by Eamon Duffy
Reform was also to survive the election of the aged Cardinal Caraffa as Pope Paul IV (1555–9). Now seventy-nine, Caraffa had singlemindedly devoted his whole life to the reform of the Church. Yet he distrusted most of the other forces at work towards that reform. While Ignatius Loyola was still a theological student in Paris, Caraffa had denounced him as a heretic, and Ignatius ‘trembled in every bone’ when he heard of the Cardinal’s election. He was not the only one. Caraffa’s distrust of his former colleagues among the Spirituali had grown with the years to the point of obsession. At the previous Conclave, which had elected Julius III, Cardinal Pole had repeatedly come within a single vote of election. His chances had been dashed by Caraffa’s hints that Pole was really a Lutheran. Pole was not at the Conclave of 1555, for he had become archbishop of Canterbury and papal legate in England, where the accession of the Catholic Queen Mary had temporarily halted the Reformation. Caraffa undermined the Catholic restoration in England by withdrawing Pole’s legatine authority, and he summoned him back to Rome. Pole ignored this invitation, which was wise, since the Pope was rounding up the rest of the Spirituali, like the much revered Cardinal Morone, imprisoned on suspicion of heresy in 1557.
This terrifying old man set about implementing his version of reform, in an atmosphere of growing fear – it was said that sparks flew from his feet as he strode through the Vatican. He suspended the Council of Trent indefinitely, replacing it with a commission of cardinals, theologians and heads of religious orders, to steer practical reform – a measure reminiscent of the Roman synods of Gregory VII. The activities of the Inquisition were stepped up, and in 1557 he introduced the Roman Index of Prohibited Books. This was a ruthless document, banning anything that was not rigidly Catholic. All Erasmus’ writings were included. Since his grammatical textbooks for schools were a staple of Jesuit education, this measure caused uproar.
No one was safe from suspicion. The impeccably orthodox Cardinal Primate of Spain, Archbishop Caranza, who had helped mastermind Mary Tudor’s reimposition of Catholicism in England, was arrested by the Spanish Inquisition on suspicion of heresy. Paul had him brought to Rome and imprisoned. No issue was too piffling for the Pope’s attention. He even became agitated about the presence of married men in the Sistine choir, a contamination of the purity of the papal chapel. No group was exempt. The Jews of Rome were herded into ghettos, forced to sell their property to Christians, and made to wear yellow headgear; copies of the Talmud were searched out and burned. There was a campaign to imprison prostitutes, and beggars were expelled from Rome.
Paul detested all things Spanish, resenting Spanish control of his native Naples and distrusting Charles V’s religious policies. He never forgave Charles for the Sack of Rome, and he was convinced that the Emperor was not only a tyrant who treated all Italy as his own, but also a heretic and a schismatic who had systematically undermined papal authority. He was outraged by the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which brought peace to Germany by conceding large tracts of the empire to the Lutherans, wherever there was a Lutheran ruler – cuius regio, eius religio. To Caraffa, this was apostasy, and he plunged the papacy into a disastrous war with Spain. Europe watched in disbelief as the Pope made war on the country which was the chief prop of the Catholic Reformation.
He was encouraged in all this by his unscrupulous nephews, Carlo, whom he made cardinal, and Giovanni, whom he made duke of Paliano. It is the supreme irony of Paul’s papacy that he should have placed absolute trust in these nephews, both of whom abused his trust to line their pockets, a fact which everyone in Rome knew about except the Pope. When he finally grasped the true situation, in January 1559, it broke him. He stripped his nephews of all their offices and drove them from the city, but he never recovered his confidence or drive, and within a year he was dead.
Paul IV is a genuinely tragic figure, a man of unflinching courage and integrity, robbed of real greatness by a fatal narrowness of vision, and by his inability to apply to his own family the bleak and unwavering scrutiny he turned on everyone else. He was the most hated Pope of the century, and when he died no one mourned him. Joyful mobs rampaged through the streets of Rome, his statues were toppled and smashed, and the cells of the Inquisition broken open to release the prisoners.
The contrast between Paul III and Paul IV was more than the contrast between a bon viveur and a puritan. The two men embodied two different visions of reform. In Paul III reform was still recognisably part of the surge of positive energies which we call the Renaissance. It was pluralist, made up of many voices, it could accommodate the theological exploration of the Spirituali as well as the austere orthodoxies of Caraffa, and it harnessed daring religious experimentation, such as Loyola’s Jesuits and their new intensely personal spirituality. Under Paul IV reform took on a darker and more fearful character. Creativity was distrusted as dangerous innovation, theological energies were diverted into the suppression of error rather than the exploration of truth. Catholicism was identified with reaction. The contrast was of course not absolute: Paul III encouraged the use of force against heresy, and Paul IV valued the work of the new religious orders. Yet there is no mistaking the establishment in these two pontificates of a dialectic of reform – creativity versus conservation. For the rest of the Tridentine era, Catholic Reformation would move between those poles, and it would be the task of the popes to manage the resulting tensions.
Indeed, the popes themselves were part of the dialectic, for there was no such thing as a ‘typical’ Counter-Reformation pope. Despite the growing seriousness of Roman religion, the Renaissance tradition which runs from Nicholas V through Julius II to Paul III did not die out. Caraffa was succeeded by just such a figure, Giovanni Medici (no relative of the great Florentine family), who took the name Pius IV (1559–65). A Bolognese lawyer, he was the father of three illegitimate children, and his career as a papal servant had taken off when his brother married into Paul Ills family; as pope, he himself was a vigorous benefactor of his many relatives. These, as it happened, included a genius and a saint, his nephew Carlo Borromeo, who at the age of twenty-three became Pius’ right-hand man and a crucial figure in the promotion of the work of Trent. Pius was conventionally religious and an affable, cultivated and able administrator, but, unlike his devout young nephew, no zealot in anything. Unsurprisingly, he had been under a cloud during Caraffa’s papacy, and that fact stood him in good stead during the conclave that followed Paul IV’s death.
He in turn was succeeded by Michele Ghislieri, Pius V (1566–72), a former shepherd who had entered the Dominican order and had served as grand inquisitor under Paul IV. Pius V was an austere saint who wore the coarse clothing of a friar under his papal robes and who lived mainly on vegetable broth and shellfish. Though he had briefly fallen foul of Paul IV for excessive leniency as inquisitor general, he revered Paul’s memory and had to be dissuaded (by Carlo Borromeo) from calling himself Paul V. He revived many of his policies, including Caraffa’s savage use of the Inquisition, his harsh treatment of the Jews, and his suspicion of Spanish religious policy. He also believed as fully as Gregory VII or Boniface VIII in the supreme authority of the papacy over secular rulers, and he excommunicated and deposed Elizabeth I of England, a measure which offended Catholic as well as Protestant rulers, and which achieved nothing except the stepping up of government persecution of the Catholics in England. Roman theologians themselves became increasingly cautious about this aspect of papal claims. In 1590, the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine would encounter papal wrath for arguing that the Pope had only an ‘indirect’ authority over secular rulers.
On Pius V’s death the cardinals once again elected another man of the world, Gregory XIII (1572–85), a former law professor with a bastard son, whom he proceeded to make governor of the Castel Sant’ Angelo. And Gregory in turn was succeeded by Felice Peretti, Sixtus V (1585–90), perhaps the most formidable of all the Counter-Reformation popes. Sixtus, like his patron and model Pius V, was a peasant’s son and a friar – in his case a Franciscan
– who lived in the Vatican as if still in his cell. He loathed his predecessor, Gregory, whom he considered worldly and extravagant, and as pope he frequently disparaged his memory in public.
Sixtus seemed to many to combine the most daunting characteristics of Julius II and Paul IV. Violent-tempered, autocratic and ruthless, he ruled the Papal States with a rod of iron, introducing draconian legislation to deal with street violence in the city and brigandage in the surrounding countryside. It was said that there were more criminals’ heads displayed on spikes along the Ponte Sant’ Angelo in the first year of Sixtus’ reign than there were melons for sale in the markets of Rome. He was equally fierce in his religious policies, encouraging the forces of Catholicism in France, Poland and Savoy to throw the weight of their armies behind the campaign against the Reformation, and offering to help finance the Spanish Armada against England. He instituted a moral purge in Rome, executing religious who broke their vows of chastity, and he attempted to impose the death penalty for adultery (a measure which, not very surprisingly, proved unenforceable). Indeed, many of Sixtus’ reforms may have been less dramatic and effective than his publicity machine led contemporaries then, and historians since, to believe. His campaign against banditry was neither so innovatory nor so successful as he claimed, for it built on initiatives taken by previous popes, including his much despised predecessor Gregory XIII. Banditry would remain an endemic problem in the Papal States until the nineteenth century. However, Sixtus’ conscious manipulation of a propaganda machine, which proclaimed the irresistibility of papal rule and the renovation at his hands of Rome and of the Church, tells us as much about the self-understanding of the Tridentine papacy as any actual successes. He was determined above all that the papal edict plenitude) potestatis should be asserted. He systematically reduced the power of the cardinals, and emphasised papal supremacy by requiring every new bishop, archbishop and patriarch throughout the Church to come to Rome before taking up their appointment, and thereafter to make regular ad limina visits to Rome, to report on the state of their diocese to the Pope.
In all this Sixtus V most resembles ‘austere’ popes like Paul IV and Pius V. Yet he also set about reconstructing the city of Rome on a scale which rivalled the most extravagant of his predecessors. Of all the popes of the century, he came nearest to fulfilling the programme of Nicholas V, to make the external face of Rome mirror the spiritual greatness of the papacy. It was Sixtus who completed the dome on St Peter, a symbol of the overarching authority which he struggled to impose on the Church. The ancient pilgrimage to the seven great basilicas of Rome had been revived by Philip Neri, and had contributed to a renewed sense of Rome as a holy city. Sixtus built on this revived piety by reinstituting the ancient ‘stational liturgy’, in which the Pope during Lent solemnly processed to celebrate the liturgy in a different titular church each day. He constructed a series of great new roads to improve access to the basilicas and to link the city in a star-shaped plan focused on Santa Maria Maggiore, where he constructed a great funeral chapel for himself and Pius V He deliberately reclaimed Rome’s pagan imperial past for the papacy, moving the great obelisk which had originally been in the Circus of Nero into the centre of the Piazza in front of St Peter’s (it took 800 men, forty horses and forty winches to do the job), and crowning the other obelisks and columns of Rome with Christian symbols. And, despite all this expenditure, he left behind him in the Castel Sant’ Angelo a treasure of 5,000,000 ducats, which he bound his successors to leave untouched except for the defence of the Papal States. By the end of the century the population of Rome had risen to 100,000, which might leap by 500,000 in a Jubilee Year. Thirty new streets had been constructed, hundreds of fountains and ornamental gardens fed by the three restored aqueducts had sprung up (most famously Sixtus’ own magnificent ‘Aqua Felice’) and Rome had become the leading city of Europe, and the artistic capital of the world.
Whatever the temperamental contrasts between the popes, the drive to concentrate authority and initiative in the hands of the papacy was a feature of the whole Counter-Reformation period. In many ways this was a surprising outcome. On many issues, the papacy seemed still to many an obstacle in the way of reform, rather than the best agent of reform. The final sessions of the Council of Trent in 1562–3 were stormy because many bishops, led by the Spaniards, wanted strong decrees on the ‘divine right’ of bishops. These were to emphasise that bishops derived their authority and their obligations direct from God, not merely by delegation from the Pope, as the Jesuit theologians at the Council argued. Therefore popes could not give bishops dispensations to live away from their bishoprics (for example in Rome, as cardinals in the Curia). Skilful diplomacy by the papal legates chairing the Council avoided a showdown on this issue, but the Pope had become extremely alarmed at the hostility of many bishops to papal claims, and even set a watch on the legates, in case they wavered. Many bishops were also uneasy about leaving the implementation of the reforms to the Pope, and called for the establishment of some permanent Conciliar body which would see that the Council’s wishes were carried out. Once again, the Jesuits at the Council argued in favour of leaving implementation to the Pope, including the reform of the Curia – but in private they considered that the Pope should be threatened with deposition by the Catholic powers if he failed to deliver.
Nevertheless, it was the papacy which in fact inherited the task of reform. When the Council of Trent finally ended in 1563 many of its reforms were incomplete, and all needed implementation. It was left to Pius IV and especially Pius V to confirm the decrees of the Council, to publish the revised Index of Prohibited Books (1564), to revise and reform the missal (1570), the breviary (1568) and other service books, to produce a catechism (1566) which would interpret the Council’s work to the parish clergy, and to promote the foundation and proper staffing of seminaries.
The enhanced role of the papacy was in part the result of the collapse or abdication of other traditional agents of religious reform. Since large parts of Europe had become Protestant, the old reliance on Catholic rulers to care for (and to some extent finance) the work of the Church could no longer be taken for granted. It fell to the popes to organise and promote the missionary drive to recover the lost populations of Europe. Rome became, what it had never before been, the working headquarters of the most vital movements for reform and renewal in the Church. Papal seminaries like the Germanicum poured out new-style priests to reconvert Europe. Gregory XIII was particularly active here, establishing the Gregorian University (1572), transforming the English pilgrim hospice into a seminary (1579) which sent a stream of missionaries – and martyrs – to Elizabethan England, and establishing Greek, Maronite, Armenian and Hungarian colleges. The clergy produced by these colleges became fundamental to the recovery of Catholicism in Europe and beyond, and wherever they went they carried with them a renewed sense of Romanitas, and loyalty to the Pope.
Most of these establishments were staffed by Jesuits, and new religious orders and congregations, like the Jesuits or the Oratorians, added to the prestige and centrality of the papacy by the simple fact that their headquarters were established in Rome, under the eye of the popes. In the later sixteenth century Rome became a beacon for a renewed Catholicism, a status symbolised in the rebuilding of its churches and streets, crammed with lavish imagery expressing the new dynamic spirit of orthodoxy, loyalty, activity for God. The Jesuit headquarters church, the Gesu, or the Oratorian Chiesa Nuova, still capture the exhilaration and upbeat confidence of this time, and the sense that the city of the popes was once again Roma Sancta, Holy Rome. In 1575 a Jubilee Year was declared, and tens of thousands of pilgrims from all over Europe flooded into Rome to gaze on the renewed city and to imbibe the spirit of the new Catholicism.
Reform of the Curia was a high priority at Trent, as it had been since the outset of the Conciliar movement. In the late sixteenth century it was also a papal priority, as the popes systematically sought to reduce the cardinalate to powerlessness and docility. The me
re increase in numbers of cardinals, and the promotion of poor men among them, went some way to achieving this, as did the routine appointment of a cardinal nephew as private secretary to the Pope. But the decisive move was made by Sixtus V in 1588, when he established the number of cardinals at a maximum of seventy, and divided them into fifteen separate congregations, six with responsibilities for the secular administration of the Papal States, the other nine to deal with various aspects of the papacy’s spiritual concerns – the Inquisition, the Index, the implementation of Trent, the regulation of bishops, matters of ritual and cult, and so on. This delegation to separate congregations was a tidying up and extension of existing arrangements. In itself it made for greater efficiency, but it also marginalised the Consistory, by taking most of its business away from it. It was plain that the cardinals now functioned as the Pope’s agents and servants, and the Pope related to the cardinals in small groups on specific issues, rather than to the concerted might of the College as a body.
Everywhere, pressure was needed to ensure that the reforms were implemented; and that pressure had to come from the popes. To push the secular princes into co-operation, Gregory XIII developed the use of diplomatic agents, the nuncios, as the principal instrument of papal policy in every Catholic state. These papal representatives, usually given the dignity of a titular archbishopric, worked to secure practical reforms, to stir Catholic rulers to fight Protestantism, to establish seminaries, and to urge local hierarchies on to vigorous action. The post of papal legate, once the chief instrument of the reform papacy outside Italy, now became an honorific one bestowed on local grandees: the nuncios became the Pope’s hands, eyes and ears all over Europe. Delegated papal powers now became a powerful tool in the hands of the local Catholic hierarchies. Zealous reforming bishops, such as Cardinal Borromeo in Milan, frequently found themselves resisted in their efforts to cleanse their diocese by recalcitrant religious houses, armed with ancient papal privileges exempting them from episcopal control. Nothing but fresh papal commands could override such exemptions, and the obstacles they had always placed in the way of episcopal inspection and oversight in the localities had long fuelled anti-papal resentments among conscientious men: they were prominent among the grievances against the pope and Curia aired in the early stages of the Council of Trent. In the wake of Trent however, Borromeo and his colleagues were able to call on those same papal powers, using delegated papal authority as legates in their own diocese to trump the older papal grants of exemption, and bulldoze away resistance to reform.