Pius X crammed refugees into the Apostolic Palace after the 1908 earthquake
When the 1908 Messina earthquake left survivors homeless, Pope Pius X opened the Apostolic Palace to refugees, moving well ahead of Italy's own government. The son of a village postman, he refused favours for his family, and his unmarried sisters lived modestly in Rome throughout his papacy.
Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto was born on 2 June 1835 in Riese, then part of the Austrian Empire, the second of ten children. His parents were poor but prized schooling, so he walked 6 kilometres a day to class and later four miles to the gymnasium in Castelfranco Veneto. A scholarship took him to the Seminary of Padua, and he was ordained in 1858.
As a young chaplain in Tombolo he carried most of the ailing parish priest's workload, and the older man once dismissed an early sermon as rubbish. At Salzano he restored the church, expanded the hospital with money he begged or gave himself, and tended the sick through a cholera outbreak in the early 1870s. He became bishop of Mantua in 1884, needing a papal dispensation because he had no doctorate; he was the last pope without one until Francis.
Elected in 1903, he reigned until his death in August 1914. He promoted the active participation of the faithful in the liturgy, encouraged frequent Communion and lowered the age for First Communion, a lasting change. He reorganised the Roman Curia in 1908 and began the work that produced the 1917 Code of Canon Law, the first comprehensive code of its kind, finished under his successor.
In doctrine he was firmly conservative, championing Thomist philosophy and condemning modernism as the synthesis of every heresy. A member of the Third Order of Saint Francis, he preached regularly from the pulpit, unusual for a pope of his time. Beatified in 1951 and canonised in 1954 by Pius XII, he also gave his name to his home town, now Riese Pio X.
Source: Pope Pius X
