Hilaire Belloc once quipped, “Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe.”
With that, on this most glorious Feast of the Holy Rosary, I present to you one of the greatest – if not THE greatest! – battles ever waged in Europe, and won by the Catholic Church.

And, this piece of brilliance from H.W. Crocker III –
“Pope Pius V, like Philip, was no exemplar of rubicund, jovial Christianity such as the Italians preferred. He thought the Church had seen too much of that, with the concomitant slackness in Renaissance morals and an excessive generosity to Protestant error.”

Thank God Europe had the pope she desperately NEEDED on this day back in 1571.