Pope Pius X: promulgator of "an audacious work of modernization"

From Sandro Magister of Cheisa:

ROMA, May 13, 2008 – Vatican Council II was not the only pivotal moment in the history of the Catholic Church in the 20th century. Another important transformation took place half a century earlier, with the pontificate of Saint Pius X.

This is the conclusion of an imposing two-volume treatise just published in Italy, entitled "Chiesa romana e modernità giuridica [The Roman Church and juridical modernity]," written by an illustrious scholar of ecclesiastical law, Carlo Fantappiè, and dedicated to a grandiose undertaking of pope Giuseppe Sarto, the new Code of Canon Law.

Pius X is remembered for his tenacious battle against "modernist" Catholics. His current profile is that of a pope of reversion and of anathemas. Not so. New studies are reinterpreting this pontificate in a different light, much more forward-thinking and innovative.

For example, his famous encyclical "Pascendi Dominici Gregis," the centenary of which fell in 2007, was prophetic in its treatment of questions that are still relevant and central in the life of the Church.

And so was the new Code of Canon Law, promulgated by Benedict XV in 1917, but desired and conceived above all by Pius X. This did not represent the Church falling back on the defensive, but was an audacious work of modernization. It reinforced the public figure and freedom of the Church with respect to the world.

Pius X rejected the philosophical modernization proposed by modernist Catholics. He saw this as a surrender to the secular culture that was eroding the truths of the faith.

But he was a decisive modernizer of the juridical and institutional form of the Church, taking from the liberal states of the time the structures that he believed were compatible with the theological nature of the Church itself.

Read the entire article.

Comments

[James M]

Very exciting story for what might otherwise be thought a dry subject. The whole article is glorious: shows what God can do with His pruning hook when the Pope (Pius X) is full of the Holy Spirit.

[Augustine II]

"forward-thinking and innovative."

Criteria of the world.

[Teresa Polk]

St./Pope Pius X's encyclicals are on the Vatican website in English and document Sandro Magister's points well (and those of the new 2-volume book Magister writes about). Pope Pius X saw the potential dangers inherent in the philosophical focus on "experience" in the secularism and the existentialist philosophy that was still new 100 years ago. He took practical steps to unify the Catholic Church globally in his own era -- and I think James M is entirely correct that he was full of the Holy Spirit. The risks he saw, mostly in theory, and described in his encyclicals written 100 years ago are the loss of certainty and loss of authority that we see now in Anglicanism and in the Protestant denominations that are fraught with divisions. (Especially discussed in an encyclical cited by Sandro Magister, Pascendi Dominici Gregis)

And Pope Pius X would have been the first to say that descriptions like "forward-thinking and innovative" were ones he would not want to have applied to himself. ("For even still there continues to circulate that poison which has been inoculated into many even among the clergy, and especially the young clergy, who have, as We have said, become infected by the pestilential atmosphere, in their unbridled craving for novelty which is drawing them to the abyss and drowning them." Communium Rerum)

[Rick]

I would prefer to say that he acted with Wisdom, Council, Knowledge, Understanding, Fortitude, Piety and Fear of the Lord over foward-thinking and innovative.