Feast of St. Pius X

21 August is the feast of Saint Pius X, the only canonised member of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, of which he was Grand Master.

Giuseppe Sarto, who became the parish priest to the world, was born in Riese, in the diocese of Treviso, on 2 June 1835. Ordained a priest in 1858, the year of the apparitions of the Virgin at Lourdes, he was a man of prayer, humble, a worker, just and righteous to the highest degree, according to those who knew him.

Bishop of Mantua and then Patriarch of Venice, he fought with courage and determination against what he defined as the crime of the modern era: wanting to substitute Man for God. Though he held a return ticket for the conclave of 1903, he did not return to Venice but became Pope under the name of Pius X, because, he explained, the Popes who had suffered the most in that century had borne the name of Pius. His work, alongside his young Secretary of State, Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, appointed at the age of 38, allowed the Church to resist the forces that sought to bring it into subjection, for, he said, better sacrifice wealth than freedom. He died on 20 August 1914, a few days after the start of the First World War.

To consolidate the position of the Order in the Holy Land, Pius X reserved for himself and his successors the office of Grand Master by the Apostolic Letter Quam multa of 13 October 1908, gave the Knights a place in the papal chapels, and appointed the Latin Patriarch Rector and Perpetual Administrator of the Order.