eucharist, and whose whole life, from the village to the See of Peter, was a striving to restore all things in Christ.

Patronage

He is invoked for the renewal of Christian life and devotion to the Holy Eucharist, and is honoured as a patron of first communicants, of catechists, and of pilgrims.