Saint Pius V

Pope (1504-1572)

Feast – May 5

From the beginning the Catholic Church has been under attack, persecuted two thousand years ago and throughout Her entire history.

Continuous warfare to stop the Ottoman Empire from taking over the world, corruption in the Church, the Protestant Reformation started by Martin Luther in 1517 which under the name of “Lutheranism” spread from Germany to Denmark, then Norway, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Estonia and Iceland.

Other Protestant leaders such as John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli and John Knox formed churches and spread to Hungary, the Netherlands, Scotland, Switzerland and France. In England though Acts of Parliament passed between 1532 and 1534, among them the 1534 Act of Supremacy which declared King Henry VIII “Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England” brought England and Wales into this Reformation movement. Those were the challenges faced by the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century.

One year before Luther started his revolution, in 1516 near Bosco in the Duchy of Milan, Italy, two Dominicans came along the road and fell into conversation with a 12-year-old boy who was minding his father’s small flock. This little boy seemed to them far too talented to be a shepherd. Recognizing immediately that he was both virtuous and intelligent, they obtained permission from his parents to take Antonio with them and educate him. Two years later the same Antonio, a son of poor parents of the noble lineage of Ghislieri, after a preliminary course of studies entered the Dominican Order at the priory of Voghera, taking the name Michael, after the prince of the heavenly host. As a novice he was sent to Lombardy where, for the first time, he met the well-organized forces of heresy which he was to combat so successfully for rest of his life.

After his ordination at Genoa in 1528, he went home to say his first Mass and found that Bosco had been razed by the French. There was nothing left to tell him if his parents were alive or dead. He eventually found them in a nearby town.

Sent out by his order to Pavia, he taught philosophy and theology for 16 years. He became the master of novices and was elected Prior of several Dominican houses in which, during a time of great moral laxity, he strove to restore the practice of the monastic virtues and spread the spirit of the holy founder. He himself was an example to all. He fasted, did penance, passed long hours of the night in meditation and prayer, traveled on foot without a cloak in deep silence, or only speaking to his companions of the things of God. Michael proved to be a wise and charitable administrator.

He was made inquisitor at Como, Italy, where many of his religious brethren had died as martyrs to the heretics. By the time of Michael’s appointment there, the heretics’ chief weapon was the printed word; they smuggled books in from Switzerland, causing untold harm by spreading them in northern Italy. The new inquisitor set himself to fight this wicked traffic, and it was not the fault of the heretics that he did not follow his brethren to martyrdom. They ambushed him several times and laid a number of complicated plots to kill him, but only succeeded in making him determined to explain the situation more fully to the pope in Rome. He returned to Rome in 1550, where he was employed in several inquisitorial missions. In 1556 he was made Bishop of Sutri by Pope Paul IV. His zeal against heresy caused him to be selected as inquisitor of the faith in Milan and Lombardy. In 1557 he was made a cardinal and named inquisitor general for all Christendom.

Known in this capacity as an able, yet unflinching man who rigorously fought heresy and corruption wherever he encountered it, in 1559 he was made bishop of the war-depleted Piedmont see of Mondovi, to which he soon brought order and restored the purity of faith and discipline.

Famous both for the spotless purity of his own life and for his intrepid defense of the Church’s faith and discipline, he was frequently called to Rome. Surrounded in his time by great men and great Saints, in apostolic virtue he was surpassed by none. He opposed Pius IV’s attempt to make 13-year-old Ferdinand de’Medici a cardinal and defeated the attempt of Emperor Maximilian II of Germany to abolish clerical celibacy. His opposition to the pontiff procured his dismissal from the palace and the abridgment of his authority as inquisitor. Before Michael could return to his episcopate, Pope Pius IV died.

In the afternoon of 8 January 1565, the cardinals, chiefly through the influence of St. Charles Borromeo and trusting that he would act as a much-needed reformer, elected Cardinal Ghislieri to become Pope. With great grief, he accepted the office and chose the name Pius V.

St. Charles’ judgment proved true: on Pius’s coronation, the money usually distributed to the crowds was given to the hospitals and the poor, and money for a banquet for the cardinals and other dignitaries was given to poor convents. When someone criticized this, he observed that God would judge us more on our charity to the poor than on our good manners to the rich.

His pontificate saw him dealing with internal reform of the Church, the spread of Protestant doctrines in the West, and Turkish armies advancing from the East.

St. Pius V as pontiff practiced the virtues he had displayed as a monk and a bishop. His piety was not diminished, and in spite of the heavy labors and anxieties of his office, he made at least two meditations a day on knees in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament.

He immediately put into action his vast program of reform by getting rid of many of the extravagant luxuries then prevalent in his court. He gave the money usually invested in these luxuries to the poor whom he personally cared for, washing their feet, consoling those near death, and tending to lepers and the very sick. It is claimed that an English nobleman was converted upon seeing him kiss the feet of a beggar covered with ulcers. He also brought in shipments of corn during a famine at his own expense.

He expected clergy to follow the decrees of the Council of Trent, two of which he strictly enforced: the obligatory residence of bishops in their sees, parish priests in their parishes and the establishment of diocesan seminaries. He strongly supported foreign missions, consecrating three Jesuit bishops for India and helping finance missionaries to China and Japan.

 

The Catechism of the Council of Trent was completed during his reign, and he revised the Roman Breviary and Missal, which remained in use until the reforms of Vatican II.

St. Pius V also commissioned the best edition to date of the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas; it was he who had declared St. Thomas Aquinas the fifth Latin Doctor of the Church in 1567.

His efforts at raising the standard of morality and reforming the clergy embraced issues ranging from the abolition of bullfighting, bearbaiting, and prostitution, to cleaning out the Roman curia. He insisted that Sunday must be hallowed. Once a month he held a special court for anyone who felt they had been treated unjustly.

In the Bull “In Coena Domini” he proclaimed the traditional principles of the Roman Church and the supremacy of the Holy See over civil power.

St. Pius V was not less active in protecting the Church outside Italy. He made full use of the Inquisition and his methods of combating Protestantism which he recognized as an attack on the Papacy and Catholic Church. At the same time, he encouraged efforts to battle Protestantism through education, preaching and supporting the newly formed Society of Jesus, founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola. In Germany he supported the Catholics oppressed by the heretical princes, in France he cooperated with the Catholic King against the Huguenot rebels and strenuously opposed all compromise with the Huguenot nobility.

He had hoped to convert Queen Elizabeth of England and after giving her every possible chance of repentance, in 1570 excommunicated her and declared an ipso facto excommunication on anyone who did not deny allegiance to her. In an attempt to save the souls of his flock he absolved her subjects of loyalty to her as queen.

At the same time, he embraced the cause of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots in the bitterness of her captivity. He sent reassuring letters to her, and once, at a time when no priest was allowed to go near her, he granted her special permission to receive Holy Communion by sending her a tiny pyx that contained consecrated Hosts.

Such an attitude was bound to make enemies in high places. The holy Pope was accustomed to kiss the feet of the crucifix on leaving or entering his room. One day the feet moved away from his lips. Sorrow filled his heart, and he made acts of contrition, fearing that he must have committed some secret offense, yet he still could not kiss the feet. It was afterwards discovered that they had been poisoned by an enemy.

St. Pius V from the beginning worked relentlessly to unite Christians against the aggression of the Ottoman Empire. In the first year of his pontificate on May 18th, 1565, the Turks under Suleiman the Magnificent made a second attempt to take Malta.

After the loss of Acre, the last Crusader stronghold in Palestine, in 1291 the Knights of St. John, or Knights Hospitaller harassed the Turkish fleet from the Greek island of Rhodes, preventing them from taking control over the eastern Mediterranean. After being driven out of Rhodes by the Ottomans in 1522 they continued their mission, and in 1530 established their headquarters in Malta. The Ottomans first attempted to take Malta in 1551 but failed. In 1565, the Knights who numbered around 500 together with approximately 6,000 foot-soldiers faced army of 40,000 Turks. In response Pope St. Pius V exhorted the faithful to penance and almsgiving to obtain victory from God. The Knights of Saint John lost nearly every fighting man, but they withstood the siege and repelled the invaders. It was the Pope who sent encouragement and money with which to rebuild their battered fortress.

St. Pius V worked hard to unite the Christian armies against the Turks, he sent money for the fortification of the free towns of Italy, and furnished monthly contributions to the Christians of Hungary. In 1567 he collected from all convents one-tenth of their revenues together for the defense of Christendom.

In 1570 Solyman II attacked Cyprus threatening all Christianity in the West. About 60,000 troops, including cavalry and artillery, under the command of Lala Mustafa Pasha landed unopposed near Limassol on July 2, and laid siege to Nicosia. The city fell on September 9. Twenty thousand citizens of Nicosia were put to death, and every church, public building, and palace was looted.

On the 25^th of May 1571, Pope St. Pius V formed the Holy League, a coalition between the Papal States, Malta, Habsburg Spain (Spain of the 16th and 17th centuries ruled by kings from the House of Habsburg), the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Genoa, and several other Italian states.

Four months later, in October, when the naval forces of the League, composed mainly of Venetian, Spanish, and Papal ships under the command of Don John of Austria, small, and numerically no match for the Turkish fleet, which so far had never met defeat, were about to cast off when St. Pius V sent his blessing to Don John of Austria with the recommendation to leave behind all soldiers of evil life. He requested that each man on board pray the Rosary and receive Holy Communion. Meanwhile, he called on all of Europe to recite the Rosary and ordered a 40-hour devotion in Rome and increased his own supplications to heaven.

Two fleets met in the Bay of Lepanto on Sunday morning, October 7th, 1571. After a day of bitter fighting the Christians miraculously defeated the Turks. The Battle of Lepanto was one of the decisive battles of world history. The Ottoman fleet fled in disgrace, broken, defeated; its power crushed forever, and Christendom was saved from the Turks.

On the day of the battle, St. Pius V was working with the cardinals, when, suddenly, interrupting his work he opened the window and looking at the sky, cried out, “A truce to business; our great task at present is to thank God for the victory which He has just given the Christian army” and he burst into tears. In memory of the triumph, he declared October 7^th the Feast of The Blessed Virgin Mary of the Rosary.

He was hoping to put an end to the power of Islam by forming a general alliance of the Italian cities, Poland, France, and all Christian Europe, and had begun negotiations for this purpose when he died of gravel (a disease of the kidneys), repeating “O Lord, increase my sufferings and my patience!” He left the memory of a rare virtue and an unfailing and inflexible integrity. He was beatified by Clement X in 1672 and canonized by Clement XI in 1712.

References and Excerpts:

[1]          CNA, “Saint Pius V, Pope,” Catholic News Agency. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/saint/st-pius-v-pope-452 (accessed May 12, 2021).

[2]          “Saint Pius V, Pope.” https://sanctoral.com/en/saints/saint_pius_v.html (accessed May 12, 2021).

[3]          “CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Pope St. Pius V.” https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12130a.htm (accessed May 12, 2021).

[4]          “Pope Saint Pius V,” The Order of Preachers, Independent, May 05, 2015. https://orderofpreachersindependent.org/2015/05/05/pope-saint-pius-v/ (accessed May 12, 2021).

[5]          “Pope Pius V,” Wikipedia. Feb. 12, 2021. Accessed: May 12, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pope_Pius_V&oldid=1006427367