St. Dominic's Family: Over 300 Famous Dominicans by Sr. Mary Jean Dorcy

Author:Sr. Mary Jean Dorcy [Dorcy, Sr. Mary Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TAN Books
Published: 2015-11-23T06:00:00+00:00

POPE ST. PIUS V

(1504-1572)

People who do not know anything else about Pope Pius V are quite apt to remember him as the Pope of the Rosary, recalling his remarkable connection with the Battle of Lepanto.

Michael Ghislieri was born in 1504, in the tiny village of Bosco. His parents were poor and could not educate their alert little boy, who seemed far too talented to spend his life herding sheep. One day, as he was minding his father's small flock, two Dominicans came along the road and fell into conversation with him. Recognizing immediately that he was both virtuous and intelligent, they obtained permission from his parents to take the child with them and educate him. He left home at the age of twelve and did not return until his ordination, many years later.

After a preliminary course of studies, he received the Dominican habit and, as a novice, was sent to Lombardy. Here, for the first time, he met the well-organized forces of heresy which he was to combat so successfully in later life. In 1528, he went home for his first Mass, and he found that Bosco had been razed by the French. There was nothing left to tell him if his parents were living or dead. He finally found them, however, in a nearby town. After he had said Mass, he returned to a career that would keep him far from home for the rest of his life.

First as novice-master, then as prior of several convents, Michael proved to be a wise and charitable administrator. He was made inquisitor at Como, 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 the North of 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 arrived in Rome on Christmas Eve, tired, cold and hungry, and here it was not the heretics that caused him pain, but his own brethren. The prior at Santa Sabina saw fit to be sarcastic and inhospitable to the unimportant-looking friar, who said he was from Lombardy. The pope knew very well who he was, however, and immediately gave him the commission of working with the heretics in the Roman prisons.

He was a true father to these unfortunates, and he brought many of them back to the faith. One of his most appealing converts was a young Franciscan, a converted Jew of a wealthy family, who had lapsed into heresy through pride in his writing. Michael proceeded to straighten out his thinking, to give him the Dominican habit, and to assure him of his personal patronage, thus securing for the Church a splendid Scripture scholar and writer.

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