Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

of the papacy was an Italian heirloom and vested interest; any Italian

who proposed to end that tribute-receiving organization seemed to most

Italians to be verging on lunacy. The upper classes quarreled with the

papacy as a political power over Central Italy, but they cherished

Catholicism as a vital aid to social order and peaceful government.

They realized that the glory of Italian art had been bound up with the

Church through the inspiration of her legends and the support of her

gold. Catholicism itself had become an art; its sensuous elements

had submerged the ascetic and the theological; stained glass, incense,

music, architecture, sculpture, painting, even drama- these were all

in the Church and of her, and in their marvelous ensemble they

seemed inseparable from her. The artists and the scholars of Italy did

not have to be converted from Catholicism, for they had converted

Catholicism to scholarship and art. Hundreds, thousands of scholars

and artists were supported by bishops, cardinals, and popes; many

humanists, some polite skeptics, had risen to high position in the

Church, Italy loved attainable beauty too much to despoil itself

over unattainable truth. And had those fanatical Teutons, or that sour

popelet in Geneva, or that ruthless ogre on the throne of England,

found the truth? What depressing nonsense those Reformers were

shouting- just when the intellectual classes in Italy had quite

forgotten hell and damnation! One could understand a quiet and private

rejection of Christian theology in favor of a vague and genial

deism, but to replace the mystery of transubstantiation with the

horror of predestination seemed a passage from a heartening

symbolism to a suicidal absurdity. Just now, when the Church had

spread her forgiving wings over the pagan proclivities of the

Italian people, Calvin was calling upon the world to fetter itself

in a puritanism that threatened to exile all gladness and

spontaneity from life. And how could Italian joy and art continue if

those barbarous Teutons and Englishmen should cease to send or bring

their coins into Italy?

II. ITALIAN CATHOLIC REFORMERS

-

Consequently the Italian argument was all for reform within the

Church. And indeed, loyal churchmen had for centuries admitted-

proclaimed- the need for ecclesiastical reform. The outbreak and

progress of the Reformation gave new urgency to the need and the

demand. "A vast torrent of abuse in hundreds and thousands of

pamphlets and caricatures poured down upon the clergy." `06386 The

Sack of Rome touched the conscience and income of terrified

cardinals and populace; a hundred priests pronounced the calamity a

warning from God. Bishop Stafileo, preaching before the Rota (a

judiciary branch of the Curia) in 1528, explained, almost in

Protestant terms, why God had struck the capital of Christendom:

"Because all flesh has become corrupt; we are citizens not of the holy

city of Rome, but of Babylon, the city of corruption." `06387 As

Luther had said.

At an uncertain date shortly before 1517 Giovanni Pietro Caraffa and

Count Gaetano da Thiene founded at Rome the Oratory of the Divine

Love- Oratorio del Divino Amore - for prayer and self-reform. Half

a hundred prominent men joined it, including Iacopo Sadoleto,

Gainmatteo Giberti, Giuliano Dati. In 1524 Gaetano organized an

order of clerks regular- i.e., secular priests subjecting themselves

to monastic vows, After the Sack of Rome the Oratory was disbanded,

and Caraffa and others entered the new order, which took the name of

Theatines from Caraffa's episcopal see of Theate or Chieti. Men of

high distinction were admitted- Pietro Bembo, Marcantonio Flaminio,

Luigi Priuli, Gasparo Contarini, Reginald Pole.... All pledged

themselves to poverty, care of the sick, and a strict moral life,

"to make up," said their first historian, "what is wanting in the

clergy, who are corrupted by vice and ignorance to the ruin of the

people." `06388 The members spread through Italy, and their example

shared with papal and conciliar reforms, with Capuchin and Jesuit

example, in restoring the moral fiber of the Catholic clergy and the

popes. Caraffa led the way by resigning all his benefices, and

distributing his substantial wealth among the poor.

Giberti was in his person and career an image of the Catholic

reform. At the court of Leo X he was a leading humanist; under Clement

VII he was datary or chief secretary to the Curia. Shaken by the

catastrophe of 1527, he retired to his bishopric at Verona, and

lived like an ascetic monk while administering his diocese. He was

alarmed by the decay of religion there- the churches dilapidated,

preaching rare, priests ignorant of the Latin in which they said Mass,

and the people rarely using the confessional. By example, precept, and

firm discipline, he reformed his clergy; soon, says a Catholic

historian, "the dungeons were full of concubinary priests." `06389

Giberti reestablished (1531) the Confraternita della Carita that had

been founded by Cardinal Giuliano de' Medici in 1519; he built

orphanages, and opened people's banks to rescue borrowers from

usurers. Similar reforms were carried out by Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga

(son of Isabella d'Este) at Mantua, by Marco Vida at Alba, by Fabio

Vigili at Spoleto, and many other bishops who knew that the Church

must reform or die.

Several of the heroes of the orthodox reform were later canonized by

the Church they had helped to save. St. Philip Neri, a young

Florentine noble, founded at Rome (c. 1540) a peculiar Trinita de'

Pellegrini: twelve laymen who, after attending Mass on Sundays, would

make a pilgrimage to one of the basilicas, or to some rural green, and

there give or hear pious talks, and sing religious music. Many of

the members became priests, and took the name of Fathers of the

Oratory; from their musical propensities the word oratorio added

to its old meaning- place of prayer- the new meaning of choral song.

St. Charles Borromeo, nephew to Pope Pius IV, resigned his high

place as a cardinal in Rome to cleanse the religious life of Milan. As

archbishop there he maintained discipline among the clergy, and showed

the way by his own austerities and devotion. There was some

resistance. The Umiliati, a religious order once proud of its

humility, had degenerated into a comfortable, even a licentious, life;

the Cardinal ordered them to obey their rule; one of them fired a shot

at him as he prayed in chapel; the result was to raise to veneration

the popular awe for a man who thought that reform was the best

answer to the Reformation. Within his lifetime and his archdiocese,

decency was made fashionable among clergy and laity alike. His

influence was felt throughout Italy, and shared in transforming the

cardinals from worldly aristocrats into devoted priests.

Stimulated by such men, the popes began to give determined attention

to ecclesiastical reform. Early in the pontificate of Paul III the

renowned jurist Giovan Battista Caccia presented to him a treatise

on the reformation of the Church. "I see," said the preamble, "that

our Holy Mother the Church... has been so changed that she seems to

have no tokens of her evangelical character; and no trace can be found

in her of humility, temperance, continence, and Apostolic

strength." `063810 Paul showed his own mood by accepting the

dedication of this work. On November 20, 1534, he appointed

Cardinals Piccolomini, Sanseverino, and Cesi to draw up a program of

moral renovation for the Church; and on January 15, 1535, he ordered

strict enforcement of Leo X's reform bulls of 1513. Enmeshed in

papal and Imperial politics, endangered by the advance of the Turks,

and unwilling, in these crises, to disturb the structure or

functioning of the Curia by radical changes, Paul deferred active

reform; but the men whom he raised to the cardinalate were almost

all known for integrity and devotion. In July 1536, he invited to a

reform conference at Rome Contarini, Caraffa, Sadoleto, Cortese,

Aleander, Pole, Tommaso Badia, and Bishop Federigo Fregose of

Gubbio, all committed to reform, and bade them put into writing the

abuses in the Church, and the means they would recommend to mitigate

them. Sadoleto opened the conference by boldly stating that the

popes themselves, by their sins, crimes, and financial greed, had been

the prime source of ecclesiastical deterioration. `063811 The

conference met almost daily for three months. Its leading spirit,

Gasparo Contarini, was the finest figure in the Counter Reformation.

Born in Venice (1483) of aristocratic lineage, and educated in liberal

Padua, he soon rose to high position in the Venetian government. He

was sent as ambassador to Charles V in Germany, accompanied him to

England and Spain, and then served the Senate as its representative at

the papal court (1527-30). Retiring from politics, he devoted

himself to study, and made his home a meeting place of the best

statesmen, churchmen, philosophers, and humanists in Venice. Though

a layman, he pondered ecclesiastical reform, and collaborated actively

with Caraffa, Giberti, Cortese, and Pole. All Italy recognized him

as a rare combination of intellect and character. In 1535, without any

solicitation on his part, he was made a cardinal by Paul III, whom

he had never met. `063812

In March 1537, the commission presented to the Pope its unanimous

Consilium dilectorum cardinalium de emendanda Ecclesia. This

"Counsel of the Appointed Cardinals on Reforming the Church" exposed

with astonishing freedom the abuses in the papal government, and

boldly ascribed them chiefly to "reckless exaggeration of the papal

authority by unscrupulous canonists." Some popes, the report held,

"had assumed the right to sell ecclesiastical offices, and this simony

had spread venality and corruption so widely through the Church that

now the great organization was on the verge of destruction through

men's lack of trust in its integrity. The report urged strict

supervision of all Curial activities, a check on dispensations, an end

to money payments for them, a higher standard in all appointments

and in eligibility to the cardinalate and the priesthood, and a

prohibition of plural or absentee holding of benefices. "Throughout

the whole world," the report added, "almost all the shepherds have

deserted their flocks and entrusted them to hirelings." Monastic

orders must be regenerated, and nunneries should be subject to

episcopal supervision, for their visitation by monks had led to

scandal and sacrilege. Indulgences should be proclaimed only once a

year. The report concluded with a solemn exhortation to the Pope:

-

We have satisfied our consciences, not without the greatest hope

of seeing, under your pontificate, the Church of God restored....

You have taken the name of Paul. We hope that you will imitate his

charity. He was chosen as an instrument to carry Christ's name to

the heathen; you, we hope, have been chosen to revive in our hearts

and deeds that name long since forgotten among the heathen and by us

the clergy; to heal our sickness, to unite Christ's sheep again in one

fold, and to avert from our heads the wrath and already threatening

vengeance of God. `063813

-

Paul took in good spirit this aureum consilium, this "golden

counsel," as many called it, and sent a copy to every cardinal. Luther

translated it into German, and published it as a full justification of

his break with Rome; however, he judged the authors of the document to

be "liars... desperate rascals reforming the Church with

cajolery." `063814 On April 20, 1537, Paul appointed four cardinals-

Contarini, Caraffa, Simonetta, and Ghinucci- to reform the Dataria,

that department of the Curia which had become especially venal in

granting those dispensations, graces, privileges, indults, and

benefices which were reserved to the papal power. The undertaking

required courage, for the Dataria yielded 50,000 ducats

($1,250,000?) yearly to the Pope- nearly half his income. `063815 At

once a cry of anguish rose from the officials and their dependents;

they complained of the high cost of living in Rome, and alleged that

if they were made to keep to the letter of the law their families

would soon be destitute. Paul proceeded cautiously; nevertheless,

wrote Aleander to Morone (April 27, 1540), "the work of reform goes on

busily." On December 13 Paul summoned eighty archbishops and bishops

residing in Rome, and ordered them to return to their sees. Again a

thousand objections were raised. Morone warned the Pope that haste

in executing this order might drive some of the bishops, returning

to now predominantly Protestant areas, to join the Lutherans. This

actually occurred in several cases. Soon Paul lost himself in Imperial

politics, and left reform to his successors.

The movement for internal reform triumphed when its leader, Caraffa,

became Paul IV (1555). Monks absent from their monasteries without

official sanction and clear necessity were commanded to return at

once. On the night of August 22, 1558, the Pope ordered all the

gates of Rome closed, and all vagrant monks arrested; similar

procedures were followed throughout the Papal States, and some

offenders were sent to the galleys. Monasteries were no longer to be

assigned in commendam to support absentee officials with their

revenues. Bishops and abbots not actually serving the Curia in a fixed

office were required to return to their posts or forfeit their income.

The holding of plural benefices was prohibited. All departments of the

Curia were bidden to reduce their fees, and to eliminate any suspicion

of simony in appointments to clerical positions. Having so

diminished his own income, Paul made a further sacrifice by ending the

payment of a fee for confirmation to archiepiscopal dignity. Severe

papal edicts were issued against usurers, actors, and prostitutes;

procurers were to be put to death. Daniele da Volterra was

instructed to cover sartorially the more glaring anatomical features

of Michelangelo's Last Judgment; and it must be admitted that that

gloomy shambles of flesh damned or saved had hardly found a fitting

place over the altar of the popes. Rome now assumed an uncongenial air

of external piety and morality. In Italy- less visibly beyond it-

the Church had reformed her clergy and her morals, while leaving her

doctrines proudly intact. The reform had been long delayed, but when

it came it was sincere and magnificent.

III. ST. TERESA AND MONASTIC REFORM

-

A moral regeneration was simultaneously taking place in the monastic

orders. We may imagine their reputation from a remark of the pious and

orthodox Michelangelo, who, when he heard that Sebastian del Piombo

was to paint the figure of a monk in the chapel of San Pietro in

Montorio, advised against it, saying that as the monks had spoiled the

world, which is so large, it would not be surprising if one should

spoil the chapel, which was so small. `063816 Gregorio Cortese set

himself patiently to reform the Benedictines at Padua; Girolamo

Seripando the Austin Canons; Egidio Canisio the Augustinian

Eremites; Paolo Giustiniani the Camaldolites.

New monastic orders stressed reform. Antonio Maria Laccaria

founded at Milan (1533) the Clerks Regular of St. Paul, a community of

priests pledged to monastic poverty; they met originally in the church

of St. Barnabas, whence they came to be called Barnabites. In 1535 St.

Angela organized the Ursuline nuns for the education of girls and

the care of the sick or the poor; and in 1540 St. John of God

established in Granada the Brothers of Mercy for hospital

ministrations. In 1523 Matteo de' Bassi, in fervent emulation of St.

Francis of Assisi, determined to observe to the letter the final

rule that their founder had left to the Franciscans. Other friars

joined him, and by 1525 their number encouraged Matteo to ask papal

sanction of a new branch of the Franciscans dedicated to the strictest

rule. The provincial of his order had him imprisoned for disobedience,

but Matteo was soon freed, and in 1528 Clement VII confirmed the new

order of Capuchins- so named because the friars wore the same kind

of cappuccio or cowl that Francis had worn. They dressed in the

coarsest cloth, lived on bread, vegetables, fruit, and water, kept

rigorous fasts, dwelt in narrow cells in poor cottages, never

journeyed except on foot, and went barefoot throughout the year.

They distinguished themselves by their selfless care of the infected

in the plague of 1528-29. Their devotion was a factor in keeping

Vittoria Colonna and other incipient Protestants loyal to a Church

that could still produce such ardent Christians.

The most interesting figure in this epoch of monastic reform was a

frail and masterful abbess of Spain. Teresa de Cepeda was the daughter

of a Castilian knight of Avila, a man proud of his puritan rectitude

and his loyalty to the Church; each night he read to his family from

the lives of the saints. `063817 The mother, a chronic invalid,

brightened her weary days with chivalric romances, and shared, from

her sickbed, the adventures of Amadis of Gaul. Teresa's childhood

imagination vacillated between romantic love and saintly martyrdom. At

ten she vowed to become a nun. But, four years later, she blossomed

suddenly into a beautiful young woman, bounding with the joy of

life, and forgetting the garb of the cloister in the colorful

dresses that doubled her charms. Admirers came; she fell tremulously

in love with one of them, and was invited to a tryst. At the crucial

moment she took fright, and confessed the dire plot to her father.

As the mother was now dead, Don Alonzo de Cepeda placed the

impressionable girl with the Augustinian nuns at Avila.

Teresa resented the solemn life and discipline of the convent. She

refused to take the vows of a nun, but looked forward impatiently to

her sixteenth birthday, when she would be permitted to leave. But as

this goal approached she fell dangerously ill, and almost died. She

recovered, but her youthful joyousness was gone. Apparently she had

developed a form of hystero-epilepsy, perhaps from suppressed

rebellion against constraints alien to her instincts. Attacks

recurred, leaving her exhausted. Her father removed her from the

convent, and sent her to live with her half-sister in the country.

On the way an uncle gave her a volume of St. Jerome. Those vivid

letters described the terrors of hell, and the flirtations of the

sexes as the crowded avenue to eternal damnation. Teresa read

anxiously. After another severe attack she abandoned all thought of

worldly happiness, and resolved to fulfill her childhood vow. She

returned to Avila, and entered the Carmelite Convent of the

Incarnation (1534).

For a while she was happy in the soothing routine of Masses,

prayers, and cleansing confessions; and when she took the sacrament

she felt the bread as veritably Christ on her tongue and in her blood.

But she was disturbed by the lax discipline of the convent. The nuns

had not cells but comfortable rooms; they ate well despite weekly

fasts; they adorned their persons with necklaces, bracelets, and

rings; they received visitors in the parlor, and enjoyed extended

vacations outside the convent walls. Teresa felt that these conditions

did not protect her sufficiently from the temptations and imaginations

of the flesh. Perhaps because of these, and her growing discontent,

her attacks became more frequent and painful. Again her father sent

her to her sister, and again, en route, her uncle gave her a religious

book, The Third Abecedarium of Francisco de Osuna. It was an A B C

of mystical prayer, prayer without words; for, said the author,

"only those who approach God in silence can be heard and will be given

an answer." `063818 In her rural retreat Teresa practiced this silent,

meditative prayer, which suited so well the trancelike state induced

by her attacks.

An herb doctor tried to cure her, but his concoctions almost

killed her. When she returned to the cloister at Avila (1537) she

was near death, and longed for it. The most violent of her seizures

came now; she fell into a coma that was mistaken for death; for two

days she lay cold and motionless, apparently without breath; the

nuns dug a grave for her. She recovered, but remained so weak that she

could digest no solid food, and could bear no touch. For eight

months she lay in the convent infirmary in almost total paralysis. Her

condition slowly improved to partial paralysis, but "the times when

I was not harassed by severe pains were rare indeed." `063819 She

renounced medical treatments, and resolved to rely entirely on prayer.

For three years she suffered and prayed. Then suddenly, one morning in

1540, the bedridden, seemingly incurable invalid awoke to find her

limbs no longer paralyzed. She rose and walked. Day by day she

joined more actively in the conventual regimen. Her recovery was

acclaimed as a miracle, and she believed it so. Perhaps prayer had

soothed a nervous system overwrought with conflicting desires, a sense

of sin, and a fear of hell; and the quieted nerves, and the absence of

doctors, gave her body unwonted peace.

The Incarnation Convent became famous as the scene of a miraculous

cure. People came from surrounding towns to see the nun whom God had

healed; they left money and gifts for the holy house; the mother

superior encouraged these visits, and bade Teresa show herself when

visitors came. Teresa was troubled to find that she took pleasure in

these visits, this fame, and the presence of handsome men. A sense

of sin returned to her. One day (1542), as she conversed in the parlor

with a man who especially attracted her, she thought she saw Christ

standing beside the visitor. She fell into a trance, and had to be

carried to her cell in a cot.

Through the next sixteen years she continued to have such visions.

They became to her more real than life. In 1558, while absorbed in

prayer, she felt her soul moving out of her body and mounting to

heaven, and there seeing and hearing Christ. These visions no longer

exhausted, they refreshed her. She wrote:

-

Often, infirm and wrought upon with dreadful pains before the

ecstasy, the soul emerges from it full of health and admirably

disposed for action... as if God had willed that the body itself,

already obedient to the soul's desires, should share in the soul's

happiness.... The soul after such a favor is animated with a degree of

courage so great that if at that moment its body should be torn to

pieces for the cause of God, it would feel nothing but the liveliest

comfort. `063820

-

On another occasion she thought an "exceedingly beautiful angel"

thrust "a long dart of gold," tipped with fire, "through my heart

several times, so that it reached my very entrails."

-

So real was the pain that I was forced to moan aloud, yet it was

so surpassingly sweet that I would not wish to be delivered from it.

No delight of life can give more content. As the angel withdrew the

dart, he left me all burning with a great love of God. *06072 `063821

-

This and other passages in the writings of St. Teresa lend

themselves readily to psychoanalytic interpretations, but no one can

doubt the high sincerity of the saint. Like Ignatius, she was

convinced that she saw God, and that the most recondite problems

were made clear to her in these visions.

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Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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