Successful Return Home for St. Pius X

“I will come back, dead or alive!”, said St. Pius X to his flock at the dawn of his pontificate. It was a promise honored 120 later. From October 4 to 23, 2023, the bronze and glass sarcophagus containing the venerated remains of Pope Sarto left the Vatican basilica where it is kept in the Chapel of the Presentation of the Virgin, for a peregrinatio corporis to the dioceses of Treviso and Padua and the Patriarchate of Venice.

Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, archpriest of Saint Peter's Basilica – and as such responsible for the relics and furniture it contains – approved, at the request of Pope Francis, a pilgrimage in five stages.

This program was carefully evaluated by the Fabric of St. Peters in order to guarantee, with the necessary precautions, the safety and conservation of the august remains of Pius X during the different phases of its translation. The aim of the program was to offer for the faithful the widest possible access to this successor of Peter canonized almost a century ago.

Lucio Bonora, an official at the Secretariat of State, was designated to accompany the mortal remains, accompanied by a delegation of the security services of the Gendarmerie Corps of the Vatican City State. They are responsible for taking special care for the safety of the body preserved inside a bronze and glass sarcophagus, which is also decorated with a chiseled bronze fastigium.

St. Pius X finds himself once again at the heart of religious news: this is the first time in the history of the Church that a pilgrimage in stages has been planned for a deceased pope. During preceding translations of the relics of Giuseppe Sarto, the journey was limited to a single stage.

The inhabitants of Venice and the constituted bodies responded in the thousands during the various ostensions of the body, which has been placed on an anti-vibration base that also maintains a constant temperature and humidity inside the reliquary. A plenary indulgence was granted to all pilgrims who made the trip, which was enough to attract crowds still animated by the spirit of faith.

It must be said that St. Pius X remains an extremely popular figure in Italy, as opposed to the other side of the Alps where the black legend of an austere pope obsessed with the hunt for “modernists” is still conveyed. The reality is different. Coming from a modest family from Riese in Veneto, Giuseppe Sarto climbed the ranks of the ecclesiastical hierarchy one by one, devoting as much of the resources of his ministry as he could to the care of the “peripheries” of the time: the poor and the sick.

Elected Successor of Peter in 1903, St. Pius X embodied the true spirit of reform in the Church by striving to modernize the sectors that could be modernized according to the demands of the times, without ever conceding the Church’s Tradition.