Pius X

By 1900 Catholic scholars in France, England, Italy and Germany were applying to the Bible and to church history the same historical and critical methods being used on every other ancient text, and some of them were drawing conclusions about the development of doctrine, the authorship of the gospels and the nature of revelation that could not easily be squared with the teaching of the schools. Pius X judged the tendency to be not a set of separate errors but one coherent system, and in 1907 he attacked it twice: the decree Lamentabili Sane Exitu listed sixty-five condemned propositions, and the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis described the system, named it Modernism, and called it the synthesis of all heresies.

The enforcement went further than the documents. In 1910 the motu proprio Sacrorum Antistitum required every priest, before ordination and before taking up a teaching or pastoral office, to swear an oath against Modernist propositions, a requirement that stood until 1967. Diocesan vigilance committees were established to watch for suspect teaching, and an unofficial network known as the Sodalitium Pianum gathered denunciations, including against bishops and cardinals, in a manner that Benedict XV moved to suppress after Pius X's death.

Assessments remain sharply divided. Defenders point out that some of what was condemned was genuinely incompatible with Christian claims about revelation, and that the pope was defending believers rather than punishing scholars. Critics count the careers ended, the biblical scholarship driven out of Catholic institutions for two generations, and the atmosphere of suspicion, and argue that the questions were not answered but postponed until the Second Vatican Council had to take them up again.

For centuries most Catholics received Communion rarely, often once or a few times a year, a habit reinforced by a strain of piety that stressed unworthiness and by lingering Jansenist rigour about who was fit to approach the altar. The 1905 decree Sacra Tridentina Synodus reversed the emphasis, declaring that frequent and even daily Communion was open to any baptized person in a state of grace with a right intention, and was to be encouraged rather than restricted. The 1910 decree Quam Singulari followed by lowering the age of first Communion from around twelve to the age of discretion, roughly seven, on the argument that a child old enough to distinguish the Eucharist from ordinary bread is old enough to receive it.

The effect on ordinary parish life was larger than any doctrinal document of the period. Within a generation the queue at the altar rail had become a normal part of Sunday for most practising Catholics, and the age at which a child made a first Communion had shifted permanently.

He legislated for church music with the same directness. The 1903 motu proprio Tra le Sollecitudini declared Gregorian chant the church's own music and the standard by which other sacred music should be judged, and ruled operatic settings and theatrical performance out of the liturgy. He also reordered the Roman Breviary so that the whole psalter was again recited weekly, and set in motion the codification of canon law that appeared as the 1917 code. He died in August 1914, weeks after the outbreak of the war he had tried and failed to avert.