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Pius X: Confronting Modern Culture

Liberalism, socialism, communism—they were not the only aspects of modern society and culture the church had to face. Those three, though born in the scholar’s study, were from the beginning meant to impact society directly in the political, social, and economic realms, and they did so. There were other developments that were more strictly intellectual, yet they posed problems that cut deeply into how the church thought of itself and of its tradition. Although they of course differed among themselves in many ways, they were the product of the new enthusiasm for the historical, genetic approach to almost all disciplines that was characteristic of the nineteenth century.

By that time historians were striving to be “scientific” like their colleagues in the harder disciplines. Instead of merely telling a story with a moral or political message they wanted to discover “what actually happened,” to use Leopold von Ranke’s famous expression. Let the chips fall where they may! In their methods they professed objectivity and freedom from the contamination of apologetic or polemical concerns. Most of them, however, subscribed in some form or other to the idea that things were evolving for the better—“progress,” which entailed focusing on the discrepancies between past and present to the advantage of the present.

For many Catholics the present was not only not the ideal state of things but the enemy to be overcome. Nonetheless, Catholic scholars could not help but be affected by this methodological shift, and they began to approach even sacred subjects like the liturgy, the Bible, and theology itself more historically. If the discrepancy between past and present could be utilized to the advantage of the present, maybe it could be utilized to demonstrate the superiority of the past, which could then act as a corrective of the present. This was an old idea, the basis in fact for most reform movements in the church like the Gregorian, but it got energized again in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The papacy’s reaction to such developments was generally suspicious or fearful but sometimes, as in the case of liturgy, selectively positive.

Meanwhile philosophy’s “turn to the subject” with Descartes and Kant took more account of the subjective element in philosophical speculation, which undermined the solid objectivity and timelessness of philosophical concepts. Without being able fully to articulate the problem he was addressing, Leo XIII promoted Aquinas as a remedy for it. Aquinas came to be advertised as embodying the “perennial philosophy,” philosophia perennis—firm, stable, and not subject to change. This was a countercultural manifesto that not all Catholic thinkers were able to appropriate.

Whether he and his electors were aware of it or not, the new pope would have to deal with this cultural ferment. When the conclave opened, Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, who had been Leo’s secretary of state, seemed to be the favorite, but on August 2nd, just as the meeting got underway, it was announced that Emperor Franz Joseph of the Austro-Hungarian Empire vetoed Rampolla’s candidacy. The announcement, received with great anger, threw the conclave into consternation, but voting proceeded on schedule. When Pius was elected he almost immediately outlawed such interventions, the end of a tradition that originated in slightly different form within a few centuries of the founding of the church. Some scholars speculate that even without the veto Rampolla probably would not have been elected.

It soon became clear that after Leo’s long pontificate, the cardinals wanted somebody different from him. As one of the cardinals declared, they wanted a pope not with political but with direct pastoral experience. The choice fell on Giuseppe Sarto, patriarch of Venice, who had in fact spent his whole priestly life in direct pastoral ministry.

Sarto was the second child in a large family of truly modest means in a small town in northeastern Italy. His father was the village postmaster, his mother a seamstress. He studied at the seminary in Padua, which was his only formal education. For nine years he was a pastor in a country parish, the only pope to have had such experience. His effectiveness led to his appointment as bishop of Mantua, a diocese that by all accounts he revitalized. In 1893 Leo named him cardinal and patriarch of Venice, where he remained for ten years until his election as pope.

Pius X had a rich pastoral background, which accounts for his positive achievements. But his formal education was meager, and he had never set foot outside Italy. He saw things in terms of black and white. While still patriarch of Venice, he wrote to a friend, “When we speak of the Vicar of Christ we must not quibble. We must obey. We must not evaluate his judgments or criticize his directions lest we do injury to Jesus Christ himself. Society is sick. The one hope, the one remedy, is the pope.” The words ring like an Ultramontanist manifesto.

Even as a pastoral pope he could not of course avoid making political decisions. He recognized his inexperience in such matters, so chose as his secretary of state Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, forceful almost beyond measure, before whom even some of the foreign dignitaries attached to the Holy See were said sometimes to tremble. Although Pius despised the Italian state, he, motivated by fear of socialism, took the first step in easing the tension by allowing bishops to relax the severity of the Non Expedit in individual cases. In his dealings with some of the anticlerical and anti-Catholic governments in Latin America, he showed a flexibility that was lacking in his head-on and uncompromising confrontation with France in 1905 when the anticlerical government unilaterally annulled the Concordat of 1801 and enforced other measures against the church. He took the same approach to Portugal the next year. In both cases he vindicated the church’s independence but at great cost. In France Catholics’ relationship to the Third Republic deteriorated even further. In contrast with Leo XIII, Pius’s diplomacy in Europe was blunt and uncompromising.

The pope’s policy met with much criticism from Catholics in France, including some of the bishops. His encyclical the next year to the French clergy and laity, Vehementer Nos, was in part a response to that situation. It reiterated in absolute terms the hierarchical structure of the church, “a society composed of two classes of people, the pastors and their flocks.” The duty of the former is to direct “the multitude,” the duty of the latter is to obey.

Pius, uneasy in the political realm, felt much at home in the pastoral. In 1904, the year after he was elected he set in motion a program to codify canon law, which by that time had become an unmanageable and sprawling corpus of documents. Although this project was not completed during his lifetime, he deserves credit for an undertaking that brought more order and even-handedness to the church’s procedures.

In Italy he suppressed a number of seminaries in small and poor dioceses in favor of regional institutions, a measure that ensured a much higher level of instruction. He himself scrutinized the dossiers of candidates for the episcopacy to make sure they were worthy of their office. The bishops for their part had to prepare a detailed report of the status of their diocese by answering a series of stipulated questions and be prepared to discuss it with the pope when they appeared before him on their required visits.

His greatest achievement and pastoral impact was, however, in liturgy. He built on several generations of historical scholarship whose origins can be precisely traced. In 1833 Prosper Guéranger, Benedictine monk and zealous Ultramontanist, refounded the monastery of Solesmes in France with the idea of providing a model Christian community united around the liturgy of the church. Such a community would be the answer to the rampant individualism of modern society.

Guéranger made the official liturgy—the mass and the Liturgical Hours like vespers—the center of piety and wanted to move it away from where it was currently centered—on the many other services and devotions like novenas and the Stations of the Cross that had proliferated in Catholicism since the late Middle Ages. Guéranger reached an international audience with his immensely influential publications, especially L’année liturgique (1841–1866), a nine-volume historical and devotional commentary of the feasts and solemnities of the church year, translated into English as The Liturgical Year in 1867–1871.

Monasteries sprang up especially in France, Germany, Austria, and Belgium more or less modeled on Solesmes, in which study of the history and practice of liturgy played a big role. The monks (and then other scholars) began to see clearly how present practice did not accord with what they took as the more normative models and practices in the past. Nothing became clearer than that over the course of the centuries the active participation of the faithful in the celebration had diminished to practically nil. There were two areas where it seemed feasible and desirable to change that situation.

The first was participation through singing parts of the mass like the Creed and the Gloria. Pius looked upon this idea with great favor. The very year he was elected he issued a call for the use of Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony in ordinary parishes and for the singing of it by the congregation. Because very few people were familiar with those musical forms and because of the difficulty of learning them, the pope’s call was not easily or widely implemented. But the principle of congregational participation had been established, and other forms of congregational singing developed in some places.

The second was participation through reception of the Eucharist. If Pius’s promotion of chant and polyphony met with only modest success in influencing how Catholics worshiped, his success in promoting frequent, even daily Communion was, over time, close to spectacular. During his pontificate the Holy See issued a number of documents related to the Eucharist, the most important of which was Sacra Tridentina Synodus (“The Holy Council of Trent”), 1905, that made frequent communion the norm.

At the time the decree was promulgated, most Catholics received the Eucharist only once or twice a year, but by the middle of the twentieth century weekly reception had become standard for large numbers in a typical Sunday congregation. Daily reception was no longer uncommon or considered strange. The Jansenists had been the major opponents of frequent Communion, and Pius’s decree is rightly seen as a final and determining countermeasure to their persistent influence on Catholic piety.

Pius thus gave encouragement to liturgical scholarship, which during his pontificate took off with new momentum. The Belgian Benedictine Lambert Beauduin stands out for many reasons but especially for translating the Latin Missal, the priest’s book that contained all the prayers and readings for the mass, into French and Flemish. For the first time, therefore, the persons in the pew could participate in a new way by following the mass with the very same text the priest was reading. Beauduin’s initiative sparked imitation in other languages. Pius meanwhile oversaw a much-needed revision and simplification of both the missal and the breviary.

Pius, like Leo, was fearful of the turn Biblical studies had taken. Certainly, some of the scholarship stripped the sacred text of all transcendent meaning, but much of it was measured and respectful. Among the outstanding Catholic exegetes was the French Dominican Marie-Joseph Lagrange, who almost singlehandedly founded a center of biblical studies in Jerusalem, L’École Biblique, still functioning today. It was the first school and research institute in the Catholic world that programmatically made use of the new historical methods.

In 1909 Pius founded in Rome the Pontifical Biblical Institute, which was modeled in a generic way on L’École Biblique but intended as a conservative counterweight to it. He entrusted it to the Jesuits. For some time the Biblical Institute more or less lived up to the conservative hopes Pius placed in it, but with the passing of the years the professors had to come to terms with the new methods and utilize them. It has trained generations of Catholic biblical scholars and ranks as one of Pius’s lasting achievements.

Advocacy among Catholics of a sometimes undiscriminating adoption of new methods of exegesis and the more critical historical approach to other fields became part of an amorphous and much broader phenomenon known as Modernism. This broadly inclusive label helps explain why it is difficult to find a common thread linking the so-called Modernists beyond their desire to help the church reconcile with what they believed was the best in intellectual culture as it had evolved to the present.

A general but not universally accepted premise of the movement (if it can be called that) was the pervasiveness of change and the need to reckon with it. The Modernists tended to be skeptical about metaphysics and critical of the intellectualism of Thomism. Some saw democracy as the system to which society had evolved. Some saw Christian truth as founded on intuition and religious experience that were then articulated into symbols and rituals.

The storm broke on July 3, 1907. On that day the Holy Office issued a decree that condemned sixty-five propositions supposedly held by Modernists. Two months later Pius came out with his long encyclical Pascendi (“Feeding the Lord’s Flock”). The pope presented a synthesis of the teachings of the Modernists in which he described the heresy as resting on two false principles: (1) the rejection of metaphysical reason, which led to skepticism regarding rational proofs for God’s existence, and (2) rejection of the supernatural, which led to the idea that Christian doctrine derived solely from religious experience. He especially rejected the idea that “dogma is not only able but ought to evolve and to be changed, for at the head of what the Modernists teach is their doctrine of evolution.” Modernism was not so much a heresy as “the synthesis of all heresies.”

Given the amorphous and ill-defined character of what came to fall under the Modernist label, Pius’s analysis was about the best achievable under the circumstance. But the most striking feature of the encyclical was the draconian remedies it demanded be applied to deal with the evil. First, greater insistence on the teaching of Saint Thomas; second, anybody found showing “a love of novelty in history, archeology, or biblical exegesis” was to be excluded from all teaching positions; third, bishops were to establish a “Vigilance Council” whose function was to inform the bishop of anybody possibly tainted with the heresy; fourth, every three years they were to submit to the Vatican a sworn report on how these provisions were being fulfilled.

The definition of Modernism was so general, virtually equated with “any novelty,” that it could be applied to almost any work of any philosophical or historical school. A veritable purge followed, with excommunications, dismissals from office, and the banning of books reaching epidemic proportions. With more than a grain of truth it has been described as a reign of terror. No doubt, some of the tenets of the Modernists could not be reconciled with Christian belief no matter how broadly that belief was interpreted, but in the wake of the encyclical the innocent got stigmatized and in some cases their careers ruined. The papal actions dealt a heavy blow to Catholic theological life and to Catholic intellectual life more broadly, from which the church suffered for two generations. But they could not utterly stamp out methods that had struck such deep roots in culture at large and that scholars saw as yielding new truths about old texts and old beliefs.

Pius died on August 20, 1914, just a few days after World War I broke out. Even those who disagreed with him on his policies saw him as a man of sincere, even if simplistic, piety. While he was still alive, he was spoken of as a saint. Forty years after his death, 1954, Pope Pius XII confirmed that opinion by canonizing him.