Sacred Mysteries: How the Pope cheered up the Virgin Queen

The Church of England celebrates the festivals of popes such as Clement, Leo the Great, and Gregory the Great. It does not, that I’ve heard, venerate Pope St Pius V, Bishop of Rome 1566-72.

In 1571, with his encouragement, the Turkish fleet was defeated at the battle of Lepanto by a “Holy League” of Spain, Venice, the Papal States and others. The importance of Lepanto is debated today by historians; at the time, it seemed of the greatest importance.

On October 7 Pope Pius, who suffered from bladder stones and often worked while walking up and down, was despatching business in Rome with Bartolomeo Bussotti, his treasurer, when he opened the window and seemed to listen. He then exclaimed that victory had been won. The Doge of Venice confirmed the victory on October 26.

It was November 8 when news reached Queen Elizabeth I, via the Spanish Duke of Alba, of the “greate victorie lately given by God’s goodness of ye Christian Army serving in the Levant Seas against the Turke”. The Queen “being thankfull and joyfull therefore as for a singular great blessing sent by Almighty God to ye benefitt of ye universall estate of Xpiandome”, issued an order of the Privy Council for bonfires to be lit in the City of London and prayers to be said at St Paul’s.

This order is all the more striking since the previous year Pius, though feeling “regret that we should be forced to turn upon one whose ancestors have so well deserved of the Christian community” had excommunicated Elizabeth and declared her to be deprived of her title to the crown. That fitted in with his resolute opposition to Protestantism, although he bravely defended Bartolomé Carranza, the Archbishop of Toledo, surprisingly accused of Lutheran teachings.

Not that Pope Pius had ever sought an easy life. Born Antonio Ghislieri in 1504, he joined the Dominican order aged 14, taking the name Michael in religion. Having been made a bishop and in 1557 a cardinal, he offered open opposition to Pope Pius IV’s plan to make his own 13-year-old nephew a cardinal.

In 1566, Ghislieri, supported by the reforming Cardinal Charles Borromeo (a nephew on his sister’s side), was elected Pope, aged 62. He banned horse races in St Peter’s Square. He issued a papal bull against bullfights. He abolished the post of papal court jester. He banished Roman prostitutes to distant quarters. (The ethical thinking of the time concluded that to make prostitution illegal would be worse than tolerating it; but it should be relegated to parts of a city of less dignity.)

Naturally, as a Dominican, Pius was happy to promote the theology of the great 13th-century Dominican Thomas Aquinas, and he declared him the fifth Latin Doctor of the Church.

In any case, at the Council of Trent, which had ended in 1563, Thomas’s Summa Theologiae had been revered by being laid on the altar, alongside Holy Scripture.

In its day, the Council of Trent was an active engine of modernisation and reform. It also had a centralising tendency, imposing on the Latin Church a single form of the liturgy of the Mass (apart from immemorial liturgies such as the Ambrosian rite at Milan or the Mozarabic at Toledo).

Trent had resolved to compile a catechism of Church teaching, for the use of parish priests, and under Pius it was published, with the Council of Trent on the title page.

The remains of Pius V are venerated as relics at the basilica of St Mary Major in Rome and his saint’s day falls on Tuesday, April 30.