Pope Pius X

Pope Pius X, Giuseppe Sarto, was a peasant’s son, a parish priest and bishop, and patriarch of Venice, elected in 1903 as a pastoral pope who reformed church music, the breviary and canon law, lowered the age of first communion, and encouraged frequent reception of the sacrament. Pascendi Dominici Gregis of 1907 condemned modernism, the attempt to reconcile Catholic teaching with modern philosophy and biblical criticism, as the synthesis of all heresies, and imposed an oath against it on the clergy that lasted until 1967. He was canonised in 1954. The Thomist colleges assign the encyclical beside Aeterni Patris as the other pole of the church’s response to the modern age.