• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Pope Pius X

On the 3rd of March 1903 Leo XIII celebrated his Jubilee with more than ordinary splendour, the occasion bringing him rich tributes of respect from all parts of the world, Catholic and non-Catholic; on the 20th of July following he died. The succession was expected to fall to Leo's secretary of state, Cardinal Rampolla; but he was credited with having inspired the French sympathies of the late pope; Austria exercised its right of veto, and on the 8th of August, Giuseppe Sarto, who as cardinal patriarch of Venice had shown a friendly disposition towards the Italian government, was elected pope.

Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto took the name Pius to honor the memory of Pius IX and his fight against the Revolution inside the Church. Pius XI took the same name in respect for Pius X. He took as his secretary of state Cardinal Raphael Merry del Val, a Spaniard of English birth and education, well versed in diplomacy, but of well-known ultramontane tendencies. The new pope was known to be no politician, but a simple and saintly priest, and in some quarters there were hopes that the attitude of the papacy towards the Italian kingdom might now be changed. But the name he assumed, Pius X, was significant; and, even had he had the will, it was soon clear that he had not the power to make any material departure from the policy of the first "prisoner of the Vatican."

In 1871, with the loss of the papal states to the modern nation of Italy and the restriction of Vatican sovereignty to its current borders, Pope Pius IX had proclaimed himself a "prisoner of the Vatican" and taken a defensive stance toward the modern world. In his decree Non expedit ("it is not expedient"), he had forbidden Italy's Catholics from taking any part in national politics. Pope Pius X (reigned 1903 - 1914) took this isolating trend further by undertaking a purge of "Modernists", especially biblical scholars who used modern textual criticism, driving many intellectuals from the Church.

The new regime at the Vatican soon made itself felt in the relations of the Holy See with the world of modern thought and with the modern conception of the state. The new pope's motto, it is said, was "to establish all things in Christ" (instaurare omnia in Christo); and since, ex hypolhesi, he himself was Christ's vicar on earth, the working out of this principle meant in effect the extension and consolidation of the papal authority and, as far as possible, an end to the compromises by means of which the papacy had sought to make friends of the Mammon of unrighteousness. It was this spirit which informed such decrees as that on "mixed marriages" of 1907, which widened still further the social gulf between Catholics and Protestants, or the refusal to allow the French bishops to accept the Associations Law passed by the French government after the denunciation of the concordat and the separation of Church and Stale, better that the Church in France should sink into more than apostolic poverty than that a tittle of the rights of the Holy Sec should be surrendered.

Above all it was this spirit that breathed through every line of the famous encyclical, Pascendi gregis, directed against the "Modernists", which denounced with bitter scorn and irony those so-called Catholics who dared to attempt to reconcile the doctrine of the Church with the results Of modem science, and who, presumptuously disregarding the authority of the Holy See, maintained "the absurd doctrine that would make of the laity the factor of progress in the Church." That under Pius X the papacy had abandoned none of its pretensions to dominate consciences, not of Catholics only, was again proved in 1910 when, at the very moment when the pope was praising the English people for the spirit of tolerance which led the British government to introduce a bill to alter the form of the Declaration made by the sovereign on his accession into a form inoffensive to Roman Catholics, he was remonstrating with the government of Spain for abrogating the law forbidding the Spanish dissident churches to display publicly the symbols of the Christian faith or to conduct their services otherwise than semi-privately.

In pursuance of the task of strengthening the Holy See, the Vatican policy under Pius X was not merely one of defiance towards supposed hostile forces within and without; it was also strenuous in pushing on the work of internal organizalion and reform. In 1904 a commission of cardinals was appointed to undertake the stupendous task of codifying the canon law, and an extensive reorganization of the Curia was carried out, in order to conform its machinery more nearly to present-day needs. In taking England, the United States and other non-Catholic states from under the care of the Congregation of the Propaganda, the pope raised the status of the Roman Catholic Church in those countries. All these changes tended to consolidating the centralized authority of the papacy.

Other reforms were of a different character. One of the earliest acts of the new pontificate was to forbid the use in the services of the Church of any music later than Palestrina, a drastic order justified by the extreme degradation into which church music had fallen in Italy, but in general honored rather in the spirit than in the letter. More important was the appointment in 1907 of a commission, under the presidency of Abbot Gasquet, to attempt the restoration of the pure text of the Vulgate as St Jerome wrote it.

Such activities might well be taken as proof that the papacy at the outset of the 20th century possessed a vigor which it was m possessing a hundred years earlier. Under Pius VI and Pius VII the papacy had reached the lowest depths of spiritual and political impotence since the Reformation, and the belief was even widespread that the prisoner of Fontainebleau would be the last of the long line of St Peter's successors. This weakness was due not to attacks from without - for orthodox Protestantism had long since lost its aggressive force - but to disruptive tendencies within the Church; the Enlightenment of the 19th century had lapped the foundations of the faith among the world of intellect and fashion; the development of Gallicanism and Febronianism threatened to leave the Holy See but a shadowy pre-eminence over a series of national churches, and even to obliterate the frontier line between Catholicism and Protestantism.

It was the Revolution, which at one moment seemed finally to have engulfed the papacy, which in fact preserved it; Febronianism, as a force to be seriously reckoned with, perished in the downfall of the ecclesiastical principalities of the old Empire; Gallicanism perished with the constitutional Church in France, and its principles fell into discredit with a generation which associated it with the Revolution and its excesses. In the reaction that followed the chaos of the Revolutionary epoch men turned to the papacy as alone giving a foothold of authority in a confused and quaking world.

The Romantic movement helped, with its idealization of a past but vaguely realized and imperfectly understood, and Chateaubriand heralded in the Catholic reaction with his Gtrtie du Christianisme (1801) a brilliant if superficial attack on the encyclopaedists and their neo-Paganism, and a glorification of the Christian Church as supreme not only in the regions of faith and morals, but also in those of intellect and art. More weighty was the Du Pape of Joseph de Maistre (1819), closely reasoned and fortified with a wealth of learning, which had an enormous influence upon all those who thought that they saw in the union of "altar and throne" the palladium of society. The Holy Empire was dead, in spite of the pope's protest at Vienna against the failure to restore "the center of political unity"; Joseph de Maistrc's idea was to set up the Holy Sec in its place. To many minds the papacy thus came to represent a unifying principle, as opposed to the disruptive tendencies of Liberalism and Nationalism, and the papal monarchy came to be surrounded with a new halo, as in some sort realizing that ideal of a "federation of the world" after which the age was dimly feeling.