Last week it was my turn to present the life of a Dominican saint at a meeting that I regularly attend—and I chose an unlikely one, an extreme and controversial figure, who exemplifies the problems of official sanctity: Pope Saint Pius V.

There’s no question about the personal holiness of Antonio Ghislieri, to use the name he was given at his baptism in 1504. His life was marked by simplicity and austerity. Like our present Pope Francis, he eschewed the luxurious trappings of the Papal court. He wore a rough white Dominican habit. He slept little, spending his nights in prayer—but when he did lie down, it was on a thin mattress of straw. He ate and drank little, wore a hair shirt, and his charity was both unceasing and strategic: he understood that public works, such as water and sewage for Rome, were means of employment for the poor, to whom he also gave grain, often at his own expense. He is remembered as the Pope of the Rosary—and as the implementor of the reforms of the Council of Trent: the man who cleaned up the church and restored key standards of practice.

But It would also be hard to find a saint whose life is more at odds with our current values that his. Europe was convulsed with religious wars at the time, as Catholic and Protestant monarchs fought each other and persecuted their own subjects. Further, Christian Europe was threatened by an ascendant Turkish power. This saint was an enthusiastic inquisitor before his ascent to the papal throne, and, once Pope, zealous in supporting Catholic monarchs in their wars against Protestants, with both money and troops. It was he who organized the “Holy League” that defeated the Turkish navy in the battle of Lepanto in 1572.

And it was he who both excommunicated and deposed Elizabeth I of England, declaring that her Catholic subjects had a religious duty to rise against her and depose her in favor of her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. That was a political error of disastrous consequence. It obliged Elizabeth to launch a far-reaching persecution against her Catholic subjects, thus resulting in numerous martyrdoms; but it also cemented an enduring anti-Catholic culture in Britain over the next three or four centuries. Happily, the Holy Spirit took a different route, offering grace and healing year after year in the quiet practice of Anglican rites. Also, in our own very different times, the same Spirit has inspired a radically different approach to contemporary ecumenism.

So in summary: zealous reformer; ascetic; man of prayer; warrior; inquisitor. A man and a pope of his time. And that’s my point, now—not to debate the rights and wrongs of torture, capital punishment, financing and conducting religious wars, the alleged ecclesial authority to depose a head of state, the parallel alleged authority to command the queen’s subjects to remove her and substitute a rival monarch. All those issues are real, and in our time, Catholics have diametrically different views than those held by this saint. Further, and here’s the thing: we consider our own abhorrence of torture, capital punishment, religious coercion and the interference of a religious leader in civil affairs to be more or less objective standards.

Hence my conclusion that this holy man’s life offers an extreme example of a continuing phenomenon in spiritual history: the holy person who lives, teaches and acts within the context of a sinful culture. And by “sinful culture” I don’t mean the kind of permissiveness that moralists like to attack. I mean our ingrained and incomplete and mistaken attitudes and beliefs and assumptions about good and evil, what’s lawful and unlawful, along with cultural taboos. Every culture and every age are “sinful” in this sense, and it’s part of the human condition that we are, like it or not, limited by our cultural norms in ways that we cannot perceive. 

Thus, no matter how holy a person may be, he or she acts and teaches and witnesses within those necessarily partial and imperfect and “sinful” limits. Therefore his or her teaching and witness is necessarily tainted and incomplete. 

This applies to the greatest of teachers, not merely a controversial saint like Pius V. It applies to St. Paul. Where his human knowledge is concerned, it applies to the Lord Jesus himself. Hence—to cite only one example—his belief that possession by evil spirits was the cause of illness. That’s a cultural assumption normal at his time, and as a man, with the limited understanding proper to his human identity, that was all he knew. He was wrong, and it would be folly on our part to apply his mistaken belief to the treatment of illness today. Sadly, that’s exactly what evangelical Christians do, with destructive results. 

To me, this human condition calls for humility. 

Humility in the face of wrongdoing in the name of God. Humility in judging the “saint” four hundred years later; but also humility in understanding the limited and partial nature of our own capacity to judge. We too are caught in history. We must judge and act, because we are alive. We have no choice. And we must do so knowing how partial and mistaken and wrong our judgements may be.