Pius X: The Complete Collected Encyclicals of Pius X. Privately published, 2023.

Born in 1835 in the Kingdom of Lombardy, Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto attended the Seminary of Padua, where he studied the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and canon law before being ordained as a priest in 1858. He rose in rank within the Church, serving as spiritual director and later professor at the seminary in the Diocese of Treviso, then as Bishop of Mantua, beginning in 1884. Nine years later, Pope Leo XIII appointed him to the Sacred College of Cardinals, and he succeeded Leo in the papacy in 1903. Notable as a critic of “modernism” in the Church, he died in August 1914, on the eve of the war that has sometimes been described as the debacle of European modernity. The Church canonized him in 1952. 

In his first message as pope, Pius professed himself “disturbed” at having succeeded such an eminent pastor as Leo but “terrified beyond all else by the disastrous state of human society today.” “For who can fail to see that society is at the present time, more than in any past age, suffering from a terrible and deep-rooted malady which, developing every day and eating into its inmost being, is dragging it to destruction?” Against this, citing Ephesians i.10,”We have no other program in the Supreme Pontificate but that of ‘restoring all things in Christ'” amidst a society in which “every effort and every artifice is used to destroy utterly the memory and the knowledge of God,” for Whom “all respect” has been “extinguished among the majority of men.” In modernity, “man has with infinite temerity put himself in the place of God,” making “of the universe a temple wherein he himself is to be adored.” The result has been a Hobbesian world, in which “the greater part of mankind [are] fighting among themselves so savagely as to make it seem as though strife were universal.” While many cry for peace, “to want peace without God is an absurdity, seeing that where God is absent thence too justice flies, and when justice is taken away it is vain to cherish the hope of peace.” He therefore calls upon his Church brethren to “lead mankind back to the dominion of Christ” as a spiritual necessity, “a natural duty,” and in “our common interest” as human beings.

The path to Christ “is the Church.” Once the Church has refuted the pretension of human self-deification, it must continue on “to restore to their ancient place of honor the most holy laws and counsels of the gospel; to proclaim aloud the truths taught by the Church, and her teachings on the sanctity of marriage, on the education and discipline of youth, on the possession and use of property, the duties that men owe to those who rule the State; and lastly to restore equilibrium between the different classes of society according to Christian precept and custom.” Central to these tasks will be the reform and reinvigoration of Catholic education: “How many there are who mock Christ and abhor the Church and the Gospel more through ignorance than through badness of mind.” “Progress of knowledge” need not extinguish faith; it is ignorance that does so. “The more ignorance prevails the greater is the havoc wrought by incredulity.” In the parishes, however, the most effective way to teach is by example, as “luminous examples given by the great army of soldiers of Christ will be of much greater avail in moving and drawing men than words and sublime dissertations.” [1]

His first specific step to realize this reformation was a letter on Church music, crucial to satisfying the need to establish “the decorum of the House of God in which the august mysteries of religion are celebrated” with “sacred chant and music.” There has been “a general tendency to deviate from the right rule,” which is “to clothe with suitable melody the liturgical text proposed for the understanding of the faithful…in order that through it the faithful may be more easily moved to devotion and better disposed for the reception of the fruits of grace belonging to the celebration of the most holy mysteries.” Although “every nation is permitted to admit into its ecclesiastical compositions those special forms which may be said to constitute its native music,” those forms “must be subordinated in such a manner to the general characteristics of sacred music,” the supreme model of which is the Gregorian Chant. The congregants should themselves participate in the Chant, so that they “may again take a more active part in the ecclesiastical offices, as was the case in ancient times.” The human voice should predominate over organ music.  Modern music “in the theatrical style” (“which was in the greatest vogue, especially in Italy, during the last century”) should be avoided in worship services, for “its very nature is diametrically opposed to Gregorian Chant and classic polyphony, and therefore to the most important law of all good sacred music.” But even the best music should be kept in strict subordination to the liturgy; “it must be considered a very grave abuse when the liturgy in ecclesiastical function is made to appear secondary to and in a manner at the service of the music, for the music is merely a part of the liturgy and its humble handmaid.” As Plato’s Socrates knew, music tunes souls, readying them for reason or for unreason and in a Christian church it should be such as prepares them for receiving the Holy Spirit by word, the Gospel, and in action, by the sacraments.

If Logos means God’s Word, and His Word is reasonable, then the Church should follow the Fourth Council of the Lateran, which in 1215 made sacramental confession and Holy Communion mandatory only after a child “had attained the age of reason.” By the age of reason, the Church Fathers did not mean the age where formal instruction in logic might be undertaken but simply the time when the child “knows the difference between the Eucharistic Bread and ordinary, material bread, and can therefore approach the altar with proper devotion.” For this “full use of reason is not required, for a certain beginning of the use of reason, that is, some use of reason suffices.” Thought governed by the principle on non-contradiction enables the mind to make distinctions between one thing and another, a capacity that small children have attained.

Beyond this elementary instruction, further knowledge of God begins with this natural capacity of the intellect. But if the intellect lacks “its companion light,” the light of the Gospel, it remains unable to see its way “to the paths of justice.” “Christian teaching reveals God and His infinite perfection with far greater clarity than is possible by the human faculties alone.” Mere “knowledge of religion” can coincide with “a perverse will and unbridled conduct.” Christian education therefore requires not only faith, “which is of the mind,” but hope, “which is of the will,” and love, “which is of the heart.” Christian education addresses “the whole man” as “the son of the heavenly Father, in Whose image he is formed, and with Whom he is destined to live in eternal happiness,” as is revealed “only by the doctrine of Jesus Christ.” Outward actions, such as baptism and giving alms, are thus less important than teaching. This is why the Council of Trent decreed that the “first and most important work” of pastors is to educate the faithful, carefully distinguishing the “milk” of catechetical instruction from the solid “bread” of the Gospel. The catechist will “take up one or other of the truths of faith or Christian morality and then explain it in all its parts,” comparing God’s command to “what is our actual conduct,” using “examples appropriately taken from the Holy Scriptures, Church history and the lives of the saints” applying them to his hearers’ own lives, showing them “how they are to regulate their own conduct” and “exhort[ing] all present to dread and avoid vice and to practice virtue.” Without this fundamental instruction—aimed, like the liturgy, including music, at preparing the soul for attention to the things of God—the more advanced instruction in the Gospel will prove little more than puffery.

Citing the intention to restore “all things in Christ” enunciated in his first Encyclical letter, Pius reaffirms the substance of the Gospel doctrine on the miracle of the Immaculate Conception, a doctrine which had been reaffirmed fifty years earlier by Pope Pius IX. “For can anyone fail to see that there is no surer or more direct road than by Mary for uniting all mankind in Christ and obtaining through Him the perfect adoption of sons, that we may be holy and immaculate in the sight of God.” That is, it is in a sense no less miraculous that decidedly unholy human beings may be ‘born again,’ becoming sons and daughters not only of their own parents but of God, than it was for God to be born of a woman. Both the ‘reconception’ Christians experience and the Conception of God in Mary are ‘immaculate’ or untainted by sin. Upon Mary, “as upon a foundation, the noblest after Christ, rises the edifice of the faith of all centuries.” Since faith is a thing of the mind, and education guides the mind, Mary is indispensable to Christian education.  “With her alone of all others Jesus was for thirty years united”; as a result, “Who could better than His Mother have an open knowledge of the admirable mysteries of the birth and childhood of Christ, and above all of the mystery of the Incarnation, which is the beginning and the foundation of faith?” In “sharing as she did the thoughts and the secret wishes of Christ she may be said to have lived the very life of her Son,” and “nobody can ever be more competent as a guide and teacher of the knowledge of Christ.” Devotion to Mary also remedies the defects of the will and the heart, since in seeking “to gain the heart of Mary,” in courting her favor, one must “correct his vicious habits and to subdue the passions which incite him to evil.” Mary educates the whole man, and does so by her nature, having been exempted from “all stain of original sin” by God. This must be so, because the Son of God took not only his human nature from her but something of her own nature. By affirming the truth of the Immaculate Conception precisely as a miracle, Christians reject rationalism and materialism. Mary “has exterminated all heresies in the world” not by preaching but by her life, crushing the head of the serpent and his ‘worldly wisdom’ with “Christian wisdom,” the purpose of Christian education in full.

Such heresies have entered the Church itself. “An air of independence which is fatal for souls is widely diffused in the world, and has found its way even within the sanctuary, show[ing] itself not only in relation to authority but also in regard to doctrine.” He tells an assemblage of bishops that “some of our young clerics, animated by that spirit of unbridled criticism which holds sway at the present day, have come to lose all respect for the learning which comes from our great teachers, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, the interpreters of revealed doctrine”—foremost among them, Thomas Aquinas, with whose Summa the mind of Pius himself had been fortified. “If ever you have in your seminary one of those new-style savants, get rid of him without delay…. You will always regret having ordained even one such person; never will you regret having excluded him.” Since “a poisonous atmosphere corrupts men’s minds to a great extent today,” bishops should proceed deliberately with ordination. “Your priests will be as you have trained them,” and you are the ones who must train them, rather than releasing them into the secular universities without “very good reasons” for doing so and after “necessary precautions have been taken.” Seminarians are not to “take part in external activities,” to read newspapers and periodicals except “those with solid principles and which the Bishop deems suitable for their study.” Bishops should appoint a spiritual director for each seminary, a man with the innocence of doves and the prudence of serpents, ready “to train the young men in solid piety, the primary foundation of the spiritual life.”

So reformed, so re-centered on Christ, the Church can then resume what Pius regards as its rightful task not only as “the guardian and protector of Christian society” but as the “solid foundation for civil legislation. In the past, proper relations between Church and State require “the public recognition of the authority of the Church in those matters which touched upon conscience in any manner” and “the subordination of all the laws of the State to the Divine laws of the Gospel,” ensuring that “the harmony of the two powers in securing the temporal welfare of the people in such a way that their eternal welfare did not suffer.” In modern life, religious toleration prevails, offering “indiscriminately to all the right to influence public opinion.” Very well then, Catholics “can certainly use this to their advantage.” To do so, they must “prove themselves as capable as others (in fact, more capable than others) by cooperating in the material and civil welfare of the people,” to “acquire that authority and prestige which will make them capable of defending and promoting a higher good, namely, that of the soul.” In regimes of liberal democracy, the Church can no longer wield political power directly but it can reestablish itself among in the minds and hearts of the sovereign people without formal Church establishment. 

Since the twelfth century, the Catholic Church had formalized its relations with civil governments by signing concordats—effectively, treaties whereby a given state would agree to a set of licit practices within it by a ‘foreign power,’ the Church. The Church never committed itself to treating with any one regime type. So long as the Church could freely perform its duties to God and to men, it was ecumenical with respect to rulers and ruling institutions. What Pius deplores in modern times is ‘laicization’ of civil society, particularly as seen in the French Law of Separation the Churches and State, enacted in 1905. Although the Concordat of 1801 had re-established the Catholic Church in France after its disestablishment and the dispossession of Church properties under the First Republic, secularization had resumed, gradually, in the 1880s within the education system. In 1904, the Third Republic had severed diplomatic with the Holy See. The new law completed the task, permitting divorce, replacing nuns with laywomen as hospital nurses, ending exemption from military conscription for priests, transferring Church property to the national and municipal governments, banning public prayers at the beginning of parliamentary sessions, and eliminating religious references from oaths taken in courtrooms as well as any religious symbols in the courtrooms. Pius deems this violation of the Concordat to be “as disastrous for society as it is for religion,” an act of “injustice to God,” inasmuch as “the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own,” incurring an obligation to “a public and social worship to honor Him,” not merely a guarantee of Christian worship conceived as “a private cult.” The purpose of the God-ordained political community isn’t “the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only”—a “proximate” aim—but of “man’s eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course.” Under the Law, however, the Church in France survives “under the domination of the civil power,” having taken over education and other important functions of Christian charity and having revoked the government subsidies Napoleon had instituted as compensation for the despoiling of Church properties during the Revolution. The framers of the Law admit that they intend to “de-Catholicize” France, even to the extent of severing religious institutions from the Church hierarchy by making them “judicially answerable to the civil authority.” Pius adjures French Catholics to defend the Church by “model[ing] all your actions and your entire lives” so that they “may do honor to the faith you profess” and then unite with “your priests, your bishops, and above all with this Apostolic see,” going forth fearlessly and prayerfully to resist these statist depredations, “employ[ing] all means which the law recognizes as within the rights of all citizens to arrange for and organize religious worship.” In so doing, French Catholics must anticipate that their adversaries will falsely claim that “the form of the Republic in France is hateful to Us,” that the Pope intends “to overthrow it.” They will pretend that the Church seeks “to arouse religious war in France,” but on the contrary, “the whole world now knows that if peace of conscience is broken in France, that is not the work of the Church but of her enemies.” [2]

Some of Pius’s suspicions were directed at would-be ‘helpers’ of the Church. In 1894, a French lay Catholic named Marc Sangnier founded Le Sillon (“The Path”). Responding to Leo XIII’s call for increased civil-social engagement by Church members, Sangnier hoped generally to reconcile Catholicism with the democratic-republican regime in general and with the French labor movement in particular. Membership grew to 500,000—predominantly laypersons and the younger clergy. The Sillon arrayed itself against the resolutely monarchist enemy of the Third Republic, Charles Maurras’s Action Française. [3]

Initially hopeful, by 1910 Pius became skeptical of the Sillon. Admittedly, “the Sillon did raise among the workers the standard of Jesus Christ, the symbol of salvation for peoples and nations,” inculcating “a respect for religion upon the least willing groups, accustoming the ignorant and the impious to hearing the Word of God,” “proudly proclaiming their faith in the face of a hostile audience,” often consisting of urban workers more accustomed to hearing secular-republican and Marxist doctrines from union organizers. Unfortunately, the leaders of the Sillon “were not adequately equipped with historical knowledge, sound philosophy, and solid theology to tackle without danger the difficult social problems in which their work and their inclinations were involving them.” They incautiously allowed “the penetration of liberal and Protestant concepts” into their talks, adapting Catholicism as much to laïcité as they adapted laïcité to Catholicism. In so doing, “the Sillonists are deceiving themselves when they believe that they are working in a field that lies outside the limits of Church authority and of its doctrinal and directive power,” a misconception Pius was not slow to correct.

In calling for Catholic civic engagement, Leo XIII rejected radical egalitarianism or social leveling, affirming rather that Christian Democracy “must preserve the diversity of classes which is assuredly the attribute of a soundly constituted state.” Neither popular sovereignty nor social egalitarianism met with Leo’s approval, yet these are the doctrines the Sillon promotes. Pius firmly replies: “In these times of social and intellectual anarchy when everyone takes it upon himself to teach as a teacher and lawmaker—the City cannot be built otherwise than as God has built it; society cannot be set up unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no, civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built on hazy nations; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and miscreants.” 

Pius regards the Sillon’s regard for human dignity as praiseworthy, but its conception of human dignity is mistaken, taken from philosophers “of whom the Church does not at all feel proud,” the ‘philosophers of freedom’ who define liberty as autonomy. [4] From the principle of autonomy they derive the principles of economic, political, and intellectual emancipation from bosses, from all regimes other than democracy, and from the Church hierarchy, respectively. “The leveling down of differences from this threefold point of view will bring about equality among men, and such equality is viewed as true human justice.” Without the traditional hierarchies ordained by God, the bonds of society will consist of “love or one’s occupation and for the welfare of the community.” Thus, fraternity will give shape and cohesion to the society of equality and liberty. None of this comports with Leo’s intention, which had been consistent with “the sentiments of Catholics who hold that the right of government derives from God as its natural and necessary principle.” Sillonists have committed “the error of philosophism,” embracing doctrines propounded by the philosophes who endowed the Jacobins with what little intellectual heft they had. In a word, the Sillon resembles a salon. By making authority “a shadow, a myth,” Sillonists establish a principle whereby there can be “no more law properly so-called, no more obedience” to rulers secular or religious. “Even the priest, on entering [The Sillon], lowers the eminent dignity of his priesthood and, by a strange reversal of roles, becomes a student, placing himself on a level with his young friends, and is no more than a comrade.” The philosophy of freedom inclines toward anarchism. But in fact, as Leo himself had declared, the people are entitled “to choose for themselves the form of government which best corresponds with their character or with the institutions and customs handed down by their forefathers.” Following Aquinas, who follows Aristotle, the Church has long considered kingship, aristocracy, and mixed regimes as licit forms of government, since “justice is compatible with any of them.” “Democracy does not enjoy a special privilege.” In embracing it, and rejecting all other regimes, the Sillon “subjects its religion to a political party,” when the Church “has always left to the nations the care of giving themselves the form of government which they think most suited to their needs.”

Nor does the Church endorse the secularist notion of fraternity. “Love of our neighbor flows from our love for God,” and “any other kind of love is sheer illusion sterile and fleeting,” inasmuch as “pagan and secular societies of ages past…show that concern for common interests or affinities of nature weigh very little against the passions and wild desires of the heart.” Catholicism means universalism, but it is far from an indiscriminate universalism. Indeed, “by separating fraternity from Christian charity thus understood, democracy, far from being a progress, would mean a disastrous step backwards for civilization,” especially since their version of fraternity tolerates false ideas, errors, and vices—interdenominationalism and indeed “promiscuity” of association. Similarly, secularist notions of human dignity only exalt “human pride.” The Sillonists are therefore utopians: “Unless human nature can be changed, which is not within the power of the Sillonists,” their envisioned society will never arrive. Real fraternity will occur only when “all minds” are “united in the knowledge of Truth, all wills united in morality, and all hearts in the love of God and His Son Jesus Christ,” which only the Catholic Church affords. “Vague idealism and civic virtues” will not do. And “worse is to come,” as “the end result of this developing promiscuousness, the beneficiary of this cosmopolitan social action, can only be a Democracy which will be neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor Jewish” but an egalitarian ‘Religion of Humanity.’ [5] Sillonists have been “carried away towards another Gospel which they thought was the true Gospel of Our Savior,” but which “put[s] aside the divinity of Jesus Christ, and then to mention only His unlimited clemency.” But the real Jesus “has laid down with supreme authority the condition that we must belong to His Flock, that we must accept His doctrine, that we must practice virtue and that we must accept the teaching and guidance of Peter and his successors.” Yes, Jesus loves sinners, but He also teaches them “in order to convert and save them.” “He was as strong as he was gentle,” teaching “that fear [of God] is the beginning of wisdom, and that it is sometimes proper for a man to cut off an offending limb to save his body.” Such teachings “show in Our Lord Jesus Christ something quite different from an inconsistent and impotent humanitarianism.” Cutting off the offending limb was exactly what Pius then proceeded to do, telling the leaders of the Sillon to turn their leadership over to the French bishops, whom he charged with superintending the civil-social work of the rank-and-file members. 

Pius outlined his own understanding of the Church’s role in a democratic republic and in regard to labor organizations in his Encyclical, Singular Quadam, published in 1912. There is to be no revival of religious warfare. “We desire and intend that the faithful live with their non-Catholic fellow citizens in that peace without which neither the order of human society nor the welfare of the State can endure.” But spiritual warfare is another matter. A Christian “cannot ignore the supernatural good,” but “must order all things to the ultimate end, namely, the Highest Good,” subjecting all his actions “to the judgment and judicial office of the Church.” This goes for labor organizations, which ought to be “established chiefly on the foundation of the Catholic religion and openly follow the directive of the Church.” Associations composed of Catholics and non-Catholics are forbidden to Catholics, given the “serious dangers to the integrity of their faith and the due obedience to the commandments and precepts of the Catholic Church” such organizations entail. “Provided they exercise due caution,” Catholic labor organizations may “collaborate with non-Catholics for the common good” as “cartels”—associations, that is, which imitate the already existing cartels among capitalist firms, cartels involving labor instead of goods. It is entirely possible that Pius may have noted the resemblance of existing cartels to medieval guilds, organizations the Church had dealt with, and among, for centuries.

Beyond Europe, Pius intervened on behalf of South American Indians, consistent with a longstanding Church policy of defending them against European colonizers. [6] Quoting Pope Benedict XIV’s 1741 Encyclical, Immensa Pastorum, Pius recalled the rebuke of nominal Catholic Spaniards who acted “as if they had utterly forgotten all sense of the charity poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Ghost,” reducing the Indians to slavery, selling some into slavery, and “treating them with such inhumanity that they were thus greatly hindered from embracing the Christian faith”—example being more persuasive than precept. Although slavery has since been abolished, in some instances Indians are still scourged and branded, “often for most trivial causes, often for a mere lust of cruelty”; whole villages and districts have seen the people slaughtered, with the extinction of some tribes. Surviving women and children are sold acts in which the rulers “have surpassed the worst examples of pagan iniquity.” Pius calls on European Catholic bishops to sponsor missions in America and to denounce “these base deeds,” which do “dishonor to the Christian name.”

Pius X’s Encyclicals clearly evidence the work of a pastor-statesman, one who undertook the reforming the regime he served in light of new circumstances, implementing a comprehensive policy consisting of recurrence to the regime’s first principles, attention to its ruling persons and institutions (especially its educational institutions, under assault from several quarters), and formulation of what might be described as a foreign policy regarding friends and enemies alike. He upholds the regime’s way of life and the end or purpose of that way of life, both as set down by its Founder. The besetting vice of the statesman might well be pride; this is even more likely in a monarchic regime, wherein the ruler has no equals, and so no one likely to rebuke his errors. To avoid this, to humble himself, Pius looks first to the King of kings and of popes. But to do that isn’t necessarily to see how a non-divine being might rule in the office he has inherited. He therefore looks to the examples set by one of his most distinguished predecessors in the Holy See, St. Gregory the Great, the great missionary and defender of the Church against monarchic interference St. Anselm of Acosta, Archbishop of Canterbury, and also St. Charles Borromeo, reformer of both the Catholic Church in Milan and the city itself and, like Pius, a strong advocate of sound education for the clergy. 

Pius celebrated the thirteenth centenarian of Gregory, “that great and incomparable man,” that “most prudent father of the family of Christ,” in 1904. In praising Gregory for his prudence, Pius follows both the teaching of Christ, who advises His disciples to be as innocent as doves and as prudent as serpents, but also Aristotle, who regards prudence as the preeminent virtue for the ruler. The parallel between the circumstances of the sixth century and the twentieth are clear: “When Gregory assumed the Supreme Pontificate the disorder in public affairs had reached its climax; the ancient civilization had all but disappeared and barbarism was spreading throughout the dominions of the crumbling Roman Empire.” Although the barbarism Gregory faced down was violent—Italy “had been left a prey of the still unsettled Lombards who roamed up and down the whole country laying waste everywhere”—Pius foresees a similar condition of anarchy in then-peaceful contemporary Europe, if the forces of modernity remain unchecked. More than only a defender of the Faith, Gregory sent to missions to England, adding that country to the realm of the Church while stipulating that it was Christ, not his own human wisdom, Who must be credited with that success. His “profound humility” led him never to “put himself forward as one invested with the might and power of the great ones of the earth,” calling himself rather “the Servant of the Servants of God.” Not despite because of this humility, carried on by his successors, the Church remains, even as the powerful men who rose up against her have disappeared and “philosophical systems without number” have been forgotten, confirming Jesus’ prophecy, “Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass.” For this reason, the Church today can “calmly wait until all the voices be scattered to the winds that now shout around Us proclaiming that the Church has gone beyond her time, that her doctrines are passed away forever, that the day is at hand when she will be condemned either to accept the tenets of a godless science and civilization or to depart from human society.”

In the coming struggle, the “unshakeable firmness” of Gregory in understanding the necessity of “a perfect harmony between the two powers, ecclesiastical and civil,” stands as an example for this pope and for all the clergy. Brought to understand that the Church does no injury to “the common weal” and may not abandon its own rights, vis-à-vis the state, “the world regained true salvation, and put itself on the path of a civilization which was noble and fruitful in blessings in proportion as it was founded on the incontrovertible dictates of reason and moral discipline, and derived its force from truth divinely revealed and from the maxims of the Gospel.” The Church today in one sense finds itself in the opposite condition. Christendom has been built, yet the world “seems as though it were tired of that life which has been and still is the chief and often the sole font of so many blessings—and not merely past but present blessings.” This exhaustion derives from the denial of the “supernatural order” and, “as a consequence, the divine intervention in the order of creation and in the government of the world and in the possibility of miracles.” “Men even go so far as to impugn the arguments for the existence of God.” Contemporary “historical criticism” of Scripture ignores the intention of the Scriptural authors, instead “forcing them to say what [the critics] wish them to say.” With the truth of Scripture effectively so erased, men “take away the principle that there is anything divine outside this visible world”; that in turn “take[s] away all check upon the unbridled passions even of the lowest and most shameful kind,” enslaving the mind, the seat of reason, to those passions and thereby negating “the morals of individuals and of civil society.” Absent moral authority, “the only check” on lawlessness governments retain is force. The rule of force causes men to “become discontented with everything,” to “proclaim the right to act as they please,” to “stir up rebellions” and “provoke revolutions, often of extreme violence,” which end in “overthrow[ing] all rights human and divine.” “The very liberty that belongs to the law of nature is trodden underfoot; and men go so far as to destroy the very structure of the family, which is the first and firmest foundation of the social structure.” With the rejection of Christ, the corner stone, the architecture of Church and state must collapse. 

Hence what began as a circumstance opposite to that seen by Gregory threatens to become something nearly identical to that circumstance. Catholics “must, above all else, have recourse to prayer, both public and private, to implore the mercies of the Lord and His powerful assistance.” But prayer is “not enough.” Gregory rebuked a bishop who had retreated to a life of solitary prayer, a man who “fail[ed] to go out into the battlefield to combat strenuously for the cause of the Lord.” Even a bishop cannot set an example if no one sees him—out of sight, out of mind. Catholic clergy must engage the errors of their time, preaching the truth of Church doctrine, especially Christian moral principles, and more “to show charity towards all, to  temper with Christian love the bitterness of social inequalities, to detach the heart from the goods of the world, to live contented with the state in which Providence has placed us, while striving to better it by the fulfillment of our duties” and “to thirst after the future life in the hope of eternal reward.” Only then, if God so wills, can “these principles be instilled and made to penetrate into the heart, so that true and solid piety may strike root there.” There is prudence and then there is prudence; not all forms of prudence are genuinely prudent at all. To concede anything to modern “science falsely so-called” bespeaks a “prudence of the flesh” and to fail to preach, teach, and fully to practice the Gospel is a failure of prudence, not the exercise of it. Gregory’s “spirit of energetic action” caused “the whole medieval period” to bear “what may be called the Gregorian imprint,” seen in “the rule of ecclesiastical government, the manifold phases of charity and philanthropy in its social institutions, the principles of the most perfect Christian asceticism and of monastic life, the arrangement of the liturgy and the art of sacred music.” Christendom proceeded to see “the ever more perfect observance of the natural law inscribed in our hearts,” as “the ferocity of the barbarians was…transformed to gentleness, woman was freed from subjection, slavery was repressed, order was restored in the due and reciprocal independence upon one another of the various classes of society, justice was recognized, the true liberty of souls was proclaimed, and social and domestic peace assured.”

Pius finds his second example of Christian statesmanship in St. Anselm of Canterbury, who served as archbishop from 1093 until his death in 1109—that is, beginning three decades after the Norman Conquest. Anselm did not confront barbarism but state oppression of the Church, the problem Pius has seen in contemporary France and Portugal. Anselm won freedom from the monarchic domination of Kings William II and Henry I, signing a concordat in which Henry renounced his claimed power to invest bishops. 

Anselm was capable of accomplishing this and other statesmanlike tasks because his soul consisted of “a wonderful harmony between qualities which the world falsely judges to be irreconcilable and contradictory: simplicity and greatness, humility and magnanimity, strength and gentleness, knowledge and piety, so that both in the beginning and throughout the whole course of his religious life” he was could “calm the angry passions of his enemies and win the heart of those who were enraged against him,” who ended by “prais[ing] him because he was good.” [7] He did this not by hedging on Church rights, “as though any compromise were possible between light and darkness, between Christ and Belial,” but by firmly asserting them. Nor did he restrict his resistance to the political realm, joining the intellectual battle against “the quarrelsome and the sophistical, ‘the heretical dialecticians’ of his time, as he rightly calls them, in whom reason was the slave of the imagination and of vanity,” even as imagination and vanity had prevailed in the minds of heretics in Pius’ day. Anselm described the heretics he saw as souls in whom “reason which should be the king and the guide of all that is in man is so mixed up with corporal imaginations that it is impossible to disentangle it from these, nor is itself able to distinguish them from things that it alone and pure should contemplate.” Such men are false philosophers who, as Anselm wrote, “because they are not able to understand what they believe dispute the truth of the faith itself, confirmed by the Holy Fathers, just as if bats and owls who see heaven only by night were to dispute concerning the rays of the sun at noon, against eagles who gaze at the sun unblinkingly.” With such men, “it must be shown to them reasonably how unreasonable is their contempt of us,” to show “the reasonableness of our faith.”

St. Charles Borromeo is Pius’ third Christian statesman. As Archbishop of Milan and a member of the Sacred College of Cardinals, Borromeo reformed both the Church and the city of Milan in the sixteenth century. More broadly, he proved a staunch defender of the Church during the Counter-Reformation. “In those days,” like today, “passions ran riot and knowledge of the truth was almost completely twisted and confused.” Calling “perversion of faith and morals a reformation,” “in reality” the Protestants” “were corrupters” who “undermin[ed] the strength of Europe through wars and dissensions,” thereby “pav[ing] the way for those modern rebellions and apostasy” Pius opposes today. To counter Protestant doctrines, Borromeo emphasized the need for “Christian instruction”—even as Pius has condemned the “public schools, lacking all religion, where everything holy is ridiculed and scorned,” “stronghold[s] of the powers of darkness” which traduce “the rights of religion and the family.” Pius thus distinguishes “between true and false reform.” False reform, “imitating the fickleness of the foolish, generally rush to extremes: exalting faith while neglecting good works or, contrarily, overlooking faith and God’s grace by “canoniz[ing] nature” in the form of human virtue, making it seem as if human beings can become self-sufficient. Such reformers never achieve reform because their extremism undermines the discipline upon which any reform depends. [8] Borromeo, his example now followed by Pius, undertook true reform, founding schools and colleges and promoting the example of Mary. “The Catholics of our days, together with their leaders, the Bishops, will deserve the same praise and gratitude as Charles as long as they are faithful to their duties of good citizenship,” obeying even evil rulers “when their commands are just” while resisting commands that are unjust,” avoiding the “impious rebellion” of seditionists as well as “the subservience of those who accept as sacred the obviously wicked laws of perverse men” who “uproot everything in the name of a deceitful liberty and then oppress their subjects with the most abject tyranny.” In Borromeo’s words, “It is a certain, well-established fact that no other crime so seriously offends God and provokes His greatest wrath as the vice of heresy.” But the warfare touched off by today’s heresies are “far more dangerous than those former conflicts which crowned Borromeo with such glory.” The religion of humanity is worse than Protestantism.

Writing of Borromeo, but likely thinking of himself, as well, Pius cites “the divine word saying that men will remember the just man forever, for even though he is dead, he yet speaks.” This is possible because the Roman Catholic Church “alone conceives, nourishes, and educates the noble family of the just.”

Note

1. In his letter, “For the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Immaculate Conception”—i.e., of the reaffirmation of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception by Pope Pius IX—Pius X elaborates: “If we know how to make ourselves the light of the world by our teaching, and the salt of the earth by our example; to put it in a word, if we employ the resources of virtue and doctrine that Paul enjoined on his own disciples, Titus and Timothy, namely sanctity and perfection of life, strength in teaching the spirit of sacrifice and self-denial, active and enlightened zeal, charity that is at once strong and gentle, then we will win the love and veneration of the good, yea and the esteem and respect even of our enemies.”
2. See also the Iam Dudum of May 1911, in which Pius condemns a similar law of separation in Portugal, also by a secularizing republican regime, which “proclaims and enacts that the Republic shall have no religion, as if men individually and any association or nation did not depend upon Him who is the Maker and Preserve of all things.” In Portugal, “the harshest and gravest stroke of all” against “the domain of the authority of the Church” was aimed at “the formation and training of young ecclesiastics,” who must now “pursue their scientific and literary studies which precede theology in the public lycées where, by reason of a spirit of hostility to God and the Church, the integrity of their faith plainly is exposed to the greatest peril”; what is more, “the Republic even interferes in the domestic life and discipline of the Seminaries, and arrogates the right of appointing the professors, of approving of the textbooks and of regulating the sacred studies of the Clerics”—in all, an attempt “to deprave the morals of the clergy and to provoke them to abandon their superiors.”
3. See Charles Maurras: The Future of the Intelligentsia & For a French Reawakening, edited and translated by Alexander Jacob. London: Arktos Press, 2016. See also “The Monarchist Kulturkampf of Charles Maurras,” on this website.
4. See Waller R. Newell: Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. See also “The Effects of the Philosophy of Freedom on Modern Tyranny” and “The Critique of Rationalism in the Philosophy of Freedom,” on this website.
5. See Pierre Manent: The Religion of Humanity: The Illusion of Our Times. Edited and translated by Paul Seaton. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2022. See also “Manent on ‘The Religion of Humanity,” on this website.
6. See Tzetan Todorov: The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Richard Howard translation. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999 [1982]. See also “Spanish Conquistadors Through a ‘Postmodernist’ Lens,” on this website.
7. For a summary of the Thomistic argument reconciling humility with magnanimity, see David Bobb: Humility: An Unlikely Biography of America’s Greatest Virtue (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2013.)
8. For example, Pius condemned the “Mariavitas,” a group of young Polish priests who had “turned aside from the right road and from the obedience they owe the Bishops” by proclaiming “a certain woman,” a Franciscan nun named Maria Franciszka Kozlowska who claimed to have experienced mystic visions, “to be most holy, marvelously endowed with heavenly gifts, divinely enlightened about many things, and providentially given for the salvation of a world about to parish,” consequently “entrusting] themselves [to her] without reserve and to obey her every wish.” (Tritus Circiter, April 5, 1906.) The priests seemed to be putting Maria Franciszka on a par with Mary—an instance of extremism, indeed. As a good Thomist, Pius could be depended upon to view such mysticism with suspicion.