Earlier this week, Pope Leo XIV paid tribute to a well-known anti-modernist clerical figurehead.
On 13 September, His Holiness received the participants of a study meeting on Cardinal Merry del Val in the Clementine Hall. The gathering was organised by a Spanish association that promotes devotion to the late cardinal and preserves his spiritual writings.
Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, the early twentieth-century Vatican statesman and leading opponent of modernism, was Saint Pius X’s right-hand man. The Pope praised his humility and pastoral devotion during an audience at the Apostolic Palace for members of the Spanish association dedicated to his legacy.
The Pope described the late cardinal as a man who lived “with fidelity to the Gospel and freedom of spirit,” noting that he sought truth before popularity and understood that “the fruitfulness of Christian life does not depend on human approval.”
The address, delivered in Spanish and released by the Vatican Press Office, highlighted Cardinal Merry del Val’s lifelong dedication to serving Rome’s poor and his personal modesty, symbolised by his request that only his episcopal motto Da mihi animas, cetera tolle (“Give me souls, take away the rest”) be inscribed on his tomb beneath St Peter’s Basilica.
Cardinal Merry del Val, born in London in 1865 to a distinguished Spanish-Irish family, served as Secretary of State under Pope Pius X and became one of the most influential figures in the early twentieth-century Church. Entrusted by Pope Leo XIII to examine the validity of Anglican orders, he oversaw the 1896 papal bull Apostolicae curae, which ruled Anglican ordinations “absolutely null and utterly void.”
His name later became synonymous with the Vatican’s battle against modernist theology, following the 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, which defined modernism as “the synthesis of all heresies.”
Throughout his career, Merry del Val remained a central figure in the Vatican’s defence of orthodoxy. While he maintained a cautious distance from more extreme anti-modernist groups such as the Sodalitium Pianum, his influence on papal policy during the reign of Pius X was significant.
The example of Cardinal Merry del Val, Pope Leo XIV said, should inspire those who serve the Church “to unite truth and charity, prudence and boldness, service and humility, so that in everything only Christ may shine forth.” The Pope added that the late cardinal’s life remains “a treasure of Christian witness” and an enduring model for those working in the Church today.
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