Today is the feast of St Celestine V (1296), a simple monk who experienced great tensions between the office of Pope and the call to holiness and resolved them by abdicating after 5 mos. His memory was invoked by the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI in 2013. Less remembered:
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He was arrested and imprisoned by his successor, Pope Boniface VIII, whose penchant for statecraft and intrigue was in every way a contrast with the character of the saintly Celestine. He proclaimed that the salvation of all creatures depends on subjection to the Pope.
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For saddling the church with Boniface Dante placed Celestine in the vestibule of the Inferno. Italian novelist Ignacio Silone made Celestine the hero of a play in which his story dramatizes the conflict between the spirit of the gospel and the principle of power.