This page needs to be proofread.

V 283

The strange chiaroscuro of the Catholic Restoration also dims the figures of its Popes. In Pius V (1566-1572) one finds, for example, traits that to a modern mind are irreconcilable. He had entered the Dominican Order when he was hardly more than a boy. Through- out life he remained a genuine mendicant monk, simple, pious, kindly, benevolent and forgiving. The young brother who made every jour- ney on foot with a kit-bag on his back became an impoverished car- dinal, a Pope of few wants, and a man who always touched the hearts of the people as he walked barefoot through the streets in processions. But the great and dangerous idea that he was an instrument of Provi- dence took possession of him. The zeal that consumed him was to consume others, too. He insisted on Church discipline to an extent that was almost rigorous; and in carrying out a will which seemed to him the will of God, he could be hardhearted to the point of cruelty. The substance of all his wishes was to transform the world in accord- ance with the decrees of the Tridentine Council. Heresy was a crime in his eyes, and therefore he also regarded the heretic as a criminal. The social injury wrought by the religious revolution was so tremen- dous to his inquisitorial conscience that he did not take into considera- tion at all the persons and personal characters of the guilty. It was his wish that the Inquisition should not only suppress heretics who spoke or were silent, but even those who did not know they were here- tics. It was under his reign that Pietro Carnesecchi, once the in- fluential secretary of Pope Clement VII, was beheaded and burned on a charge of favouring die Reformation. Even one of the great men of the Council, the Pope's pious and magnanimous fellow Dominican Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo, was thrown into a Roman dungeon. Since the Reformation was making progress in England, he hurled the anathema at Queen Elizabeth, declared her deposed, released her subjects from the oath of loyalty, and so brought about the unfortu- nate persecution of all Papists as a sect dangerous to the state. Ger- many enjoyed a great deal more consideration and moderation because the powerful and influential apostle of the Counter-reformation, Saint Peter Canisius (a Jesuit born in the Netherlands) guided the arm of the Pope. There were many who wished that he had more such men at his side. Exaggerating rather than weakening the Roman claims of the Middle Ages, the Pope made the Bull Ccsna Domini a col-


284