These considerations explain, but are far indeed from exculpating, the complicity of clergy and cut-throats in every crime of violence attempted against foes of Papal Rome.
Sarpi's worst enemies could scarcely fix on him the crime of heresy.

He was a staunch Catholic; so profoundly versed both in dogmatic theology and in ecclesiastical procedure, that to remain within the straitest limits of orthodoxy, while opposing the presumption of the Papal Court, gave him no trouble.

Yet at the time in which he lived, the bare act of resistance to any will or whim of Rome, passed with those doctors who were forging new systems of Pontifical supremacy, for heretical.

In this arbitrary and uncanonical sense of the phrase Sarpi was undoubtedly a heretic.

He had deserved the hatred of the Curia, the Inquisition, the Jesuits, and their myrmidons.