St. Pius X

Giuseppe Sarto was born at Riese in the Veneto in 1835, the second of ten children of a village postman and a seamstress, and walked to school at Castelfranco. He was patriarch of Venice from 1893 and was elected pope in the conclave of 1903, taking the name Pius X. The Church keeps his memorial on August 21.

His decree Quam singulari of 1910 moved first communion from about twelve years of age to the age of discretion, around seven, and Sacra Tridentina of 1905 pressed for frequent and daily communion at a time when reception several times a year was normal. Together they changed the ordinary practice of Catholic life more than any other act of his pontificate. He also began the reform of the Breviary and the codification of canon law completed under his successor, and his Tra le sollecitudini restored Gregorian chant to the liturgy.

His campaign against Modernism was severe. The 1907 decree Lamentabili and the encyclical Pascendi condemned it as the synthesis of all heresies, and the anti-Modernist oath of 1910 was required of clergy for over half a century. The network of informants that operated under Umberto Benigni, the Sodalitium Pianum, was suppressed by Benedict XV in 1921.

He died on August 20, 1914, three weeks after the outbreak of the First World War, and left a will asking to be buried without embalming. Pius XII canonized him on May 29, 1954. His body lies in the Chapel of the Presentation in St. Peter's Basilica at Rome, under the altar, his face and hands covered in silver.