Saint Pius X

Above the altar we find a reproduction of a painting of Pope Saint Pius X, the original of which is in the Latin American Seminary in Rome. Giuseppe Sarto was born on June 2, 1835 in Riese, a small village in Veneto (Italy), in an extremely modest environment. His intelligence, his hard work and his piety made him successively climb all the degrees of the hierarchy: parochial vicar, parish priest, bishop of Mantua, cardinal-patriarch of Venice, and he was finally elected pope on August 4, 1903, taking the name of Pius X. He was for the Church a pastor of tireless devotion and lucid energy, ardent in defending the purity of doctrine by condemning modernism, knowing the value of the liturgy as the prayer of the Church and all the the support it can provide to the devotion of the faithful. He revived the ceremonies of worship, especially Gregorian chant, so that the Christian people could, in his words, “pray on beauty.” Nor did he spare his efforts to spread the sanctifying practice of early, frequent, and daily Communion. He died on August 20, 1914 and was canonized by the Venerable Pope Pius XII on May 29, 1954. Originally, the altar was dedicated to Saint Joseph, and instead of the current painting, we had a work by Francois -Joseph Navez representing Saint Joseph holding before him the Child Jesus.