701 ST MAURUNTIUS, ABBOT

Like her great exemplar she was a native of Thuringia, having been born at Sanger­hausen, to the south-west of Eisleben. Married at the age of fifteen to a man of noble rank, she proved an admirable wife, besides being a great benefactress to the poor.

Once, in a vision, our Lord had said to her, “Follow me”; and she strove not only to obey Him herself, but to lead her household to do the same. In the early days of her married life, her husband had remonstrated with her for the simplicity of her dress, but she gradually won him over to her own point of view. He was actually on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land when he died—to the great grief of his widow, who was left to bring up her children alone.

As they grew up, one after another entered religious orders, and Jutta was left free to follow the call which she had long cherished in her heart. She gave every­thing she possessed to the poor, and then, clad in a miserable dress, she begged bread for herself and the poor from those who had been her dependents. Though some scoffed, others treated her with reverence, knowing what she had given up, and she resolved to go forth among strangers in order that she might be despised by all. As she wandered on, walking barefoot in summer and winter, she relieved on the road many tramps by dressing their wounds and feeding them with food supplied to her in charity. At last she made her way into Prussia, the land of the Teutonic Knights, whose grand-master, Hanno of Sangerhausen, was a relation of her own. There she settled as a solitary in a ruinous building on the shore of a sheet of water called the Bielcza, half a mile or so from Kulmsee.

1572 ST PIUS V. POPE Sancti Pii Quinti, ex Ordine Prædicatórum, Papæ et Confessóris, qui Kaléndis mensis hujus obdormívit in Dómino.Pope St. Pius V, confessor of the Order of Preachers, who went to sleep in the Lord on the 1st of May.

MICHAEL GHISLIERI was born in 1504 at Bosco, in the diocese of Tortona, and received the Dominican habit at the age of fourteen in the priory of Voghera. After his ordination to the priesthood he was lector in theology and philosophy for sixteen years, and for a considerable time was employed as novice master and in governing houses of the order—everywhere endeavouring to maintain the spirit of the founder. In 1556 he was chosen bishop of Nepi and Sutri, and the following year was appointed inquisitor general, and also cardinal—in order, as he ruefully remarked, that irons should be riveted to his feet to prevent him from creeping back into the peace of the cloister. Pope Pius IV transferred him to the Piedmontese bishopric of Mondovi—a church reduced almost to ruin by the ravages of war. Within a short time of his accession the newly-appointed prelate had done much to restore calm and prosperity in his diocese, but he was soon recalled to Rome in connection with other business. Here, though his opinions were  often at variance with those of Pius IV, he never shrank from openly stating his convictions.

In December 1565 Pius IV died, and Michael Ghislieri was chosen pope, largely through the efforts of St. Charles Borromeo, who saw in him the reformer of whom the Church stood in need. He took the name of Pius V, and from the outset made it abundantly clear that he was determined to enforce the letter as well as the spirit of the recommendations of the Council of Trent. On the occasion of his coronation, the largesses usually scattered indiscriminately amongst the crowd were bestowed upon hospitals and the really poor, whilst the money which was wont to be spent in providing a banquet for the cardinals, ambassadors and other great persons was sent to the poorer convents of the city.

One of his first injunctions was that all bishops should reside in their dioceses, and parish priests in the cures to which they had been appointed—severe penalties being imposed for disobedience. The new pope’s activities extended from a drastic purge of the Roman curia to the clearing of the papal states of brigands, from legislation against prostitution to the forbiddance of bull-fighting. In a time of famine, he imported from Sicily and France at his own expense large quantities of corn, a considerable proportion of which was distributed gratis to the poor or was sold under cost price.

A deter­mined opponent of nepotism, he kept his relatives at a distance, and although he was persuaded to follow tradition by making one of his nephews a cardinal, he gave him little influence or power. In the new Breviary which was published in 1568, certain saints’ days and some extravagant legends were omitted and lessons from the Holy Scriptures regained their proper place, whilst the Missal, issued two years later, was as much a restoration of ancient usage as a revision adapted to the needs of the time. *[ *This Roman liturgy was imposed on the whole Western church, except where local and proper uses could show a prescription of two hundred years, e.g. in the pope’s own order, the Dominicans.]

To Pius the Church owed the best edition of St Thomas Aquinas which had yet appeared and the solemn recognition of St Thomas as a doctor of the Church. So severe were the penalties inflicted for every breach of order or morals that he was accused of wanting to turn Rome into a monastery. That he succeeded as well as he did was largely owing to the popular veneration for his personal holiness; even when he was ill and old he fasted throughout Advent as well as through Lent, and he prayed with such fervour that he was popularly supposed to obtain from God whatever he asked in the hospitals, which he visited frequently, he loved to tend the sick with his own hands.

Reforms such as those enumerated might seem more than enough to engross the attention of any one man, but they were not even the main preoccupation of St Pius V. Throughout his pontificate two menacing shadows were ever before his eyes—the spread of Protestantism and the inroads of the Turks. To counteract these dangers he laboured untiringly; the Inquisition received fresh encourage­ment, and the learned Baius, whose writings were condemned, only saved himself by recantation. Nevertheless this pope’s success against Protestantism was not all effected by such drastic means, for he is said to have converted an Englishman simply by the dignity and holiness of his appearance. The catechism, too, which had been ordered by the Council of Trent was completed during his pontificate, and he at once ordered translations to be made into foreign tongues. Moreover, he made the catechetical instruction of the young a duty incumbent on all parish priests. Conservative in most of his views, he was notably ahead of his contem­poraries in the importance he attached to adequate instruction as a preliminary to adult baptism.

By the terms used when Pius V re-issued the bull “In cena Domini” (1568), it was made clear that as pope he claimed a certain suzerainty over secular princes. For a long time he cherished hopes of winning to the faith Queen Elizabeth of England, but in 1570 he issued a bull of excommunication (“ Regnans in excelsis”) against her, absolving her subjects from their allegiance and forbidding them to recognize her as their sovereign. This was undoubtedly an error of judgement due to imperfect knowledge of English feeling and of the conditions which obtained in that country. Its only result was to increase the difficulties of loyal English Catholics and to lend some appearance of justification to the accusation of treason so frequently brought against them; and to aggravate those controversies about oaths and tests which vexed and weakened their body from the Oath of Obedience in 1606 until Emancipation in 1829: the suspicion which the bull raised about the civil loyalty of Catholics has not quite disappeared even to-day. Several English martyrs died protesting their loyalty to the queen, and when in 1588 the Spanish Armada set out, with the encouragement of Pope Sixtus V, to (incidentally) enforce the sentence of Pius V by establishing Spanish dominion in England, English Catholics at home were in general no more anxious for its success than were their compatriots. All Europe, indeed, had gone a long way since St Gregory VII and Henry IV, Alexander III and Barbarossa, Innocent III and John of England, since Boniface VIII and “Unam sanctam”; it was nearer the time when a pope, Pius IX, would declare that: “Nowadays no one any longer thinks of the right of deposing princes that the Holy See formerly exercised—and the Supreme Pontiff thinks of it less than anyone.”

Pius V’s disappointment in England was compensated for in the following year when, aided politically and materially by the Holy See, Don John of Austria and Marcantonio Colonna broke the Turkish power in the Mediterranean. Their force, which comprised 20,000 soldiers, sailed from Corfu and came upon the Turks in the Gulf of Lepanto. There, in one of the world’s greatest maritime battles, the Ottoman fleet was completely defeated. From the moment the expedi­tion started the pope had prayed for it almost unceasingly—often with uplifted hands like Moses on the mountain. He had also prescribed public devotions and private fasts and, at the very hour that the contest was raging, the procession of the rosary in the church of the Minerva was pouring forth petitions for victory. Mean­while the pope himself was convening on business with some of his cardinals; but on a sudden he turned from them abruptly, opened a window and remained standing for some time with his eyes fixed upon the sky. Then, closing the casement, he said, “This is not a moment in which to talk business: let us give thanks to God for the victory He has granted to the arms of the Christians”. To commemorate the great deliverance he afterwards inserted the words “Help of Christians” in the Litany of Our Lady and instituted the festival of the Holy Rosary. The victory was won on October 7, 1571. In the following year the pope was struck down by a painful disorder from which he had long suffered and which his austerities had aggravated: it carried him off on May 1, 1572, at the age of sixty-eight.

St Pius V was canonized in 1712, the last pope to be raised to the Church’s altars till the beatification of Pius X. The monastic austerity of Pius V’s earlier days was continued throughout his life.* [* The white cassock now worn by the popes is said to derive from Pius V’s white Dominican habit.]