Une Fois Encore by Pope Pius X
Updated: Aug 15
Pope Pius X (b. 2 June 1835 – d. 20 August 1914), born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto, began his pontificate on 4 August 1903. He is known for opposing modernist thought and as a bishop proposed a new catechism for laymen in 1880.
The encyclical “Une Fois Encore” was published on 6 January 1907. It is relatively short at approximately 2,800 words in 21 paragraphs and is “On the Separation of Church and State” given the French government’s stance regarding the Church at the time.
Pius X begins with a reminder of the “war” against the Church and Christian religion in general.
It is no longer only the Christian faith that they would uproot at all costs from the hearts of the people; it is any belief which lifting man above the horizon of this world would supernaturally bring back his wearied eyes to heaven. Illusion on the subject is no longer possible. War has been declared against everything supernatural, because behind the supernatural stands God, and because it is God that they want to tear out of the mind and heart of man.
He then mentions the importance of the union of the Church, that it is connected to the papacy which the enemies clearly understand as they attack utilizing bribery and the press:
Our enemies have on this been under no misapprehensions. From the outset, and with the greatest clearness of vision, they determined on their objective; first to separate you from Us and the Chair of Peter, and then to sow disorder among you. From then till now they have made no change in their tactics… Specious promises, dishonorable bribes offered to schism, threats and violence, all these have been brought into play and employed. … Thereupon, thinking that the best way to separate you from Us was to shatter your confidence in the Apostolic See, they have not hesitated, from the tribune and in the press, to throw discredit upon Our acts by misrepresenting and sometimes even by calumniating Our intentions.
This includes accusations of the Church seeking a “religious war” when war has been declared against her:
During the last twenty-five years she has had to undergo this warfare. That is the truth and the proof of it is seen in the declarations made and repeated over and over again in the Press, at meetings, at Masonic congresses, and even in Parliament, as well as in the attacks which have been progressively and systematically directed against her. These facts are undeniable, and no argument can ever make away with them.
One of the tactics is the confiscation of Church property, usually done under the guise of some legality:
As for the ecclesiastical property which we are accused of having abandoned, it is important to remark that this property was partly the patrimony of the poor and the patrimony, more sacred still, of the dead. It was not permissible to the Church to abandon or surrender it; she could only let it be taken from her by violence. Nobody will believe that she has deliberately abandoned, except under the pressure of the most overwhelming motives, what was confided to her keeping, and what was so necessary for the exercise of worship, for the maintenance of sacred edifices, for the instruction of her clergy, and for the support of her ministers. It was only when perfidiously placed in the position of having to choose between material ruin and consent to the violation of her constitution, which is of divine origin, that the Church refused, at the cost of poverty, to allow the work of God to be touched by her. Her property, then, has been wrested from her; it was not she that abandoned it. Consequently, to declare ecclesiastical property unclaimed on a given date unless the Church had by then created within herself a new organism; to subject this creation to conditions in rank opposition to the divine constitution of the Church, which was thus compelled to reject them; to transfer this property to third parties as if it had become “sans maitre,” and finally to assert that in thus acting there was no spoliation of the Church but only a disposal of the property abandoned by her—this is not merely argument of transparent sophistry but adding insult to the most cruel spoliation. This spoliation is undeniable in spite of vain attempts at palliating it by declaring that no moral person existed to whom the property might be handed over; for the state has power to confer civil personality on whomsoever the public good demands that it should be granted to, establishments that are Catholic as well as others. In any case it would have been easy for the state not to have subjected the formation of “associations cultuelles” to conditions in direct opposition to the divine constitution of the Church which they were supposed to serve.
Other attacks include taking away the powers of officiating priests and restricting worship:
But by providing that the “cure or officiating priest would no longer,” in his church, “be anything more than an occupier without any judicial title or power to perform any acts of administration,” there has been imposed on ministers of religion in the very exercise of their ministry a situation so humiliating and vague that, under such conditions, it was impossible to accept the declaration.
Ultimately, everything was conveniently vague, obviously for easier manipulation.
The vague and ambiguous-wording of some of its articles places the end pursued by our enemies in a new light. Their object is, as we have already pointed out, the destruction of the Church and the dechristianization of France, but without people’s attending to it or even noticing it.
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