A long time ago, in a tiny Italian village called Riese, there lived a family with many children. The father, Giovanni Battista, was the village postman, and he knew every door and every name. The mother, Margherita, took in sewing and looked after the house. They were poor, but in the Sarto home nothing that truly mattered was ever missing: faith, tenderness, and a place at the table for everyone.

On June 2, 1835, the second of their ten children was born, a boy with bright, watchful eyes named Giuseppe. At home everyone called him Bepi. He helped with whatever he could, prayed with his family as evening fell, and loved to sit very still in the village church, like someone listening to a good secret.

Bepi was quick at his studies, and the village priest noticed it right away. But the good school was far off, in the town of Castelfranco, many kilometers down the road. Every single day the boy walked there and back, with his books under his arm and a piece of bread in his bag.

It is said that, so as not to wear out his shoes, he would take them off as soon as he left the village and hang them over his shoulder. Then he walked on barefoot along the dirt road, dusty in summer and muddy in winter. Shoes were expensive, and Bepi knew how much effort every coin cost his father and mother.

The boy grew up and felt a call in his heart: he wanted to be a priest. He studied at the seminary in Padua with the help of kind people who paid his way, and in 1858 he was ordained. He went to serve first in a parish called Tombolo, then in Salzano, always among simple country folk, the same kind of people he had grown up with.

Father Giuseppe was a priest whose door was always open. When a terrible sickness swept through the region, he did not run away: he visited the sick, comforted the grieving families, and helped bury the dead with dignity. Everything he earned ended up in the hands of the poor, so much so that his sister, who kept house for him, used to say he gave away even what he did not have.

Time went by, and the Church trusted him with greater and greater tasks. In 1884 he became bishop of Mantua. In 1893 he was made a cardinal and Patriarch of Venice, the city of canals and gondolas. There, instead of staying shut up in a palace, he chatted with fishermen and market sellers, and his pockets were always empty, because everything he had turned into help for somebody.

In 1903, Pope Leo XIII died, and the cardinals from all over the world gathered in Rome to choose a new pope. They prayed and voted, prayed and voted, and the name that rose to the top was Cardinal Sarto's. He wept and said he was not worthy, but he accepted the cross God was giving him. On August 4, 1903, the son of the postman of Riese became Pope Pius X.

As the motto for his work he chose four words in Latin: Instaurare omnia in Christo, which means to renew all things in Christ. It was his way of saying that Jesus should be at the center of everything, from the morning's first prayer to the night's last dream.

Even as pope, Pius X stayed as simple as ever. He had no taste for pomp or princely honors, and he said he had been born poor and wished to die poor. On Sundays he himself taught the catechism to the people in a courtyard of the Vatican, in words even the little ones could understand. And people say he carried sweets in his pockets for the children he met along the way.

But the most beautiful gift he left was for the children of the whole world. In those days, little ones had to wait a very long time for their First Communion, sometimes until they were twelve or fourteen. A child would gaze at Jesus during Mass, longing to receive him, and always hear the same answer: not yet, wait until you are older.

Pius X remembered the words of Jesus in the Gospel: let the little children come to me, and do not stop them (Mark 10:14). So, in 1910, he signed a document called Quam Singulari. From that day on, children who could already tell ordinary bread from the Bread of heaven, at around seven years old, could receive Jesus in Holy Communion. The long waiting was over.

The story goes that one day a mother brought her little boy, only four years old, to the pope, saying the child was still too young to receive Communion. Pius X bent down to the child's height and spoke with him.

— Whom do you receive in Holy Communion?

— I receive Jesus — the boy answered.

— And who is Jesus?

— Jesus is God — said the child, without a moment's doubt.

Then the pope smiled and said to the mother:

— Bring him to me tomorrow, and I will give him his First Communion myself.

Because of this love for the Eucharist, and because he invited everyone to receive Communion often, Pius X became known as the Pope of the Eucharist.

In 1914, a great sadness fell over the world: a huge war began, dragging in country after country. Pius X, by then an old man, suffered deeply over it. It is said that he declared he would gladly give his own life if that could keep the war away from his children.

Only a few weeks after the war began, on August 20, 1914, he died in Rome, handing over to the Lord that heart which had loved the poor and the little ones so much. He asked for a simple funeral and a simple tomb, just as he had lived. In 1954, Pope Pius XII declared him a saint, and the whole Church celebrated the barefoot boy from Riese who had reached the altars.

Today, when a seven- or eight-year-old gets ready for First Communion, that child may not know it, but the joy of that day is owed to a pope with an enormous heart. From heaven, Saint Pius X goes on calling the little ones close to Jesus.