Anselm was, in the best sense of the phrase (the one Henry VIII would make perverse) a defender of the faith. And this was the subject of an encyclical by Pope St. Pius X, Communium Rerum, on the saint’s feast in 1909. The Holy Father mentions neither the ontological proof nor Fides quaerens intellectum. It’s Anselm’s defense of the Church’s role in public life that mattered to Pio Decimo.
He lists the popes (Gregory VII, Urban II, Paschal II) who corresponded with Anselm and held him in high esteem. “And yet,” Pius writes, “Anselm in his own eyes was but a despicable and unknown good-for-nothing, a man of no parts, sinful in his life.” But Anselm is praiseworthy not only because of his humility, but also because he bravely championed ecclesiastical rights against the power of secular governance.
The pope’s praise of Anselm as a model churchman (and loyal servant of popes) was written not long after a great earthquake had rocked Messina, Sicily (7.1 on the Richter Scale), followed by a tsunami, destroying most of the city, and killing 70,000. Pius had filled the Apostolic Palace with refugees, even as the Italian government provided little in the way of aid. How, Pius wondered, can any sensible Christian not see the Church as more exemplary than the State?
Pius sees Anselm as a comrade in arms in the ongoing battle against error – in the 20th century it was the war against modernism – which he and his predecessors (Pius IX and Leo XIII especially) seemed never to vanquish despite their many warnings to the faithful.
Sancte Anselme, ora pro nobis.
(source: St. Anselm: Man of Premises – The Catholic ThingThe Catholic Thing)
