CRISTO RAUL.ORG

READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

CHAPTER XXIV.

The Beginnings of the Catholic Reformation.—The Oratory of the Divine Love.—Gaetano di Tiene and Carafa.

Even in times of deepest depression true reformers have arisen within the Church. In spite of abuses and secularity in high places they have never sought occasion to renounce their loyalty to the divinely appointed authority, but have striven to bring about the necessary ameliorations in lawful ways and in closest adhesion to Catholic dogma and the Holy See. Working in this direction, they have rejected every change incompatible with the permanent and divine institutions of the Church, and with her authority and doctrine.

During the fifteenth century, in every country in Europe, men of high character were pursuing reforms in this spirit on the firm foundations of the Catholic faith. But nowhere were these efforts to secure a completely satisfactory renewal crowned with success. In Spain itself, where Cardinal Ximenes, that powerful and far-seeing Franciscan, was achieving, comparatively speaking, the most remarkable results in Catholic reform, his work was lamentably injured in its permanent effect by the absolutism of the Royal power.

In Italy Egidio Canisio of Viterbo had laid down the programme of the Catholic reformation at the opening of the Lateran Council in words of weighty meaning: “Men must be transformed by religion, not religion by men.” Even if the Council drew up its decrees of reform in agreement with this principle, yet the most important thing of all was wanting: the practical execution of the same. Even the outbreak of the religious severance did not draw Leo X into a different course; consequently the state of the Church became so menacing that many despaired of a remedy. When all seemed lost a change for the better was coming to pass in perfect quietness, and this proceeded from the inner circles of the Church. It was essentially a new expression of the indwelling element of the divine life and an evident witness to the protection promised by Christ to the Church for all time.

While almost the whole official world of the Curia was given up to politics, and the Italian clergy, conspicuous among whom were the Roman prelates, to corruption and frivolity to an alarming degree, while Leo X himself, heedless of the threatening signs of the times, was sunk in aesthetic enjoyment amid the whirl of a gorgeous secular life, a certain number of men, clerics and laymen, noted for virtue and knowledge, had united themselves, under the guidance of the spirit of God, in a confraternity under the protection of St. Jerome bearing the significant name of the Society or Oratory of the Divine Love. Deeply penetrated by the extent of the corruption around them, they started as true reformers with the view that they ought not to indulge in useless lamentations, but begin the much-needed reformation of the whole body with a reform of themselves and their immediate surroundings. From these small and unpretentious beginnings they, in the fulness of their holy enthusiasm, laid the foundations of a citadel for the observance of the means of grace, for the contest against vice and abuses, and for the exercise of works of charity.

The main principle of the members of the Oratory of the Divine Love, to begin with the inward renewal of their own lives through religious exercises, common prayer, and preaching, frequentation of the sacraments and works of neighbourly love, and to point the right way to reform by means of example, was a thoroughly Catholic one; for the Church, in accordance with the will of her Founder, has always considered and set forth inward sanctification as the essential thing. All the members of the Oratory were also united by a strong Catholic feeling. Not one of these men thought even remotely of abandoning the foundations of Church doctrine on account of defects in the clergy, high and low, or of seeking reforms in unlawful ways. Their place of meeting was the little church of SS. Silvestro and Dorothea, which, near to S. Maria in Trastevere, lay in a quarter of the city to which the then existing tradition assigned the dwelling-place of St. Peter; on the adjoining slope of the Janiculum the Prince of the Apostles had, as was then believed, suffered martyrdom. Thus when the members of the confraternity betook themselves to their meetings the loftiest associations of Christian Rome were called up before their eyes.

As the Oratory was founded in 1517 at the latest, it is probable that its institution was an echo of the intensified religious feeling connected with the Lateran Council closed on the 16th of March of that year. This religious feeling had found incomparable expression in the visions of Christian art displayed in the masterpieces of Raphael. What devotion radiates from the forms of the Sixtine Madonna and the Divine Child whom she shows to mankind from her height of glory! It has been said with justice, that the great lustrous eyes with which the infant Christ meets the gaze of the beholder might well urge an unbeliever to confess the faith. The same deep life of faith and grace is mirrored in the Transfiguration. The ancient Umbrian piety speaks here in the more powerful accents of the art of a new age. There is certainly no evidence that Raphael was a member of the Oratory of the Divine Love; but with two of its most distinguished members, Sadoleto and Giberti, he was on terms of friendship and spiritual sympathy. It may be said at least that these, his greatest masterpieces, were executed in the spirit of the Oratory.

The greater elevation of religious feeling in those days found expression also in the foundation of yet other con­fraternities which, together with the encouragement of a Christian tone of life, especially devoted themselves to works of practical charity. In the first rank mention must here be made of the “Confraternita della Carita.” It had been founded in 1519 by no less a man than Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, afterwards Clement VII, for the support of poor persons above the mendicant class, for the visiting of prisoners, and the burial of the destitute. As early as 1520 this association numbered more than eighty members, including bishops, prelates, and officials of the Curia. Leo X, on the 28th of January 1520, raised it to the status of an archconfraternity and bestowed upon it indulgences and spiritual graces. In the first year of his pontificate Clement provided for this, his own institution, by endowing it with the Church of S. Girolamo, in the neighbour­hood of the Farnese palace, and ever since known as “della Carita,” together with the buildings belonging to it The protectorate, which Clement as Pope had to resign, was held by Cardinal Antonio Ciocchi del Monte; he was followed by Enkevoirt (1529), Cupis (1533), Carafa (1537), and Morone (1553). During Clement’s lifetime we find among the deputies of this confraternity, together with lesser officials, the Pope’s Master of the Household, Girolamo da Schio, and the Cardinals Enkevoirt, Quinones, and Ercole Gonzaga.

The Confraternity of S. Girolamo della Carita was, by the autumn of 1524, in such prosperity that Valerio Lugio saw therein the hand of God. “Twelve chaplains,” he reported to Venice, “attend to divine worship in the church; the members are unwearied in visiting the hospital, the poor, the wounded, the sick, the imprisoned; they bestow burial on the dead and perform every imaginable work of charity.”

The members also of the Oratory of Divine Love did not restrict themselves to purely religious exercises. They were not less diligent in offices of neighbourly charity, and there is an express tradition that in the days of Leo X they devoted themselves to the maintenance of the ancient Hospital of S. Giacomo degli Incurabili. Here arose another confraternity in which Leo X, all the Cardinals, and many prelates and courtiers were enrolled. The convent for female penitents on the Corso owed its origin to the Oratory of the Divine Love. Cardinal Medici obtained the sanction of Leo X for this institution, and when Pope continued his support.

The members of the Oratory of the Divine Love, whose numbers rose in course of time to between fifty and sixty, were men differing from one another considerably in culture and social position. Together with those whose interests lay exclusively in ecclesiastical life, such as Giuliano Dati, parish priest of SS. Silvestro and Dorotea, Gaetano di Tiene, Gian Pietro Carafa, Luigi Lippomano, with whom, later on, in the person of Giberti, a politician and diplomatist also became associated, we find several humanists like Sadoleto, Latino Giovenale Manetti, and Tullio Crispoldi. The influence of these latter explains to some extent the curious form of the single contemporary memorial that brings back to day in Rome the memory of the Oratory at S. Dorotea. This is a holy water vessel in stone in the shape of an ancient heathen altar, bearing on the front side the name, title, and arms of Giuliano Dati, who died previous to 1524, The inscription on the right side shows that it was composed by persons who delighted in expressing their thoughts in the language of classical antiquity. Here, if anywhere, is evidence that the employment of phraseology not only classical but even pagan in tone, does not warrant the conclusion that this was the outcome of unchristian sentiment.

It was of great importance that the quiet activity of the Oratory of the Divine Love, the members of which, under Clement VII, also showed care for the poor class of pilgrims to Rome, should have set an example to different cities of Italy, Verona, Vicenza, Brescia, and Venice being among the earliest to imitate the Roman model. These communities were connected with their brethren in Rome. They held to the same genuine Catholic principle that the sanctification of the individual must necessarily precede any attempt to bring a reforming influence to bear on others. How important for the revival of the inner life of the Church was the Oratorian practice of the frequent use of the sacraments of penance and of the altar, long before the days of Jesuit activity had come, is evident from the well-authenticated fact that, prior to this, the number of those who approached the altar more than once a year, namely, at Easter, was very small.

Important and full of blessing as the work of the Oratory and its offshoots proved to be, yet, from their very nature, associations of this kind were debarred from exercising a wider and more penetrating influence. As confraternities they lacked a strict organization. In addition to the constant fluctuation in the number of members, there were the repeated claims, of duties and business of other sorts calling them away from the good work for the sake of which they had united together.

The recognition of these drawbacks led to a plan for the formation of a special order of regular clergy, the so-called Theatines. This Order, which was essentially a product of the Oratory of the Divine Love, soon won a position of exceptional importance in the progress of Catholic reform and restoration. We can thus understand the enthusiastic praise lavished by the historian of the  Theatines on the Oratory of the Divine Love as the cradle of their society. If at first the Oratory was only a hopeful omen of the quiet reaction towards reform working within the Church, its full significance became known at last through the new and powerful organization which owed to it its birth.

To two men of very different character the foundation of the new Order was due ; they were Gaetano di Tiene and Gian Pietro Carafa.

The ancestors of Gaetano di Tiene were nobles of Vicenza who bore the title of Count. Born about 1480, he studied jurisprudence at Padua and came to Rome in 1505, where he was appointed Protonotary-Apostolic by Julius II. Not until he had reached his thirty-sixth year, in the autumn of 1516, did he receive minor and sacred orders. It is evident from the letters of this devout priest to the Augustinian nun Laura Mignani of Brescia that he had hitherto held back from entering the service of the sanctuary from humility and a holy fear of that high voca­tion. Gaetano, who devoted eight hours a day to prayer, dwells in these letters in touching language on his unworthiness to offer up the sacrifice of the Mass wherein he, “a poor worm of earth, mere dust and ashes, passes, as it were, into heaven and the presence of the Blessed Trinity, and dares to touch with his hands the Light of the sun and the Maker of the universe.” Such a priest must have found in the Oratory of the Divine Love the expression of his innermost soul. If Gaetano nevertheless left Rome as early as 1518, it was in obedience to a call of filial duty bidding him return to Vicenza, where his mother had just undergone a heavy loss in the death of a second son. There he worked in the spirit of the Oratory in Rome and urged worthy and repeated reception of the sacraments. In this direction Gaetano’s efforts were specially effective, for he infused fresh life into the Confraternity of S. Girolamo. It was he also who induced this society to take over the administration of a decayed hospital for incurables. On this work of compassion he spent large sums of money, and also obtained for it from Leo X. all the privileges and indulgences belonging to the great Hospital of S. Giacomo in Rome.

In the summer of 1519 a brotherhood at Verona, the Secret Confraternity of the Most Holy Body of Christ, which had also been one of Gaetano’s revivals, addressed a petition to the confraternity at Vicenza to be admitted into fellowship with them in spiritual possessions, prayers, and good works. In his great humility Gaetano inverted the petition and requested admission to the brotherhood in Verona, whither he went, accompanied by the leading members of the community of Vicenza. When it came to the signing of the form of aggregation he made his companions take precedence. His own subscription was as follows: “I, Gaetano di Tiene, wholly unworthy to be a priest of God, have been received as the last among the members of this holy community in July 1519.”

From 1521 to 1523 Gaetano, with the exception of a short visit to Brescia where he saw Laura Mignani, devoted himself to works of spiritual and temporal compassion in the city of Venice. There also he bestowed much attention on the hospital for incurables, and in an astonishingly short time brought it into a better condition. In spite of this success he was not satisfied; the worldliness of life in the city of the lagoons grieved him deeply. From thence on the 1st of January 1523 he wrote to his friend Paolo Giustiniani: “How pitiful is the state of this noble city! One could weep over it. There is indeed not one who seeks Christ crucified. Jesus waits and no one comes. That there are men of good will among this fine people I do not deny. But they will not stand forth ‘for fear of the Jews.’ They are ashamed to be seen at confession or Holy Communion.”

These discouraging conditions probably led to Gaetano’s return to Rome at the end of 1523. There, in the Oratory of the Divine Love, he found Bonifazio da Colle, Paolo Consiglieri, and Gian Pietro Carafa all full of reverence for his own ideals. His intercourse with Carafa especially was to be followed by most important results.

Seldom have two such different characters combined in the pursuit of the same aim as these two men whose activity in the beginning of the great movement of the Catholic reformation was fertile in influence. A waft of sacred poetry breathed through the life of Gaetano, who, like the saint of his deep veneration, Francis, glowed with a mystic love for the poor Child in the manger. Amid all the fire of his religious emotion he was yet a personality of exceeding gentleness and tenderness. Yielding, given to self-communing, silence, and reserve, it was only with great reluctance that he took a public place. He thus gave rise to the remark that he wished to reform the world, but without letting the world know that he was in it. A beautiful saying, and the best description of the peculiar character of a man who was filled with a boundless trust in the providence of God. In long hours of meditation Gaetano prepared for the sacrifice of the Mass. He was often seen to burst into tears at the moment of consecra­tion. Daily, in the sacrament of penance, he clad his soul in the purest wedding garment, and was himself unwearied in the duties of the confessional and in the visitation of the sick and poor.

Carafa also was full of love towards God and his neighbour. His sense of religion was not less deep than that of Gaetano; but in him, the typical southern Italian, it found a very different expression. Brimming over with eloquence, impetuous, glowing with a zeal not always tempered with wisdom, capable of inconsiderate obstinacy and hardness, he flung his whole being into the work that seemed to him to be necessary. The embodiment of strength of will, and driven by an irresistible urgency to work and originate, he formed a striking supplement to Gaetano, the tranquil servant of prayer and meditation.

Carafa’s career was also much more troubled and full of vicissitude than that of his friend. Born on the vigil of the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul (June 28) 1476, this scion of one of the oldest, noblest, and most influential families in the kingdom of Naples wished, while yet in his twelfth year, to enter the Dominican Order, but was prevented by his father, Gian Antonio, Baron of S. Angelo della Scala and, in right of his wife, Vittoria Camponesca, also Count of Montorio. Gian Pietro’s sister Maria, eight years his senior, felt the same vocation for the cloister. On Christ­mas night 1490 they both escaped from their parents’ house. The brother sought out the Dominicans, the sister the nuns of the same Order. Once more the father snatched his son from the cloister; but, on the other hand, he gave him permission to study theology for, as the nephew of an Archbishop and Cardinal, brilliant advancement seemed certain. On completing his studies in 1494 Gian Pietro received the tonsure, and in accordance with his father’s wishes he went to Rome to his uncle, Cardinal Oliviero Carafa. The latter wished at once to procure a bishopric for the lad of eighteen, who conscientiously refused to entertain the notion. Even later (about 1500), when a Papal chamberlain, he only accepted benefices to which the duty of residence was not attached. Entirely given up to study, prayer, and works of charity, he passed through the corrupt court of Alexander VI pure and unspotted. The keen insight of Julius II. soon recognized his worth; by 1503 he had appointed him a Protonotary and in 1504 Bishop of Chieti in the Abruzzi. Carafa accepted this honour unwillingly. From this and from the opposition of the Spanish government to the appointment of an offshoot of a family always inimical to their interests, we can explain why Carafa’s consecration did not take place until 1506. Immediately afterwards he was sent by Julius II. as Nuncio to Naples to welcome Ferdinand the Catholic on his arrival from Barcelona. On this occasion also Carafa had to experience the hardness of the Spanish character. Ferdinand flatly refused to pay the annual tribute on in­vestiture with the kingdom demanded by the Nuncio in the Pope’s name. He rejoiced when, in 1507, his mission came to an end, and at once returned to Chieti to find his diocese in an evil plight.

Carafa as a genuine reformer began to introduce an improvement by his own example and the change of behaviour in his household, in accordance with the motto adopted by him at this time: “For the time is, that judg­ment should begin at the house of God.” In his new position Carafa had often to resist the encroachments of the Spanish officials on his own jurisdiction. But no obstacle turned back this man of iron purpose. In every way, especially by his visitations, he laboured for five toilsome years to raise the standard of the diocese; so intent was he on this work that he did not attend the first four sittings of the Lateran Council. As soon as his diocese was to some extent set in order he went to Rome in the beginning of 1513 where, as a member of the commission for the restoration of peace and the removal of the schism, he soon attracted the attention of Leo X, who in 1513 appointed him Legate to Henry VIII. During his stay in England he came to know Erasmus, on whom he urged the duty of pre­paring an edition of the works of St. Jerome. Erasmus praised Carafa in a letter, speaking with admiration of his dignity, his eloquence, and his knowledge of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and theology. Leo X in 1515 sent him as Nuncio to Spain. On his journey thither he formed a friendship in Flanders at the court of Margaret of Austria with the Dominican, Juan Alvarez de Toledo, an earnest supporter of reform. At first his reception at the court of Ferdinand the Catholic was of the best; the King gave him a place on his Council and made him Vice Grand Chaplain. Carafa tried to make his influence felt in Aragonese affairs, on behalf of the independence of Naples. But all his attempts to move Ferdinand to a renunciation of that kingdom were unsuccessful. He appealed in vain to the conscience of the dying King, reminding him of his broken pledges to Frederick of Naples and his sons. This attitude also reacted on his relations with the new King, Charles. Although Carafa was on the King’s side during the revolt of the Comuneros, he was viewed with dislike at court. He was suspected of disclosing State secrets to the Pope, and one of his colleagues on the Council even taunted him with the words: “If the Neapolitans had their deserts, they would get dry bread and a stout stick”. When, on the appointment of a new Grand Chaplain, Carafa was passed over, he requested leave to retire. Charles V tried to reconcile him by appointing him Archbishop of Brindisi, but Carafa withdrew from the court in bitter displeasure. Henceforth a deep-rooted distrust and dislike of the Hapsburg King of Spain took possession of him.

But in other respects his long residence in Spain had been of great importance to Carafa. While it lasted he had formed friendly relations with the men who were anxious to carry out a scheme of reform on sound Catholic principles and without making a breach in the established order of things. He was in near touch not merely with Cardinal Ximenes but with Adrian of Utrecht and the Neapolitan, Tommaso Gazella di Gaeta. Powerful as the Spanish influences were in this connection, yet they must not be overrated. Like Adrian, Carafa had been a friend of reform long before he had come to know in Spain the fruits of the activity of a Ximenes. In one important point his plan of reform differed from the Spanish programme. He abominated any intru­sion of the secular power into the ecclesiastical sphere, and had, especially, a higher sense of his position as a churchman than the Spanish prelates. What was the amazement of the latter when Carafa once in the Chapel Royal replied to a court official who had asked him to delay beginning Mass until the King arrived : “ Within these sacred walls I represent the person of Christ, and therefore, vested with such an office, would deem it an indignity to await the coming of an earthly king.”

Carafa returned to Rome from Spain by Naples, where he restored the Confraternity of the Bianchi, who ministered to persons lying under sentence of death. When in 1520 he reached Rome, the affair of Luther was being discussed. Leo X made use of him during the deliberations; he also may have had a share in formulating the Bull of Condemnation, otherwise his chief occupation in Rome was the pursuit of works of charity; he was most constantly seen in a hospital for incurables he had founded earlier with the help of Ettore Vernacci, and in the Oratory of the Divine Love. Devoted as he was to the objects of this association, agreeing as they did with the motto of his choice, yet he was soon once more in his dioceses of Brindisi and Chieti, where a great field lay open for his reforming energies. He did not return to Rome until an express summons from Adrian VI. called him back in 1523. He gladly obeyed the request of the Pope, who was determined to give practical shape to his idea of reform. Of the impression made in Rome by Carafa we have some information from a letter of Paolo Giustiniani in which he gives an account of some of the devout men whose acquaintance he had made in the city. Carafa, he says, was a man of learning and humility, and so holy in his manner of life that no one in Rome could be compared with him. How much might have been hoped if such a man had been permitted to co-operate for long with the lofty-minded German Pope in his reforming efforts! But Providence had decreed otherwise. Carafa, in July 1523, had just obtained for Paolo Giustiniani a confirmation and extension of plenary powers for the congregation of the hermits of Camaldoli when Adrian died.

Carafa, with the penetration which was peculiar to him in such matters, perceived that Clement VII, notwithstanding his previous good intentions, could not be expected to follow the course on which his predecessor had entered. For a moment he dwelt on the thought of withdrawing himself into the solitude of the hermits of Camaldoli: fortunately for the Church, the bent of his character towards energetic work had the upper hand. Carafa was not mistaken in supposing that political interests would more and more predominate at the court of Clement VII.

In closest intimacy with the members of the Oratory of the Divine Love, and especially with Gaetano, he drew up new plans. With all their enthusiasm for the Oratory, these two friends were well aware that a mere confraternity offered no guarantee for a comprehensive and permanent renewal throughout the Church. Besides, since all ordinances from higher authority and all Papal decrees of reform were almost a dead letter, the idea was pressed home to them that, by the force of example, the deeply needed improvement might be begun first of all among the ranks of the secular clergy. Thus there ripened in the conversations of Carafa and Gaetano, to which some other friends, such as Bonifazio da Colle of Alessandria and the Roman Paolo Consiglieri had been admitted, the plan of substituting for the Oratory a special foundation with fixed rules and a life in community consisting of regular clerics in immediate dependence on the Holy See. Instead of the old orders which, partly from deterioration, partly from their organization, were no longer adapted to the needs of the times, a new institution, instinct with life, was to arise, the members of which, as simple priests of blameless life and faithfulness to their vocation, were to shed a guiding light of example before the great mass of the secular clergy, numbers of whom were sunk deep in the prevailing corruption. The fundamental idea of the founders was to form a society of devoted priests who should give themselves up entirely to the administration of the sacraments, the work of preaching, and the conduct of ecclesiastical ceremonies so as to set an example before the Church. Of friars there were plenty, and many were disreputable men; the members of the new Order, therefore, were not to bear names, many of which had fallen into wide discredit. At their head there was to be neither prior nor guardian, but simply a superior. Attention was also paid to the form and colour of their clothing; the customary black garment of the ordinary priest seemed the only suitable one for a community with the primary task before it of effecting by example and hard work a thorough reform in the secular clergy, and a return to apostolic standards of life.

While any imitation of the externals of the existing orders was thus avoided, Carafa and his associates were all the more anxious to be true to the inner character of lives devoted to a religious rule. They therefore demanded a secluded community life and the observance of the three vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty. On this last point they went much further than the followers of the poor man of Assisi. The members of the new institution were to practise poverty in its most rigorous form. They were to have no capital, no income; they might not even once ask for alms. Depending calmly on the divine providence, they were to wait for spontaneous gifts and in this way bring back clergy and people to the enthusiasm of the first Christians. A fountain-head of evil in the Church was the immoderate striving after possessions, whereby so many were enticed without vocation into the sanctuary. This grievous abuse was to be torn up by the roots by an association of priests subject to vows, and leading lives of poverty in the fullest sense. This idea had taken possession of two men sprung from families of noble descent, who thus sought to make expiation for the scandals brought on the Church by others in their own station in their pursuit of worldly possessions.

This summons to absolute poverty aroused in the Curia of Clement VII, where most men were absorbed in money and the acquisition of money, general observation and great opposition. If amid the chilling of Christian love the mendicant Orders were hardly able to exist, how could a new order maintain itself by repudiating the appeal to the alms of the faithful? To such objections Gaetano replied in the words of Christ: “Be not solicitous for your life, what you shall eat; nor for your body, what you shall put on.” So fervently did he dwell on God’s providence in the presence of the Pope that the latter exclaimed: “I have not found such faith in Israel.” But difficulties of a more serious kind were not wanting. Gaetano had scruples in allowing Carafa to become a member, as he was already a bishop. Clement VII. on his side saw with reluctance so capable a man, to whom he had given an important function in respect of the reform of the Roman clergy, removed from his service. The Pope also feared the difficulty of finding a substitute for him in the dioceses of Chieti and Brindisi. But the fervent Carafa, supported by his old friends Giberti, Sadoleto, and Schonberg, gave Clement no rest until he yielded and consented to his resignation of the two sees. The decisive Brief, drawn up by Sadoleto, was issued on the 24th of June 1524. It gave permission to Carafa, Gaetano, and their associates, after solemnly taking the three essential vows, to live in community as regular clergy while wearing the garb of the ordinary ecclesiastic. They were to be in immediate subordination to the Pope, to choose a superior holding office for a period not longer than three years, while secular clergy and laymen were to be admitted to the vows after a probation of one year; they, moreover, held all the privileges of the Canons of the Lateran, together with permission to accept benefices with a cure of souls. The special constitutions were not to be presented for acceptance until later, when greater experience of their working had been acquired.

Gaetano now resigned all his benefices and handed over his patrimony to his kinsfolk. “I see Christ in poverty and I am rich,” he wrote on the 24th of August 1524; “He is despised, and I am honoured. I wish to draw one step nearer to Him, and therefore have resolved to renounce all yet remaining to me of this world’s goods.”

Carafa also distributed his property among needy relations and the poor; at the same time he resigned both his sees. This instance of a self-sacrifice unprecedented in that age created a great sensation; to many such a heroic step was simply unintelligible; others indulged in depreciation or ridicule, but Gaetano and Carafa went on their way unheeding. On the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (September 14), 1524, in company with Bonifazio da Colle and Paolo Consiglieri, after receiving Holy Communion they presented, at the tomb of St. Peter, to Bonziano, Bishop of Caserta, as Apostolic Commissary, the Brief by which their institute was recognized as an Order, and then proceeded to take the solemn vows. Carafa was immediately afterwards chosen Superior, retaining, according to the desire of Clement VII, his title as Bishop. The new foundation was in closest communication with the Holy See, and its members, directly subject to the Pope, looked upon St. Peter as their special patron.

The new regulars, who were called Theatines or Chietines from Carafa’s first see, and sometimes Cajetans or Clerks Regular of the Divine Providence, were clad entirely in black; they always wore the cassock, high collar, and white stockings, and their head covering was the clerical biretta. Carafa strictly required them to be clean shaven and wear a large-sized tonsure. They lived, as much as possible, in seclusion; but when they appeared in public their demeanour was full of dignity. They began with a small house in the Strada Leonina, leading to the Campo Marzio, once the property of Bonifazio da Colle. On the 30th of April 1525 the first novice was received; he was the learned priest Bernardino Scotti, afterwards a Cardinal.

Before the close of 1525 Giberti provided the Theatines with a new dwelling on the Pincian, then quite unbuilt upon, where the Villa Medici now stands.[554] There they gave themselves up assiduously to prayer, meditation, the study of Holy Scripture, and the care of souls. Especially were they diligent in preaching, avoiding all profane alloy in their sermons and fervently teaching devotion to the Blessed Virgin and the frequentation of the sacraments. At the same time they aroused violent enmity and vulgar contempt; Carafa in particular suffered in this respect, for he stood high in Clement’s favour and, being the Superior of the community, was a representative personality. The worldly-minded ridiculed the new Order as a collection of laughable eccentrics who were neither monks nor simple clergy, but among the people respect for them increased on account of their mortified lives and their exemplary devotion to the sick and the poor pilgrims during the outbreak of the plague in the Jubilee year of 1525. A deep impression was made by the sight of men of illustrious and noble lineage, to whom all the enjoyments of life might have lain open, choosing of their own accord the strictest poverty and, without fear of infection, visiting the poor and plague-stricken in hospitals and private houses, to tend, cheer, and succour them in the pains of death. It was then that a nun of Ravenna declared that God was now sending His saving help to reform the Church and renew the lives of men.

Whoever led a more interior life, with greater piety and strictness than others, was spoken of as a Theatine. Even among the Roman clergy the earnestness and asceticism of the new Order, whose members, notwithstanding the almost insupportable scarcity, never lacked the necessaries of life, began to produce a wholesome effect. What a change was brought about in Rome by the quiet, plodding labours of the first Theatines is seen from a letter written on the 5th of January 1527 by one of themselves to their friends of like mind in Venice, who had charge of the Hospital for Incurables there. “Christ,” he says, “is now more feared and honoured here than in days past. The proud humble themselves, the good praise God, the wicked are without hope. Let us pray for their conversion, pray for the fathers, and specially for Carafa! God is making use of his own in the Church. Bethink you, the first prelates and lords in Rome, who at first despised us in their pride, now come daily to us with such submission, as if they were our servants, that I am quite ashamed. They show a willing spirit of penitence, prayer, and pious works. They do all that the fathers bid them. And yet more—daily the Holy Father asks for the prayers of us poor wretches.” He then goes on to relate how the great Tommaso Campeggio came one day to Carafa and asked him very humbly to bestow on him the episcopal consecration, which he had hitherto deferred, as he desired henceforward to be a true bishop of the see of Feltre. Although Campeggio was a man of learning, Carafa examined him as if he had been a simple priest. He submitted with touching humility, and might have received all the grades at once, and even have asked for consecration at the hands of the Pope himself; but he preferred to act in obedience to Carafa’s wishes. He fasted with the Theatines, kept the canonical hours along with them, and at each ordination communicated with such humility that all present were put to shame. Giberti too, at that time next to the Pope the most influential man in Rome, visited Carafa daily, and often shared with him his frugal meals. Just then Clement VII showed his attachment to the Theatines by the bestowal of new indulgences. The new community grew day by day in men’s regard, but their labours in support of the hospitals and other benevolent institutions did not diminish in zeal.

Carafa and Gaetano looked to the future in hope and joy. Then came the catastrophe of the sack of Rome; Carafa, Gaetano, and their twelve associates were brutally treated by the soldiers and thrown into prison. They managed, as by a miracle, to escape from the hands of their tormentors. The Venetian envoy, Venier, took compassion upon them in Ostia and was the means of enabling them to make the journey to Venice, which they reached in June. The Confraternity of the Hospital for Incurables, with whom they had always had close ties, procured for them in their entire destitution a refuge at S. Eufemia. Thence they migrated to S. Gregorio, and finally found a suitable community house in the Oratory of S. Nicola da Tolentino.

The Theatines, who had, on the 14th of September 1527, chosen Gaetano as Superior, lived as retired a life in Venice as in Rome, so that they were spoken of as the “hermits.” They continued to urge the frequent use of the sacraments; they were also occupied with raising the observance of divine worship to a higher level of solemnity and with the improvement of the Breviary by the excision of unhistorical narratives. Their pastoral zeal, their heroism amid the famine and plague of 1528, won them an increase of friends, and one of their greatest benefactors was the Doge Andrea Gritti.

It was of the greatest importance for the Theatines that in Venice they came into closer relations with such eminent advocates of Catholic reform as Gasparo Contarini, Reginald Pole, and the regenerator of the Benedictine Order, Gregorio Cortese. The garden of S. Georgio Maggiore, Cortese’s monastery, was the scene of many learned and pious conversations, for which reason Bruccioli chose it as the background for his “Dialogue on Moral Philosophy” Carafa drew up the earliest rules for the Theatines, over whom he was again Superior from 1530 to 1533. The object of these statutes was the formation of a blameless type of priestly character enjoying the utmost possible freedom for the exercise of the different branches of the pastoral office. The several rules were not to bind the members of the Order under sin.

Carafa showed great prudence in his guidance of the Order. When Clement-VII, in February 1533,2 enjoined the erection of an affiliated house in Naples, the Superior raised difficulties, for he feared lest his slender forces should be broken up. The Pope, in entire confidence, left the matter to Carafa’s sole decision. The latter did not make up his mind until August, and then sent two of his best colleagues, Gaetano and Giovanni Marino, to Naples, where the Theatines, supported by Gian Antonio Caracciolo, soon secured a firm footing. Gaetano, who was the Superior in Naples, although in other respects a gentle character, was inflexible in the observance of the strictest poverty, as he showed in his resistance to the Count of Oppido, who wished to press upon the Neapolitan house settled revenues. In order to escape from him Gaetano moved into the Hospital for Incurables. Afterwards he obtained a new house through the good offices of the devout Maria Laurenzia Longa, who was to become the foundress of the Capuchin nuns.

Gaetano was also quite as strict as Carafa in the reception of new members. This and the requirement of complete poverty accounts for their numbers not having exceeded, after nine years, one-and-twenty persons. Consequently the burden of work falling on the individual members became so heavy that Clement VII, in 1529, ordered other forms of prayer to be substituted for the daily office to relieve those who were already over­charged with the duties of study, visiting the sick, and the confessional.

The system of scrupulous selection observed by the founders of the Order had thoroughly justified itself. The great success of the Theatines undoubtedly is to be attributed to no small extent to this characteristic, that here a small, carefully chosen circle of men, deeply schooled in obedience to the Church, formed, as it were, a corps d’élite with which Carafa won his victories. Thus the Theatine Order was not so much a seminary for priests, as at first might have been supposed, as a seminary for bishops who rendered weighty service to the cause of Catholic reform. One of the chief causes of the failure attending the efforts of Adrian VI. was the want of a suitable organism to carry into effect the right measures; such an organism was found in the new Order.

In Rome Carafa had many opponents, especially among the worldly minded Cardinals. It is to the credit of Clement VII that he almost always was on the side of Carafa in his many encounters, and that he fostered the development of the Order by means of extensive privileges. In the presence of the secularized character of the episcopate, Carafa held it to be of the greatest importance that his community should remain in direct dependence on the Holy See. He knew no rest until this vital point was expressly settled by a Brief issued on the 7th of March 1533 which also contained yet other graces and privileges.

Full of rejoicing and encouragement at the Pope’s support the Theatines worked, as Carafa expressed it in writing, day and night. Although often visited with illness Carafa was indefatigable in hearing confessions and preaching; an ardent lover of souls, he sought out the erring, thinking the conversion of sinners the priest’s first task. It is astonishing how he also found time for other occupations as well. From the time when Clement VII, in 1529, had appointed him to bring order into the complicated situation of the Greeks in Venice and to renew a better life in the eremitical settlements in Dalmatia, his activity had gone on increasing; where the question of reform arose he was at once active. He endeavoured to influence the Pope through Giberti, and made representations to him with frankness and courage. In his correspondence he addressed himself not merely to members of religious orders who had gone astray, but to bishops who neglected their duties. “Why do you not preach?” he wrote to one of them, “if you are not able to, you ought not to have taken the bishopric.” In Verona, again at the Pope’s special request, he supported the work of Giberti. In Naples in 1530 his advice was of powerful aid to his sister in her reform of the Dominican convents. In the same year Clement entrusted him with the process against the Lutheran Galateo and with the much-needed reform of the Franciscans of the province of Venice. A more suitable choice seemed impossible, for Carafa was on excellent terms with the Venetian authorities and he praised the Republic as the seat of Italian freedom and the bulwark against the barbarians. In course of time he acquired in Venice a peculiar and important position. He intervened in the politico-ecclesiastical disputes between the Republic and the Pope; in this as in other instances it was to his advantage that the Signoria preferred the services of a man uninfluenced by private interest, who was more than a prelate merely in name and not absorbed in ecclesiastical affairs only, to those of the Nuncio. Carafa’s reputation in the highest circles stood so high that the ambitious Signoria, even in purely political affairs, such as the boundary disputes with Ferdinand I, made use of his and asked him to draw up for them a memorial on the reform of ecclesiastical conditions. Even if his intention to punish heresy before all things met with no response, his position in the Republic was none the less a most influential one.

Carafa was not discouraged when his endeavours to meet heresy in Venice with severity fell through. He now had recourse to Rome, for in October 1532, in an exhaustive memorial to the Pope, he drew a deplorable picture of the religious condition of Venice and with the greatest candour made far-reaching proposals for the removal of abuses. Together with stringent measures against heretics Carafa called most emphatically for a thorough reform of the degenerate Venetian clergy; for he knew well that mere measures of repression would only touch the symptoms of the disease without being able to cut at its root.

Carafa laid down that the sources of heresy were three­fold : bad preaching, bad books, and bad ways of living. What he had already for three or four years been calling the attention of his Holiness to, he once more exposed: a commission, consisting of the Patriarch, the bishops, and some men of approved piety, should be appointed to examine all clergy desirous of preaching and hearing confessions, with regard to their probity and manner of life, their vocation, and the Catholic faith. Those only who were found worthy should be allowed in future to exercise pastoral functions. Henceforth no exceptions should be made to this rule. Carafa, without hesitation, gives a warning against these examinations being left in the hands of the generals of orders. He dismisses as absolutely unworthy of notice the fear that monks suspended from the pulpit and the confessional would become heretics, or that the number of qualified priests would be a small one; better that they should be few but good. How much depends on the preacher requires no illustration. Of still greater importance is the function of the confessor; what Carafa here reports of the abuses that had crept into this institution make his indignation intelligible. There were convents of Conventuals in which friars, who were not even priests, installed themselves in the confessionals in order to filch a couple of soldi. In consequence of the horrible scandals caused by such proceedings, the majority of the Venetian upper classes neglected their Easter confession. In this connection Carafa went on to speak of the monstrous abuse of the vagabond monks, against whom the strongest measures should be taken. The penitentiaries, greedy of fees, must be restrained from the heedless issue of dispensations to leave the cloister. A new Grand Penitentiary1 having just been appointed, now was the exact moment to take steps, and monks who had become secularized should be deprived of all pastoral charges.

Carafa saw a further source of grave abuses in the decay of the episcopate. The great majority of the bishops neglecting the duty of residence, the office of chief shepherd had become an unreality. Ambition led the bishops from court to court, while they relegated their diocesan duties to degenerate monks who called themselves titular or suffragan bishops. These subordinates conferred orders in many instances for money on unworthy and incompetent men, even on boys of sixteen. Hence the contempt for the priesthood and the Holy Mass among the people. In the presence of such scandals, what reply could be made to the heretics who saw in them cause of exultation? So noisome is this state of things, exclaims Carafa, that every place reeks with its foulness. If, in spite of the excellent enactments of 1524, there are still to be found in Rome many who will without conscience bestow holy orders, what measure can one take of the state of things in Venice? All these unprincipled titular bishops should be deprived of ordaining faculties, but those already ordained must be thoroughly examined, and all who are unworthy be suspended.

Carafa ends by speaking once more of the incredible corruption of the religious orders, on whose condition the salvation or the ruin of mankind depends. That Carafa does not exaggerate in his description of the disorders here prevailing is proved by the contemporary reports of the Nunciatures. But deep as the wounds of the Church at large were. Carafa still saw the means of healing if only the Pope would make use of them. Two things, above all, were necessary: in the orders in which abuses prevailed, further decay must be arrested; a free hand must be given to the few good remaining by separating them from the bad. Thus only can a real reform be opened up, as even Eugenius IV. had perceived in his day, and as Spain and Portugal have attempted with good results in more recent times. Although every Order has need of a regenera­tion, yet this is especially the case with the Franciscans ; therefore with them a beginning might be made, and that certainly at once in Venice.