CRISTO RAUL.ORG

READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

CHAPTER XXV

Gian Matteo Giberti.—The Somaschi and the Barnabites.

The comprehensive reform of the secular and regular clergy as demanded by Carafa for Venice in his memorial of 1532, had already been begun since 1528 in the diocese of Verona by a member of the Oratory of the Divine Love. The man from whom, in this case, came the impetus towards improvement was one of Carafa’s most sincere friends, and at the same time deep in the confidence of Clement VII, Gian Matteo Giberti.

He was born at Palermo in 1495, the illegitimate son of a Genoese admiral, and while yet a youth of eighteen became a secretary to Cardinal Medici, greatly against his wish, for, being of a pious disposition and fond of retirement, he had longed to enter some religious order. He submitted, however, to his father’s wishes. As secretary to the Cardinal, Giberti showed such devotion to his work that he not only won the entire confidence of his master, but also the special favour of Leo X. As time went on he was initiated into the most important political and ecclesiastical business. In the completion of the offensive alliance of the 8th of May 1521, between the Pope and the Emperor, he took a part of no small importance. Notwithstanding his many political preoccupations, Giberti found time as well for his spiritual and mental development. He was in close relations with many of the humanists of Leonine Rome, who were glad to find a rallying-point in his house; one of his particular friends was Vida, who had also celebrated Giberti’s ordination to the priesthood in a beautiful ode.

After Leo X’s death Giberti continued to be of the household of Cardinal Medici, who sent him on a mission to Henry VIII and Charles V. On his return from Spain he came with Adrian VI to Rome. Even then, although he looked young in years, he seemed to have the wisdom and virtue of the aged; it therefore caused no surprise when Clement appointed him his Datary and at once made use of him as his first minister. Giberti would have preferred the quiet fulfilment of his priestly duties to his novel position, which, although highly influential, was also an agitating one. But he did not possess enough determination to say “No” with firmness; his loyalty to his master turned the scale against himself. For the same reason, from having been in the highest degree friendly to the Emperor, he became one of the most ardent champions of the League of Cognac. In these years of unresting political activity at Rome, as well as on foreign embassies, he displayed astonishing capacity for work; but the excessive strain sowed the seeds of great irritability. As Datary his conduct was irreproachable; in other respects also he gave evidence of a sterling character in close sympathy with the noblest personages of his time, among others with Vittoria Colonna. The Pope was justified in placing full confidence in him.

In August 1524 Clement had already bestowed upon him, to his great reluctance, the bishopric of Verona. He would now gladly have broken with Rome, and devoted, himself to the administration of his neglected see; but the Pope held back his trusted servant. Giberti from Rome did all he could to regenerate morally and intellectually the regular and secular clergy of Verona, a work in which Clement gave him ready support. He also took an active share in the efforts at reform during the opening years of this pontificate, as well as being the animating spirit of all that was good in Rome. With Carafa he was on terms of closest intimacy, and rendered him most important services in connection with the founding of the Theatine Order. His greatest delight was to pass his time in their pious circle and that of the Oratory of the Divine Love, regretting that there was so little of it to spare from the hard claims of his political engagements.

Notwithstanding his increasing distaste for political life, Giberti persevered in his loyal devotion to the Pope; with him he passed through the calamitous years 1526 and 1527 in Rome, and shared the captivity in St. Angelo. Thence he went as a hostage to the Imperialist camp, where he was placed in chains and narrowly escaped execution. During those terrible days the old unquenched longing for a life of tranquil occupation in sacred things revived with increased energy. He now reproached himself bitterly for not having listened earlier to the voice of God calling him to carry out his duties as a bishop resident amid his people. From his captivity, he begged Carafa, on the 15th of November 1527, to go to Verona in his stead and reform that diocese; at the same time he expressed the hope that his misfortunes might open a way for that which had so long been the object of his desire—to withdraw from political life and give himself up entirely to his ecclesiastical work. “Willingly will I carry these fetters,” he added, “if they should become the occasion for freeing myself from other bonds which I have found not less heavy to bear.”

Giberti succeeded in escaping from his persecutors, and at Orvieto informed the Pope of his resolve to withdraw to his diocese; Clement tried in vain to keep him at his side. On the 7th of January 1528 he had already reached Venice. One of the first whom he visited was Carafa, with whom he was in full agreement on the points of Church reform, the better preparation and closer examination of the clergy, and the radical restoration of discipline in the religious orders. If Carafa had been formerly his counsellor in spiritual matters, so was he also now when the arduous work was about to begin of transforming a diocese given over to the secular spirit into an example of what a reformed bishopric should be.

What he did in this respect is best understood from a description of the state of things he had to encounter on entering his see. Many of the clergy were non-resident, leaving the cure of souls to hirelings who, for the most part, were persons of demoralized habits. The ignorance of many of them was so great that Giberti had to order the rubrics of the Missal to be translated into Italian for the sake of those who knew no Latin. Preaching in many places had been given up altogether. The confessional was treated with laxity, and the churches were so neglected that they looked like stables. There was a corresponding disorder in the lives of the people, who had sunk into the worst vices.

Giberti entered on the difficult task of reform with great courage, but with even greater wisdom and calmness. First and foremost he relied on the influence of his personal example. In accordance with the bad custom of his times, even Giberti had gone further than was right in the accumulation of benefices; now he resigned all those to which a cure of souls was attached. The incomes of the rest, which he conscientiously believed himself entitled to retain, he spent only on worthy objects. But in other respects also he underwent a great change of character. The geniality, which no burdens of statecraft could destroy, disappeared, and he embraced the strict asceticism for which he became famous.[His day was divided between prayer and work, and his table was one of the most frugal. In the performance of his ecclesiastical functions he set the best example. Unwearied in giving audience, he first gave access to the poor, then to country-folk, and lastly to the citizens of Verona. Naturally prone to impulsiveness, he listened with the utmost patience to everything brought before him; in deed and word he was at every man’s disposal.

In his diocese he at once started on trenchant reforms in which he displayed the practical sense acquired during long years of experience of affairs. How much depended on the presence of a resident bishop was now made apparent. Formerly he had made attempts at reform through his representatives, but in an inadequate way; now, under his own eye, a different state of things was set in motion. In November 1528 it was already reported from Verona: “The priests in this diocese are marked men; all are examined; the unworthy or unsuitable suspended or removed from their offices; the gaols are full of concubinarii; sermons for the people are preached incessantly; study is encouraged; the bishop, by his life, sets the best example.”

In January 1529 Giberti undertook the visitation of his diocese. He wished in this way to carry into practical effect his numerous ordinances, and devoted the closest attention to the visitation, which was partly conducted in person and partly by delegates. With a small retinue he went from village to village undeterred by any obstacle, so great was his holy zeal; on one occasion he was nearly drowned in a flooded stream. When he reached a parish he chose in preference the worst quarters for the night, and went into a minute examination of the conduct of the clergy, the condition of the churches, and the lives of the common people. In a volume specially set apart for this purpose he noted down the actual facts of each case. That his information might not be one-sided, he also heard laymen and gave them practical encouragement in their troubles. In order to bring long-standing enmities to an end, this man of refined culture did not shrink from seeking out the rudest peasants and exhorting them on his knees to be reconciled to one another. He had a wonderful way of combining gentleness with strength. In cases of gravity he was inexorable in using excommunication and public penances. With his clergy he was urgent in insisting on .the exact observance of the duty of residence and the maintenance of irreproachable conduct. Whoever failed in these respects was dismissed without regard to the patron, even if he were a bishop. At first Giberti refused to allow any female, not even a sister, to be the inmate of a priest’s house; but at a later date somewhat relaxed on this point, and permitted women of whose integrity he was personally convinced to act as housekeepers. In order to put a stop to the tenure of a plurality of benefices with cure of souls attached, he caused all dispensations, hitherto given in such cases by Rome, to be revoked. The execution of the visitation orders was to be carefully watched over by his vicarii foranei; in addition to which the parish priest or preacher was to send him reports.

In order to ensure a regular and continuous discharge of the cure of souls, Giberti took particular pains to restore the former dignity of the office of parish priest. He therefore forbade stringently any encroachment on their rights by the religious orders, and insisted on parishioners attending on Sundays and festivals the parish priest’s Mass, while the latter was not to be celebrated in the other churches. The erection of new chapels and the saying of Mass in private houses he tried to limit as much as possible.

The worship of the parish church was to be conducted with the utmost possible solemnity and dignity; therefore the closest observance of the ritual and due reverence on the part of the celebrant were strictly enjoined. Giberti’s exactitude in these respects is shown by his reprimanding such an apparently insignificant offence as a priest laying his biretta on the altar. But of greater importance to him than any externals were inward piety and purity of heart. He therefore enjoined on all priests weekly confession. He sought to ensure a faultless administration of the sacraments by numerous instructions, some of which went into minute details. The reservation of the Holy Eucharist In a locked tabernacle on the high altar, and the ringing of the bell at the elevation seem to have been introduced first by him. He also sought to promote the adoration of the most Holy Sacrament by means of confraternities. He subjected confessors to the strictest discipline, and by the suspension of all who were unfit and by repeated examina­tions he cleansed their ranks inexorably. Here also he was not indifferent to externals; confessors were always to exercise their office wearing cotta and stole and seated as judges, not standing, as often happened when the penitents were persons of high station. It is not improbable that the confessionals of the shape now generally in use originated with Giberti.

Parish priests were also exhorted to administer con­scientiously the revenues of their churches, and to keep a watchful eye over the schools, hospitals, associations and confraternities, the poor, the widows and orphans; but especially he bade them lay to heart the need of a fruitful ministry of preaching. This was well timed in view of the danger of Lutheran teaching being introduced, against which Giberti had already issued a strong edict on the 10th of April 1530: In every parish church throughout the year on Sundays and festivals the Gospel of Christ was to be preached to the people in “love and simplicity of heart, without superfluous quotations from poets or the discussion of theological subtleties.” Without the permission of the bishop, preaching was not to be allowed preachers from without were enjoined to consult the parish priest as to the special requirements of the congregation. Giberti tried to secure the best preachers in Italy for the cathedral and conventual churches of Verona. He often despatched them into country places where the priests were frequently not competent to preach; he also instituted instructions for children on Sunday afternoons. Even the peasants gathered round the church doors before the beginning of divine service were not forgotten by this zealous bishop; an acolyte was to be sent out to them to read aloud from some sacred book.

Together with the reform of the secular clergy went that of the Orders. There were certainly still some monasteries of excellent character, but in many others corruption had reached an unbearable pitch. Giberti entered on the campaign with spirit.1 Clement VII. gave him special powers with regard to the exempt convents of men. All preachers and confessors were put under the same strict regulations as the secular clergy, and visited with the severest punishment in cases of moral delinquency. With great vigour Giberti also set himself against the abuses connected with the system of indulgences, which for the most part was carried on by monks. Through his representations to the Holy See it was settled that in future no questor was to collect alms in the diocese of Verona without Giberti’s permission, and all powers to the contrary, even if they originated with the Pope himself, were to be declared null. In the autumn of 1528 Giberti had already begun the visitation of the convents of nuns. He often made his appearance at an entirely unexpected hour. He collected detailed information on all points. Some convents he closed; others he improved by the introduction of good elements; in all he took care, as a matter of the first importance, to have good confessors. In some convents of women where the corruption was deep-seated, and where rich and powerful relatives were mixed together, Giberti met with incredible difficulties. He therefore in 1531 had his regulations for the reform of nunneries confirmed by the Doge. In these convents he even forbade the use of the organ and artistic choir singing. The severest precautionary rules were drawn up for the observance of the enclosure and the probation of novices. Here Giberti recurs to the principle of his old friends Gaetano and Carafa: better to have few and good, than many and useless.

Still greater difficulties than those caused by refractory nuns awaited Giberti in his Cathedral Chapter. Here as elsewhere exemptions stood in the way of the execution of his enactments. On this account Clement VII had already given him, in 1525, full jurisdiction over all exempts. As the Canons proved stubborn, the Pope on the 26th of March 1527 removed by express order the Cathedral Chapter from the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Aquileia, and placed them directly under that of the Holy See, naming Giberti, for life, Legatus natus, for the city and diocese of Verona. When Giberti, on the ground of this appointment, installed a provost in 1529, the Canons left the cathedral and held their choir services in S. Elena. Although Rome pronounced in the Bishop’s favour, the Chapter kept up their resistance. Not until January 1530 was Carafa, as mediator, able to bring about an agreement to which Giberti, with great magnanimity, consented. Nevertheless, at a later date there were fresh misunder­standings with the Chapter

On other occasions also serious conflicts arose with the corrupt clergy as well as with the citizens; Carafa, and on one occasion also Gaetano, had to intervene. It went so far that Clement VII thought that Giberti ought to give up his difficult post and return to Rome, but he had no intention of doing so. He certainly obeyed the Pope’s summons to come to him in 1529 and 1532, but he went back to his diocese as soon as it was possible. Even the Cardinalate, in connection with which his name was so often mentioned, had no attraction for him. Patiently and gently he worked at the reform of his clergy, always receiving steady support from Clement.

Giberti never allowed his devoted efforts to relieve the physical and moral wretchedness of his people to relax. The social activity of the Bishop of Verona was an almost unique phenomenon in that age. It formed a beautiful complement to his activity as a Church reformer, although in that capacity he always kept his eyes steadily fixed on the broad ranks of the people. With fatherly love he provided for the accommodation of the sick, poor, and orphaned children, and opened Sunday schools for the lower classes. He founded in Verona a refuge for poor young women in way of temptation, and another for those who had fallen. A sign of the practical sense which was uppermost in all he did was his endeavour to find domestic service or husbands for those who, under such circumstances, had come back to a better life. At the same time he made regulations to check the prevalence of public immorality in the city.

Giberti endeavoured to give an entirely new start to works of public benevolence by reforming the confraternities intended to carry out such purposes, but most of which had become disorganized. On the model of the Monte di Pieta at Verona he caused similar institutions to be set up by the country priests in their parishes. They were not to be used merely as pawn­shops, but also as mutual loan societies which should prevent the peasantry from having recourse to Jewish usurers.

In order to remedy the mendicancy which, in true Italian fashion, had become intolerable in Verona, he founded the Society of Charity, composed of clerical and lay members, and obtained for it from Clement VII all the graces conferred on the “Societas Pauperum” in Rome. The new association, which met every month, was a sort of Society of St. Vincent de Paul for the material and moral elevation of the poor. The members supplied the really deserving with money, provisions, and articles of clothing, procured medical attendance for the sick, furnished dowries for poor girls, dissolved concubinage, undertook legal proceedings for widows and orphans, and made peace between obstinate enemies. Francesco Zini is right in calling this “society of Christian love” the greatest and noblest of all Giberti’s works, surpassing all the rest together in the way that charity surpasses all other virtues. This most benevolent institution, which Giberti first of all raised with such care in Verona, was afterwards spread by him throughout the country. In every parish seven men were chosen to carry out, together with the priest, all works of Christian charity, and at the same time to act as a sort of moral police. The object of such an association, writes Francesco Zini, is “that no man should offend God, no man suffer hunger, no man do injury to his neighbour, no man, above all things, commit sin, no man be deprived of the necessities of life; finally, that enmity and all hatred and anger should be taken away, so that we, as men once did in the first and happiest days of the Church, should all live with one heart and one soul in the fear and praise of God.”

Giberti, in the midst of his strenuous exertions, found his one recreation in the pursuit of knowledge and the society of learned men. Every leisure hour he devoted to study, especially of the Holy Scriptures in the original text and the commentaries of the Fathers; from the primitive sources he wished to become familiar with the discipline of the ancient Church, the ever-present ideal of his efforts at reform. To many of the humanists, scattered abroad by the tempest of the sack of Rome, his see of Verona became an asylum of hospitality. Under his patronage arose an association of men of learning and poets known as the Accademia Gibertina. In the pleasant loggia of the episcopal palace, looking down on the Adige, this company met together within sight of one of the most beautiful of Italian landscapes. But even in this atmosphere Giberti did not forget the question of ecclesiastical reform. He tried to entice the poets from the profane to the religious muse, he urged the philologists to translate and comment on works of religion, notably the Greek Fathers. For this purpose he set up in his house a private printing press in which Greek types were specially prepared. The humanist Tullio Crispolai, a member of the Oratory of the Divine Love, prepared, at his instance, a small Catechism and a Manual for Preachers.

The example thus set was not lost on other bishops. To confine oneself to the reign of Clement and his personal encouragement, among the foremost may be named Cardinal Bernhard Cles in Trent, Cardinal Cornaro in Brescia, Pietro Lippomano in Bergamo, Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga in Mantua, Cardinal Ridolfi in Vicenza, Aleander in Brindisi, Vincenzo Carafa in Naples, Vida in Alba, Federigo Fregoso in Salerno and Gubbio, Girolamo Arsagi in Nice, Sadoleto at Carpentras, Ludovico Canossa at Bayeux, who were all followers of Giberti’s reforming zeal. Each of these prelates had a high sense of his official responsibility; some of their ordinances, for example the visitations conducted by Cardinal Gonzaga in his diocese, point unmistakably to the influence of the Bishop of Verona.

That this change in the character of the episcopate was due in great part to Carafa’s untiring energy is substantiated by not a few witnesses, and his influence was often direct.

There was, at the same time, a slow but gradual revival of synodal life in Italy. Clement VII while yet a Cardinal had organized a Provincial Council at Florence in accordance with the regulations of the Lateran Council. Cardinal Farnese, supported by his excellent Vicar-General, Bartolommeo Guidiccioni, after beginning in 1516 to lay the foundations of reform in his diocese of Parma by visitations, held in the same city in November 1519 a diocesan synod. Rangoni, in 1522, did the same in Modena, and in the autumn of 1534 Giberti was thus active in Verona. Synods held in Poland, Germany, France, and England showed, under Clement VII, the same interest in Church reform. Amid the general confusion signs of fresh life were stirring at points of the Church’s life the most remote from one another. That this reaction should have found its greatest impetus soonest and most decisively in Italy was due largely to Giberti. His example was a stimulus raising a zealous emulation in an increasing number of bishops; St. Charles Borromeo himself did not disdain to follow in the steps of Giberti, and the voice of the latter has been embodied in not a few of the decrees of the Council of Trent Verona, although a see of small extent, became a source of super­abundant blessing to the Church at large.

The Catholic reformation set on foot by Giberti was eminently popular in character. It was not devised in a scholar’s study, and thus did not primarily apply to the learned but to the great bulk of the middle and lower classes. Among the latter a point of contact was reached with an undercurrent of religion which, even in the worst days of the Italian Renaissance, had always been a living force.

The distresses of the time—and this was a point of great importance for the carrying through of Catholic reform—played their own part in giving a stronger impetus to this movement. The horsemen of the Apocalypse, war, famine, and death, depicted at the close of the fifteenth century by Dürer as portents of things coming on the earth, made the circuit of Italy with their accompanying horrors. Like a hurricane let loose the furies of war harried the land, devastating dwellings and fields and driving men before them. The garden of Europe was changed at last into a field of slaughter covered with dead, and soon to become a hotbed of pestilence. The frightful events they saw, the sufferings they underwent, roused the population to a pitch of excitement which was not diminished by the constant predictions of hermits and solitaries.

An exceptionally deep impression was made by the crowning catastrophe of the sack of Rome, by which the leading members of the Oratory of the Divine Love were driven from the city to upper Italy, where a fresh sphere of fruitful activity was opened to them. The moral effect of this disaster was greater even than the material loss.

Throughout all Italy, and in all other countries of Europe as well, the sound of lamentation arose over the ruin of a city which, from century to century, had exercised a matchless witchery over the minds of men. Unheard-of atrocity and infamy, murder, violence, robbery, plunder, fire and sacrilege of the worst kind had visited Rome the eternal, and turned the scene of a brilliant civilization, the centre of the literary and artistic Renaissance, the seat of the supreme government of the Church, into a waste place over which hovered the breath of pestilence. As in the days of St. Jerome so now many a writer bewailed in prose and verse the downfall of the lordly city. In a letter to Sadoleto, Erasmus expressed himself in the words: “It is not the city, but the world that has gone to ruin.” Here spoke the humanist. The sack marked, in fact, the end of the Renaissance, the end of the Rome of Julius II and Leo X.

A world had disappeared, a new one had to arise in its place. The connection between the Papacy and the Renaissance on its pagan side was doomed to be dissolved in time, and the catastrophe which brought their union to such a pitiful end introduced the subsequent great sobering of human society and prepared the way for the Catholic reformation. This terrible event became one of the great land­marks not merely of literary and artistic but also of religious history. Generally, among heretical Germans as well as orthodox Spaniards and easy-living Italians, the horrors of the sack of Rome were looked upon as a just judgment of God on the deep depravity of the chief city of Christendom, a frightful retribution for the evil example given to the world by many prelates and not a few Popes during the age of the Renaissance. In Italy this was the view taken not merely by the educated, but by the masses of the

The knowledge that God had punished with fire and sword the iniquity that cried to heaven from the Eternal City brought many to examine their own hearts. Even so ardent a disciple of the culture of the Renaissance as Pierio Valeriano had now to admit that they had had no firm principles of life to offer, and that a revolution in morals had become a necessity. In the school of suffering men were beginning to learn better and purer things. As once amid the storms which accompanied the downfall of the Roman Empire, so now many men of noble birth took refuge in solitude and penance. All the better elements in the Church recognized the guilt in which all more or less were implicated. This self-knowledge was bound by degrees to bring on a reaction. No less a person than Sadoleto saw therefore, with prophetic vision, in the misery of the present the gleams of a new dawn, the coming purification of the souls of men. “If,” he wrote to the Pope, “the wrath and might of God have been satisfied by our calamities, if this fearful punishment should open a way once more for a better morality and better laws, then perhaps our misfortune has not been the greatest that could befall us. What is God’s own, God can take care of; but we have before us a life of renewal that no power of the sword can wrest from us; only let us so direct our acts and thoughts as to seek the true glory of the priesthood, and our own true greatness and strength in God.”

Clement VII and many Cardinals and prelates with him had indeed, in their hour of calamity, entered into their own hearts. But the former, a Medici to the core, was brought back only too soon into the labyrinth of politics; many prelates also led lives as before, but an entire restoration of the previous state of things was impossible. With Clement’s successor came the immediate perception of the task imposed on the Papacy for a century to come by the apostasy of the North. The speech delivered by Bishop Stafileo on the reassembling of the Rota on the 15th of May 1528 is a remarkable proof of the serious change in many members of the Curia as well. After a description of all that Rome had undergone through plunder, pestilence, and famine, the Bishop put the question why the capital of the world had been so sorely visited. He answered with a frank confession of sin recalling that of Adrian VI: “Because all flesh has become corrupt, because we are not citizens of the holy city of Rome, but of Babylon, the city of corruption.” Stafileo did not shrink from applying to Rome the apocalyptic image of the woman of Babylon. From the terrible catastrophe whereby the Lord had driven the buyers and sellers from His temple he drew for himself and his colleagues the lesson that they should now amend themselves and administer justice incorruptibly. “We have all sinned grievously,” he exclaimed; “ let us reform, turn to the Lord, and He will have pity upon us.”

The sack had, like a storm, cleared the air of Rome and left ineffaceable traces behind. The city had suffered too much ever again to become the brilliant, deeply corrupt Rome of Leo X. The indiscriminate enthusiasm for classical antiquity, the life of splendour and festivity with its moral decay, which the great masters of art with difficulty concealed, all the joyous spirit of the Renaissance, had gone for ever. The feast of Pasquino, once neglected but restored in 1525, became a failure; the frolics of the Carnival fell flat. Instead of the half-pagan masquerades on feast­days religious processions were now seen in the streets, and the voices of preachers of penance had more attraction for the Romans than the compositions of poets and musicians.

The destruction had, indeed, been so great, so much that was good had been swept away with the bad, that Rome at first was but a barren field for such religious efforts. The Oratory of the Divine Love, indeed, renewed its life, but Carafa’s attempt to bring about a fresh settlement of the Theatines did not succeed.

The horrors of war were not confined to the Papal States. Lombardy in particular suffered hardly less, on the whole, than Rome; war, hunger, plague, and the Spanish methods of extortion drove the inhabitants to despair. The most productive portions of the country resembled a desert infested by prowling wolves; by 1528 the famine was so great that the peasants looked on the flesh of dogs, cats, and mice as dainties. These half-famished wretches fled to Venice in such numbers that there also there was a heavy rise in prices. Among those who were foremost in their heroic efforts of charity to aid the prevailing misery, the Venetian noble Girolamo Miani was conspicuous.

Born in 1481, Miani had devoted himself to military service and had lived entirely for the world. In the war of the Republic with Maximilian I he was taken prisoner, but had a wonderful deliverance and in consequence became converted. By penitential exercises and works of charity he sought to atone for his former life; his favourite prayer was, “Most sweet Jesus, be not my judge but my redeemer.” In 1518 he entered the priesthood and thenceforward lived only for good works, closely attached to Carafa and directed by him. His labours in the famine and plague year of 1528 aroused the admiration of all; he sold the whole of the furniture of his house to help the needy; at night he buried the dead, their bodies, on account of the great mortality, often being left lying on the streets. An attack of typhus, contracted during his self-sacrificing work, raised him to still higher stages of perfection. On his recovery he renounced, in February 1531, all his means of living in order to devote himself as a mendicant to the service of the poor. He was specially moved to compassion by the troops of orphan children wandering about in utter destitution. He collected them in a house near San Rocco, where they were simply provided for, received religious instruction, and were trained in some handicraft, a point which he thought of great importance. In order that the children might not in tender years become accustomed to ways of idleness and beggary, he repeated to them constantly, “The man who will not work, shall not eat.” The Venetian Government supported his philanthropic efforts, in which Miani was helped by a settler from Vicenza.

Orphanages were also founded on the same footing by Miani in Brescia and Bergamo; in the latter town he also instituted a house of refuge for the fallen. He soon included in his programme instruction for the country people, and gathered round him a number of excellent priests and also devout laymen Thus a religious association was formed occupied in the first instance with the management of the orphan asylums founded by Miani, but with the special care besides of other victims of misfortune, the sick, the poor, the ignorant. From their place of meeting, the lonely village of Somasca, near Bergamo, the members got their name of Somaschi.

Miani had always followed Carafa as his spiritual guide; if the latter declined the honour of being at the head of this new association of Clerks Regular, he was yet their intellectual founder. So impartially did the founder of the Theatines watch the growth of the community of Somasca that he never attempted to win over Miani to his own congregation. As soon as he recognized Miani’s special characteristics he handed over to him even the orphan schools hitherto conducted by the Theatines in the Hospital for Incurables in Venice.

It was also due to Carafa that Miani extended his work into the Milanese territory. For the mitigation of bodily and spiritual suffering hardly any field was more suitable at that time than that district, ravaged as it had been by unspeakable inroads of war, hunger, and plague. In Milan, as in Venice, many were converted by the troubles of the time. What had seldom happened before, the sons of distinguished families now gave up riches and honours in order to follow Christ as His poor. Preachers called on the people to repent; among them one especially distinguished himself, the Spanish Dominican, Tommaso Nieto. In the year 1529 he intro­duced a solemn procession of the Blessed Sacrament, when the Host was carried in a sort of ark borne by four priests.

More hidden and more permanent work in Milan was carried out by Antonio Maria Zaccaria, a nobleman of Cremona, whose character strongly resembled that of Gaetano di Tiene. Zaccaria, who was born in 1502 and was at first a doctor, turned in his twenty-sixth year to the study of theology, and after his ordination as priest he displayed an eager pastoral activity in his native city. At the end of 1530, at the wish of the pious Countess Lodovica Torelli of Guastalla, he went to Milan. There, in the Confraternity of the Eternal Compassion, he made friends with kindred souls in Bartolommeo Ferrari and Jacopo Antonio Morigia, who had already become famous for conspicuous works of charity. These good men believed that the best way of checking the misery and immorality caused by the war was to form a society of Clerks Regular primarily devoted to the in­struction of the young and the cure of souls. After the adhesion of two other Milanese, Jacopo de’ Casei and Francesco Lecchi, Clement VII, in a Brief drawn up at Bologna on the 18th of February 1533, gave permission to Bartolommeo Ferrari and to Antonio Maria Zaccaria to live in community with three other associates in accordance with special statutes, under a superior, but subject to the jurisdiction of their Ordinary, to receive new members, and make their vows before the Archbishop of Milan.2 The new community took possession in autumn 1533 of a small house near S. Caterina, not far from the Porta Ticinese of Milan. This they soon enlarged with the permission of the Duke of Milan.

The constitutions, as drawn up by Zaccaria, who was chosen Superior, have many points of resemblance with those of the Theatines. The manner of living of these “sons of St. Paul,” as they called themselves in their deep veneration for the Apostle of the Gentiles—a name long afterwards changed to that of “Barnabites,” from the seat of the community in the ancient Milanese monastery of St. Barnabas—closely resembled that led by the members of the foundation of Gaetano and Carafa. In the foreground they placed a life of mortification, an eager care for souls, and the visiting of the sick. The chronicler Burigozzo relates the astonishment caused by these priests, who went about their duties in threadbare garments and round biretta, their heads bent and, in spite of their youth, an air of earnestness about them all. Zaccaria instructed his sons to influence especially priests and parents; only in this way could the coming generation be improved. He therefore very soon opened his house to priests desirous of making spiritual exercises and founded a confraternity of married people. The Barnabites differed from the Theatines in seeking publicity. They took pains to stir the feelings of the ruder sort of people by open-air missions and public exercises of penance; they were to be seen, crucifix in hand, preaching in the most crowded thoroughfares ; some carried heavy crosses, others confessed their sins aloud. Complaints were made that they were disturbers of the peace, but as Zaccaria in his full trust in God had foretold, they came through this first persecution completely justified. This community, though slow in growth, became a powerful instrument of which St. Charles Borromeo made use in reforming his diocese.