The program of the pontificate of Saint Pius X.

 

(September 3, feast of Saint Pius X, Pope)

 

 Pius X,  "great among the greatest Popes of the Catholic Church," immediately understood the present hour and, in quick synthesis, deepened all the needs of the moment.

His first encyclical is dated October 4, 1903; in it he dealt with the basic lines, simple and clear, of his Pontificate:  “Instaurare omnia in Christo” ; the same program of the  “fullness of time” , the same and identical program that he, a man of rigidly rectilinear action, had lived and carried out every day as a great battle of faith and the supreme goal of continuous affirmation, from which he had not departed for a single moment.

For men of human interests it was a new word, but for Pius X it was already 20 centuries old. Redirect humanity under the rule of Christ. A great task.

But before this promise to restore all things in Christ flourished in a wonderful spring of soul, reaching the most distant corners of the Catholic world, inexpressible pain and bitterness were going to narrow, like an immense crown of thorns, the heart of the Pope who With firm intuition and the gallantry of an athlete, he was preparing to face problems and events that no one before him had faced or even dared to overcome.

And the bitterness and pain came from far and near, from Ecuador, Mexico, Russia and Portugal, Germany, Spain, France and even Italy, the last bulwark of the Latin world.
Being Patriarch of Venice, on August 9, 1879, at the XIX Eucharistic Congress, he had loudly proclaimed with solemn eloquence the sovereign rights of Christ:

“Jesus Christ is King and supreme King, and as King he must be honored. His thought must be in our intelligences; their morals in our customs; his charity in the institutions; his justice in the laws; its action in history; his cult in religion; his life in our life ”.

He knew well that the salvation of individuals and nations lay solely in the positive practice of the doctrine of the Divine Master: the doctrine that surpasses all times and dominates all ages. 

Consequently, science and civilization, culture and politics, law and morality, the state and the family, sociology and the school, public life and private life, in all their multiple manifestations, should be inspired not in the skillful arts of intelligent diplomacy or in the successes of human smallness, but in the immutable teachings of the Gospel, in the Christian life understood in all its breadth and in all its depth: the life that one day will restore Christ his Kingdom, the kingdom that is in the Sermon on the Mount, and not in the transactions here below.

For this reason, when Pius X announced his Pontificate to the world, he wrote like this:

  “Before human society we only want to be a Minister of God, of whose authority we are depositories. God's interests will be our interests, for which we are determined to wear out all our strength and even life itself, and if someone asks us for a slogan, as an expression of our determined will, we will always give this and no other: Restore all things in Christ, so that Christ may be all in all. With the enormous crime of apostasy of all supernatural order, so typical of our time, in which society has fallen, we must return honor due to the most holy laws and the advice of the Gospel; affirm the truth and doctrine of the Church regarding the sanctity of Christian marriage, the education of the youth, the possession and use of property,the duties towards those who hold the reins of government, it is necessary to restore the balance between the various social classes according to the norms of the prescriptions and Christian customs. "

  And so that no doubts could arise about the orientation of his Pontificate, and so that no one could have any illusions or pretend mistakes about his intentions, he did not hesitate to clarify and specify his program with even greater precision in the first Consistory of September 9. following November:

  “Our sublime mission, because it is about something that, surpassing these ephemeral goods of the earth, extends into eternity, embraces all nations and stimulates our concern for all men, for whom Christ died. 'Restore all things in Christ.' This is our program, as we have already announced. And since Christ is the truth, our first duty will be, first of all, to teach, proclaim and defend the truth and the law of Christ. Hence the duty to illustrate and confirm the principles of natural and supernatural truth, which, so often in our day, we see, unfortunately, obscured and forgotten; consolidate the principles of dependence, authority, justice and equity, which are being violated today; guide everyone according to the norms of morality,also in social and political affairs; to all, we say, both those who obey and those who command.

We know very well that we will collide with not a few, who will say that we necessarily deal with politics. But any impartial judge of things can see that the Supreme Pontiff, invested with God from the Supreme Magisterium, cannot at all separate things that pertain to faith and customs from things of politics. Being, in addition, head and first Magistrate of the Church society, it is necessary that he have mutual relations with the heads of nations and with civil authorities, if he wants that in any part where there are Catholics, their security and safety be provided. freedom, without forgetting that, presided over by faith, our apostolic duty is also to confute and reject the principles of modern philosophy and civil law,that today they are taking the course of human things where the prescriptions of the eternal Law do not allow. At this point, our conduct, far from opposing the progress of humanity, will only prevent it from plunging to total ruin. "

These assumptions were serious with which the Pope, who had been Parish Priest and Bishop, started his Pontificate, in an hour in which among so many parties in which men were divided, the best of the parties was missing: the  "party of God". He was not unaware that the Pontiff who wanted to restore all things in Christ could not back down from any obstacle, nor be impressed by objections or criticism; He should not fear contempt or misunderstandings, not take into account threats or discordant attitudes, even those of heads of state or government, but dominating with the strength of God all events, even the most arduous, he should move forward Undaunted until he reached the goal, ready to break with an iron hand the audacity of anyone who tried to deform the divine physiognomy of the Church.

"The victory will always be God's," he had said shortly before his first Encyclical, "and the defeat of the man who dares to oppose God will never be closer than when in the midst of the enthusiasm of triumph he rises with greater audacity."

At 68 years of age, Pius X was still a robust man, full of vigor and life, with complete assurance in the existence of God and in the eternal youth communicated by Christ to his Church. He had not attended diplomacy school, but he had the diplomacy of experience, he had the science of facts, because he had scrutinized the world from the top of many observatories and had mastered the horizon that had been growing ever wider.

He knew in depth the diplomacy of the Gospel that upsets all the old and new diplomacies of the world: he had strength of character, a firm heart and a will that vibrated with the profound rite of a sure precision of judgment, with the force of a living faith, fiery, unmistakable.

Thus, looking serenely towards the frontier of eternity, directing high thought and fruitful action to the restoration of all things in Christ, with indomitable firmness he began his Pontificate, which, although in the complexity of the vicissitudes during his 11 years he felt more than once the bitter solitude of Gethsemane, he also had the effulgent light that sprang up from the darkness of Calvary when Christ, dying, destroyed death, and, rising, renewed life.

Girolamo Dal-Gal , " Pius X, the Holy Pope ."