THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 1903. THE PEASANT POPE

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 39, 24 September 1903, Page 17

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 1903. THE PEASANT POPE

T was no mere empty formula that rang out over the great square of St. Peter's when Cardinal Macchi stood on the balcony of the great Basilica and announced ' a great joy ' to the far-extending and expectant throng. For joy indeed ruled the day in Rome when Pius X., the peasant's son of Riese, ascended the tnrone of the Fisherman of Galilee. It was a boast of the First Napoleon that every soldier in his conquering legions carried in his knapsack the marshal's baton. Hitherto a patent of nobility had been the first door to place and power. It was then a comparatively new principle that merit and fitness should be the sole conditions of access to the highest military and political preferment. But in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church this common-sense principle has been in active exercise ever since the days of the Apostles. She is the oldest, greatest, truest, and most consistent of democracies. Money-bags and blue blood count for little in appointments to the episcopate and the Chair of St Peter. And the prolonged, repeated, and stormy plaudits that set the hot summer air a-tremble on the noble square of St. Peter's and resounded through the \ast spaces of the greatest religious edifice in Christendom, were, no doubt, the spontaneous expression of the popular joy that a man of the people and a friend of the worker and the poor had been raised to the highest dignity in the Church of the people and the poor.

' The election to the supreme office in Christendom of the son of a peasant is,' says the • New Century ' ' a pleasant reminder of the essentially democratic constitution of the Church. In that essential democracy lies the appeal of the Church to the imagination of men The prince and the peasant, the aristocrat and the dreamer of a new order are the same in the contemplation of the most democratic society in the world. Holiness of life and fibre .of mind are the only things considered. 1 Another American paper, the < New World, 1 says : ' Men talk of the opportunities existing in a republic. Where can greater opportunities exist than in the Catholic Church ? Peter, the Fisherman, became head of the Church in the first century, and in the, twentieth the son of a peasant becomes Pope. Down through the years there have been shepherd Popes and peasant Popes, and Popes of noble blood, and Popes of no blood. It is no marvel the Church is universally called the Church of the Poor. There is no institution on earth that is so democratic. Imagine, if you can, the kings of Austria, and Spain, and Portugal, and Germany, and other rulers of the world paying court to the son of humble Italian parents, who is himself a poor man, and who has a brother selling sausages and tobacco ; yet this will take place to-morrow and next year and the year after. Evidently neither blood nor money counts in attaining the Papacy. 1 * Adrian IV.— the solitary Englishman who occupied the papal throne— was the son of a poor bargeman and rose by sheer merit and conspicuous talent from the humble position of lay-brother in the Langley monastery to that of visible Head of the Church on earth. Sixtus V. was one of the greatest of the long line of occupants of the See of St. Peter. This remarkable man began life as a herdsboy, and rose by his commanding genius to the headship of the Franciscan Order, the Cardinalate, and finally to the Papal throne. The triple crown of the papacy has oftener adorned the brow of the peasant than of the aristocrat. What is known as the middle class has probably furnished by far the most numerous contingent to the long roll of the Roman Pontiffs. But the Popes from the nether ranks have almost invariably been the men that have left the deepest and most lasting impress upon their generation. The peasant-Pope, Pius X., has succeeded to the scion of an ancient noble house. Leo was a diplomatist and scholar, but he was still more the friend of the poor, and he set his hand to the solution of the knotty problems of labor and capital and other thorny subjects that are full of menace to the civilisation of our time. Pius X. has inherited the social policy of Leo XIII. As parish priest, bishop, and patriarch, he took a keen and active interest in the agricultural banks and many other activities of Catholic social work for the improvement of the condition of the rural and civic populations of northern Italy. The exalted position which he now holds as head of the greatest world-power on earth will give him the opportunity of putting into operation over a wider field the beneficent principles which he exercised with so much profit to his flocks in the lesser spheres from which his own great merit has raised him.