Sainthood

● Writing in A Protestant Manifesto, Winfred E. Garrison says: “Just how tangled this complex of power and piety can become is well illustrated by the career of that same Pius V whose attempt to depose Queen Elizabeth was an important element in the revolutionary movement which brought on the ‘martyrdom’ of some of its underground agents. He had been an officer of the Inquisition for fifteen years and so zealous that he became Grand Inquisitor before he was made pope. In the supreme office he continued his war on dissent and deviation with every possible weapon. He strengthened the machinery and stiffened the rules of the Inquisition, established the Congregation of the Index for systematic censorship, hounded hundreds of printers out of Italy, encouraged Philip II to exterminate Protestantism in the Netherlands and applauded the bloody tactics of the Duke of Alva, ordered the extermination of the Huguenots (but died three months before the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre), denounced the emperor’s compromise with the Lutherans, tried to organize a coalition of the Catholic German states for a war of religion against the Protestants, and was a party to the plot to drive Elizabeth from the throne of England. Now he is a ‘saint’, canonized in 1712.”