April 30th. St. Pius V.

Born 1504, Michael Ghisleri was a member of the Dominican Order and passed through many offices within the Order before being made Bishop of a small diocese north of Rome in 1556 and a Cardinal in 1557. He was later sent north to the diocese of Mondovi near Turin where discipline had more or less collapsed and where his vigorous reforming ways achieved quick success. In 1565 Pope Pius IV died and Michael Ghisleri was elected as his successor, taking the name Pius V. The preceding decades had not been the most glorious in the history of the Papacy, with luxury, lust, nepotism and fiery tempers succeeding each other in a doleful procession of vices and Pius V set to work to cut through this jungle of decadence with a will. Wasteful expenditures were diverted to the relief of the poor, the internal government of the church was thoroughly shaken up and a moral crusade extended to the Papal States, long overrun by highwaymen and ne'er~do-wells of all kinds. Pius V applied with vigour the reforms of the Council of Trent, with a new Breviary and new Missal, a new Catechism and a new attachment to the work of St. Thomas Aquinas whose theology became more or less the sole 'Roman standard'. Whole layers of medieval liturgical practice were swept away, although as is usually the case the reform proved so drastic that many colourful details began to seep back in again before too long, On the political front Pius inspired the European league against the Turkish invasion which resulted in the sea victory at Lepanto in the Mediterranean [1571], ascribed to the intercessory value of the rosary. He also achieved fame or notoriety, through excommunicating Queen Elizabeth I in 1570 though historians have since tended to agree that if the Pope had been better advised about local conditions he would have refrained from this action, which made things much more difficult for English Catholic laity, and priests. His sanctity and dedication made him immensely, popular in Rome, and his tomb in St. Mary Major's was soon adopted as a shrine, though his actual canonisation did not occur until 1712.