Feast day: August 21

St. Pius X

Pope · 1835–1914

Patron of First communicants, pilgrims

Peasant-born pope who lowered the age of First Communion to 7 and urged frequent Communion — 'to restore all things in Christ.'

Giuseppe Sarto, who became Pope Pius X, was born in 1835 in a poor family of the Venetian countryside, the son of a village postman, and rose through the Church entirely as a pastor — country curate, parish priest, bishop, and patriarch of Venice — before his unexpected election as pope in 1903. He never lost the simplicity and direct piety of his origins, taking as his motto 'to restore all things in Christ.'

His pontificate was marked by deep concern for the spiritual life of ordinary Catholics. His most famous and far-reaching reform concerned the Eucharist: he urged frequent, even daily, Communion at a time when many received it rarely, and — most beloved of all — he lowered the age of First Communion so that young children, on reaching the use of reason, could come to the altar, earning him the title 'the Pope of the Eucharist.'

He also reformed the Church's sacred music, restoring Gregorian chant; began the great work of codifying canon law; and reorganized the Roman curia. At the same time he firmly opposed the intellectual movement called Modernism, which he saw as a threat to the foundations of the faith.

A man of personal holiness and warmth, distressed by the gathering clouds of the First World War, he died in 1914, soon after its outbreak. He was canonized in 1954 — the first pope to be made a saint in centuries.

Born a poor village postman's son, he walked miles to school barefoot to save shoe leather — and never stopped living simply, even as pope.

“Holy Communion is the shortest and safest way to Heaven.”
— St. Pius X

Image: Ernest Walter Histed (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/12137a.htm