20

Five Popes and a Council

The eighteen years of the Council of Trent, 1545–1563, extended across five pontificates—Paul III, Julius III, Marcellus II, Paul IV, and Pius IV. During those years the council was actually in session a total of only about four, which were divided into three distinct periods, with a ten-year hiatus between the second and the third, 1545–1547, 1551–1552, 1562–1563. Different sets of legates presided over each of the periods. So much time elapsed between the latter two periods and so few participants returned who had been at the first (death and old age had taken their toll) that many people demanded the third declare itself a new council. Other things were happening in Catholicism besides the council. Two crucially important developments for the Catholic Church during this period occurred altogether independently of the council—the founding of the new religious orders and the sending of missionaries to the Spanish and Portuguese overseas dominions. The popes themselves had other concerns besides Trent, with defense against the Turks weighing as much on their minds as did the council.

Contrary to the impression textbooks generally give, the Council of Trent did not try to address all aspects of Catholicism. It almost immediately decided that it had to handle both doctrine and reform, thus satisfying and making anxious both Paul and Charles. On those two broad categories the council adopted a specific and limited focus. Under doctrine the council meant to treat only Protestant teachings that were in conflict with Catholic teachings. Thus Trent made no pronouncements on the Trinity or Incarnation or other Christian truths over which there was no disagreement. In this regard Trent had Luther principally in mind, with some scant attention to Zwingli, the Anabaptists and, only in the third period, Calvin. This focus meant dealing principally with two issues—justification and the sacraments.

Reform had a similarly precise focus. For the bishops at Trent “reform of the clergy and the Christian people,” as the council put it or, as it was more commonly expressed, “the reform of the church,” meant essentially the reform of three precisely defined and traditional offices in the church—the papacy, the episcopacy, and the pastorate. That last office meant those who had the “care of souls,” in the strict canonical sense of pastors of parishes and certain chaplaincies. The focus therefore was on local or diocesan clergy, the clergy under the jurisdiction of bishops, not on members of religious orders like the Dominicans and Franciscans.

As is to be expected from such a long, sprawling, and contentious meeting, these clear boundaries were not always observed, and the council spilled out occasionally into other areas. But it in principle set itself a limited agenda and did not try to deal, for instance, even with such a crucial issue as foreign missions. Moreover, it never quite got to the “reform of the Christian people” except indirectly through its assumption that reform of the clergy was the key to reform of the laity. As a legislative and judicial body, the council was concerned with external behavior and discipline. It was concerned, specifically, to assure that the office holders in the church do their jobs as set down in the canonical tradition.

The glaring abuse of which many bishops and pastors were guilty was absenteeism, bishops not residing in their dioceses and pastors not residing in their parishes. These absentees hired “vicars” to do their jobs for them. The principal reason they were absent was because they held several at a time (which was another glaring abuse) and collected revenues from them all, which gave them a generous income out of which they paid their vicars. Even in the first period, 1545–1547, the council tried to deal with these abuses, but by the third period, led by a few determined bishops from Iberia, it took on a new and uncompromising urgency.

Both of these abuses flagrantly violated canon law. How did they come about? The simple answer is through papal dispensations, which were granted, reformers alleged, as rewards for services rendered or for money exchanged. To reform the episcopacy and the pastorate necessarily entailed, it would seem, reform of the papacy. Reforming the papacy in that specific abuse led into the larger question of how the whole papal operation was financed. By the third period this aspect of reform put the council on a collision course with the pope.

For the first period, however, relations between Paul III and the council went relatively smoothly. The big achievement in this period was the decree on justification, over which the council labored for seven months. Practically everybody who has seriously studied the council without animus has assessed it as the council’s masterpiece. Stung by Luther’s accusation that Catholics were Pelagians who believed that their “works” rather than grace saved them, the council insisted that justification was accomplished always and everywhere under the inspiration of grace. “Good works” were no good for salvation and they could not of themselves win grace unless they were grace-inspired from the very beginning. Nonetheless, the council also insisted, human beings are not mere puppets but genuinely contribute, in some mysterious way, to the process.

When on January 13, 1547, the bishops at the council passed that decree, they felt that the council, already in operation for over a year, had accomplished its essential task and could soon wrap up its business. Things seemed to be going swimmingly even outside the council. Charles had finally gone to war with the Schmalkaldic League and in the early spring defeated it, which presumably meant the end of Lutheranism as an organized military force. He could now insist on Lutheran acceptance of the decrees of the council. At that moment, however, several bishops died at Trent, presumably of typhus, which raised the specter of plague. A few bishops slipped out of the city and headed for home. After contentious debates the remaining bishops voted 39 in favor of transferring the council to Bologna, fourteen against, and five noncommittal. The legates had authorization from Paul III to act in such an emergency.

Without any consultation with the emperor, Paul acquiesced in the transfer—to a city right under his eye in the Papal States. Charles was furious, accused the pope of bad faith and refused to let his bishops, mainly Spanish, leave Trent. Although most of the bishops went to Bologna, the council really could not function without Charles’s support, so that in early 1549 Paul was forced to adjourn it.

The consequences of the move to Bologna were heavy. After it the relations between Charles and Paul, always fragile, continued to deteriorate. Charles, though now victorious over the Lutherans, felt he could no longer insist with them that the council was being held “in German lands” and therefore could not insist they go to it. He lost his momentum. Historians speculate that if the council had remained at Trent the German religious situation might have turned out altogether differently, but such speculations are speculations.

Paul III died the year he suspended the council. To elect his successor a conclave sharply divided between pro-French and pro-imperial factions took two and a half months. During it Reginald Pole failed by one vote to be elected. The successful candidate, Julius III, was Giammaria Del Monte, another legate with Pole at Trent, who was opposed by Charles because he had favored the transferral to Bologna. But the pressure was on both the emperor and pope to work together for the resumption of the council, which Julius successfully reconvened in May 1551.

In this period the council continued its work on the sacraments, begun at Trent and continued at Bologna. Charles, as a result of his victory over Schmalkalden, was able to insist that representatives from several Lutheran states attend, but their presence hindered rather than helped the council’s progress. Meanwhile the new French king, Henry II, who refused to allow his bishops to go to the council, joined his forces to a resurgent Lutheran army and forced Charles to flee from Innsbruck, too near Trent for comfort. On April 28, 1552, Julius had to adjourn the council.

The pope was a typical career ecclesiastic, well-meaning but emotionally detached from the great moral and religious issues of the day. Especially as his pontificate wound down he spent more and more time hunting, banqueting, attending the theater or simply passing his days in quiet luxury in the residence he had built for himself, today the Villa Giulia (which houses the world’s most extensive collection of Etruscan artifacts). His relatives pursued him for favors, to which, despite his denunciation of the nepotism of his predecessors, he could muster only half-hearted resistance. His blind insistence on raising to the cardinalate a shifty street urchin, age fifteen, was the great scandal of his pontificate. After Julius’s death, that cardinal’s crimes caught up with him, and he ended his days in prison.

Nonetheless, Julius tried to be attentive to his duties. He set up a commission of six cardinals to make recommendations for reform of the curia. He was successful in reducing the size of his court and made some progress in curtailing the real and alleged venality of several papal bureaus. By 1555 he had a reform bull ready to issue, but his death prevented him from doing so. Although these measures did not go very far, they served as a basis for more extensive ones later. Julius continued to support Michelangelo as chief architect of Saint Peter’s and defended him against his detractors.

The contentious conclave after Julius’s death, divided again along political lines, allowed the reforming party to push forward its candidate, who in the end received a unanimous vote. Marcello Cervini, another legate to the first period of Trent, kept his baptismal name, which has been immortalized by Palestrina’s Mass of Pope Marcellus. He was a striking contrast with Julius III, whose nepotism and luxury he had denounced in such outright fashion that he had to withdraw from Rome. The new pope, as learned as he was able and upright, set to work the very day after his election by cutting the expenses of his coronation almost to the bone. He gave half the money saved to the poor; the rest went to the depleted papal treasury. To forestall even the slightest suspicion of nepotism from touching him, he made it clear to his many relatives they were not welcome in Rome. One of his nephews, Robert Bellarmine (Roberto Bellarmino), later joined the Jesuits, won renown as a theologian, and was eventually canonized. The high hopes Marcellus’s pontificate raised among reformers were dashed when he died suddenly of a stroke twenty-two days after his election.

At another divided conclave the reformers were once again able to get their candidate elected, Giampietro Carafa, who took the name Paul IV. Though seventy-nine years old, this stern, austere, and autocratic reformer was as vigorous as somebody half his age. He came from a wealthy and highly influential family of Naples. Although he owed his quick rise in rank to his uncle, Cardinal Oliviero Carafa, he was worthy of the trust his uncle placed in him. In the mid-1520s he, as mentioned, cofounded with Saint Cajetan the Theatines, had served on the commission on church reform, and helped head the Roman Inquisition.

It would be difficult to imagine anybody more zealous for the good of the church than Paul IV, but his intransigence and his unmitigated confidence in his own judgment destroyed the possibility of a constructive reign. The religious zeal of his early years had turned into fanaticism by the time he became pope. Ignatius of Loyola was said to tremble in every bone in his body when he heard of Carafa’s election. For the Council of Trent Paul IV had a disdain bordering on contempt—it had accomplished nothing toward reform of the church and its doctrinal decisions, especially on justification, smacked of compromise with the Lutherans. He would undertake the reform of the church singlehandedly.

Paul saw heresy in the slightest deviation from his narrow orthodoxy, which meant he had Cardinal Giovanni Morone, the man who would later save the Council of Trent, put on trial for heresy and imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo. He ordered Cardinal Pole, now archbishop of Canterbury and papal legate to Mary Tudor’s England, back to Rome for the same fate, but Pole delayed and died in the meantime. He infused the Roman Inquisition with a new zealotry. In 1557 and then in a revised edition in 1559 he published the first papal Index of Forbidden Books, so extreme and categorical in its strictures that Saint Peter Canisius, a contemporary who was certainly not soft on heresy, called it intolerable and a scandal. Seeing the Jews as a source of disbelief, he erected for the first time in Rome a ghetto and had them herded into it.

Paul IV was scrupulously careful to make worthy appointments to the College of Cardinals, which bore good results in the future, but he made one colossal mistake. Reformer though he was, he two weeks after his election named his nephew Carlo to the college, an intelligent but devious and scheming young man, upon whom Paul unfortunately began more and more to rely for advice. Papa Carafa, a proud Neapolitan, hated the Spaniards for their domination of Naples for the past half-century. Carlo played on his uncle’s prejudice to entice him into a military alliance with France against Philip II, Charles V’s son, now king of Spain. The war ended in 1557 in a humiliating defeat for the pope, who did not become aware of his nephew’s other machinations until the end of his pontificate. When he did, he took characteristically swift measures by stripping him, his brother Cardinal Alfonso Carafa, and the third brother, Giovanni, duke of Paliano, of all their offices. He forced them to leave Rome within twelve days.

Swift action, yes, but for most Romans the punishment was not severe enough to fit the crimes. When Paul IV died, roundly hated in Rome, his obsequies were interrupted by riots. At one point a mob broke into the prison of the Inquisition, destroyed records, freed the prisoners, and then threw a statue of Paul into the Tiber.

His successor, Pius IV, elected in 1559 as a compromise after a conclave deadlocked for four months, was as affable and seemingly as accommodating as Paul was the opposite. He was not known as a reformer. As a young man he had fathered three natural children, and even while he was pope there was speculation about his private life. Somewhat surprisingly, therefore, he turned out to be an effective pope. He at once began to reverse Paul’s more repressive measures by freeing Cardinal Morone from prison, moderating the Index, and restricting the competence of the Inquisition. He abhorred Paul’s anti-Spanish and anti-Habsburg obsession and immediately set about trying to improve relations with Philip II of Spain and Emperor Ferdinand, Charles V’s successor. Although strongly urged to do so, he refrained from excommunicating Elizabeth I of England, who in 1558 came to the throne after the death of her half-sister Mary. His administration of the Papal States, in desperate condition after Paul’s war with Spain, was masterly.

The pontificate opened with the sensational arrest and trial of Paul IV’s three nephews, who were accused of theft, violence, assassination (including that of Giovanni’s wife), abuse of power, and other crimes. Carlo and Giovanni were sentenced to death and their possessions confiscated. The trial, which seems to have been conducted fairly, won him favor with the Romans, who were convinced Paul IV, hard on everybody else, had let his nephews off far too lightly.

A year after his election, Pius IV named to the cardinalate one of his nephews. This appointment was as wise and successful as the appointment of Carlo Carafa had been disastrous. The nephew, age twenty-two, was the talented, deeply devout Charles (Carlo) Borromeo, who later as archbishop of Milan became the living exemplar of the reformed episcopacy for which the Council of Trent was striving. He would be canonized in 1610. Pius brought the young man to Rome, made him his closest confidant, and was increasingly influenced by him in the direction of church reform.

Pius IV won his respected place in church history, however, by successfully reconvening the Council of Trent and successfully bringing it to conclusion. Among the many things that had changed since the council’s suspension in 1552, two were especially important. The French monarchy had in 1559 made its final peace with the Habsburgs, and French Catholicism was now seriously threatened by Calvinism. These two factors made the French more willing to cooperate. The monarch most strongly advocating the resumption of the council, however, was Philip II of Spain.

The council got under way in mid-January 1562, and concluded in early December the next year. It continued the discussion of the sacraments and brought it finally to conclusion, making use of the intense speculation on them by the Scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages. Important though those doctrinal decrees were, the drama of this period was over reform, and it centered on the obligation of the bishops to reside in their dioceses. Some bishops strongly and unflinchingly argued that the obligation was “of divine law,” and therefore could not be dispensed even by the pope. Their object in so arguing was to make sure they had closed the biggest loophole beyond the possibility of its being reopened.

The issue brought the council to full crisis and to a grinding halt when the pope, insisting that he would himself handle the matter, instructed his legates to block the measure. Like all the popes Pius refused to allow any restriction on his freedom of action. But the bishops refused to back down. Just at that point Pius appointed the now fully rehabilitated Cardinal Morone as president of his legates to the council. Morone, dedicated as he was to the cause of reform, was able to engineer a compromise that saved the council from shipwreck. He then went on to mastermind a whole series of measures for the reform of the episcopacy and pastorate that in time transformed the pastoral functioning of those offices for the better. Once again, as in his nephew, Pius had in Morone made a brilliant choice.

When the council ended, Pius approved all of its decrees from the first to the last period, though some in the curia strongly advised him to be more selective. He then reserved to himself the interpretation of the council and for that purpose established in Rome a Congregation of the Council to advise him on the matter. In obedience to a decree of the council mandating bishops to create a seminary in their dioceses for the training of future priests, he in 1564 established the first such institution in Rome and put it under the direction of the Jesuits. After the hiatus of the pontificate of Paul IV, he resumed patronage of artists, architects, and civil engineers and laid the groundwork for even more extensive renovation of the city by later popes.

By the time he died in 1566 Catholicism, and with it the papacy, had entered a new era. Certainly, it would take a long time for the decrees of Trent to be implemented on a widespread scale, but many bishops returning from the council were changed men, determined on implementation. The bishops at Trent were unable to carry through on the reform of the papacy many of them fought for, but Pius and his successors set to the task, not always with the constancy, thoroughness, and determination desirable. Nonetheless, it was clear certain things would no longer be tolerated.

Along with this new moral and religious seriousness, the papacy was also the beneficiary of a newly stable political situation in Italy, due largely to the fact that Spain was firmly ensconced in both Milan and Naples. This meant that, along with everything that Julius II had been able to accomplish in bringing the Papal States under manageable rule, those States were no longer under military or political threat. The popes, who would still be deeply involved in European politics, now had a security at home that was new and that allowed them to pursue more consistent and constructive policies.