St. Pius V

St. Pius V (born January 17, 1504, Bosco, duchy of Milan [Italy]—died May 1, 1572, Rome, Papal States [Italy]; canonized May 22, 1712; feast day April 30) was the pope, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, from 1566 to 1572. An Italian ascetic, reformer, and relentless persecutor of heretics, he reigned during one of the most austere periods in the church’s history. During his reign, the Inquisition was successful in eliminating Protestantism in Italy, and the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545–63) were put into effect.

Early life and career

Pius V, born Antonio Ghislieri, came from a poor family in northern Italy. He was a shepherd until the age of 14, when he became a Dominican friar. His first important appointment was as inquisitor, a high office of the Inquisition, which at the time was the Roman Catholic Church’s judicial system for discovering, examining, and punishing heretics. Ghislieri’s methods, prompted by excessive zeal, provoked such opposition from his bishop’s officials as well as his chapter that he was recalled in 1550.

The chief inquisitor in Rome, Giovanni Pietro Carafa, convinced of Ghislieri’s value, sent him on a mission to Lombardy and, in 1551, appointed him commissary general of the Roman Inquisition. When Carafa became pope (as Paul IV), Ghislieri was made bishop of Nepi and Sutri (1556), cardinal (1557), and finally grand inquisitor of the Roman church (1558). He was continued in this office by Pius IV, whom, however, he antagonized by his censoriousness and obstinacy.

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Papal reforms

After the death of Pius IV on December 9, 1565, the adherents of strict religious rules, led by Cardinal (later St.) Charles Borromeo, the nephew of Pius IV, had no difficulty making Ghislieri pope (January 7, 1566).

Retaining his ascetic mode of life, Pius immediately began the work of reform. Decrees and ordinances were issued rapidly; the papal court became a model of sobriety; prostitutes were driven from the city or confined to a certain quarter; penalties were fixed for Sunday desecration, profanity, and animal baiting; clerics holding benefices were required to spend definite periods in their administrative districts; members of convents were compelled to live in strict seclusion according to their vows; instruction in the catechism, the manual outlining the principles of Catholicism, was ordered. A new catechism appeared in 1566, followed by an improved breviary (the daily prayers for clergy and nuns) in 1568 and an improved missal (a book containing the prayers and responses for celebrating the mass in 1570). The use of indulgences—i.e., the remission of temporal punishment due for sin—and dispensations from vows was restricted, and the whole system of penance was reformed.

Pius was an avowed enemy of nepotism, the practice of granting jobs and other favors to relatives. Though it is true that he made one nephew a cardinal, he was allowed to have no influence, and the rest of the family was kept at a distance. By the papal constitution Admonet nos (Latin: “It Admonishes Us”; issued on March 29, 1567), he forbade the reinvestiture of fiefs—those landed estates held under feudal tenure that were intended to revert to the Holy See—and bound the cardinals by oath to observe it. In March 1569 Pius ordered the expulsion of Jews from the Papal States, though for commercial reasons they were allowed to remain under humiliating conditions in Rome and Ancona. In February 1571 the Humiliati, a corrupt monastic order of Milan, was suppressed on account of an attempt upon the life of the city’s archbishop, Cardinal Borromeo.

The rules governing the Inquisition were sharpened; old charges, long suspended, were revived; rank offered no protection but rather exposed its possessor to fiercer attack. None was pursued more relentlessly than the intellectuals, among whom many of the Protestant doctrines had found acceptance. Princes and states withdrew their protection of heretics and courted the favor of the Holy See by surrendering distinguished offenders. King Philip II of Spain in 1566 surrendered Bartolomé de Carranza, the Spanish theologian and former confessor to Queen Mary of England, and Cosimo de’ Medici in 1567 gave up Pietro Carnesecchi, a Florentine humanist and sympathizer of the Protestant Reformation who had been suspected of heresy even during Paul IV’s papacy. As a reward for this action, Medici received the title of grand duke of Tuscany two years later.

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In March 1571 the special Congregation of the Index, a list of books condemned as dangers to faith and morals, was established distinct from the Inquisition, and hundreds of printers took flight to Switzerland and Germany. The regret of Pius was that he had sometimes been too lenient. He encouraged Philip II to use the most ruthless tyranny to preserve his Dutch subjects in the Catholic faith and sent troops to France to help Catherine de Médici repress the Huguenots. Pius also protested against the tolerance shown by the Holy Roman emperor Rudolf II.

Legacy

In all this work, Pius confirmed Borromeo’s belief that a spiritually minded pope was above all else necessary if the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545–63) that were intended to rebut Protestant doctrines and to reform Catholicism were to be put into practical effect. The moral standing of the papacy was greatly raised, its effectiveness was immensely increased by the obliteration of heresy in Italy, and the morale of the church was much improved by the insistence on interpreting church doctrine according to precepts established at the council. Yet it is uncertain how much of this improvement was due to Pius’s continuous use of the Inquisition. Some credit belongs to the new generation of higher and lower clergy in the several provinces whose attitude was so different from that of their predecessors. The council left him to finish the reform of the missal and breviary, but he left the medieval canon virtually unchanged, as it remained until 1970.

Moreover, Pius’s policy had practical disadvantages. It took too little account of the wishes of secular rulers at a time when their support was essential for the defense of the church against heresy. He excommunicated Elizabeth I of England and declared her a usurper (February 25, 1570) without possessing the means to enforce his judgment, and he antagonized not only England but Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire as well. Much more successful was his organization of a crusade against the Turks, which resulted in a decisive naval victory of Lepanto (October 7, 1571). Pius made October the month of the rosary, a devotional practice honoring the Virgin Mary, because of his victory.