Rod compares Santorum to Savonarola, which is frankly unfair to Savonarola. Girolamo Savonarola was a Dominican friar preaching against church abuses and immorality in the context of a Florentine republic recently freed from the tyranny of the Medicis. His enemies resented him for a number of things, not least of which was his opposition to the Medicis. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s brief sketch of Savonarola’s career in his history of the Reformation sums up the views of some of his contemporaries about him:

Machiavelli, who knew him well, pointed out that he was an ‘unarmed prophet’, and his last words had the serene dignity of a martyr. He left many admirers: throughout Europe, pious humanists valued the deep spirituality of his writings and overlooked the nightmare years of his republic–far away in the kingdom of that would-be Henry VIII, Savonarola’s meditations continued to be much read, and two of his meditations were incorporated in an officially approved English primer in 1534. Ignatius Loyola felt constrained to ban members of the Society of Jesus from reading his writings, despite seeing a lot of good in them, simply because his fate still stimulated unseemly disagreement between his supporters and his detractors. (p.95)

Dominicans have advocated his canonization, and Erasmus reportedly cited Savonarola’s example as a major reason why he remained in the Catholic Church rather than going over to one of the Reformation churches. Savonarola is probably one of the more misunderstood figures from early modern history.