We have already seen how Ettore’s eldest child was born on April 15, 1497, and was held at the font by Catherine, receiving, however, the name of Tommasa, after the God-father, the celebrated Doctor of Law, Tommaso Moro. Giuliano was still alive, but already gravely ill. Nothing could well prove more clearly Vernazza’s closeness of friendship for the Adorna and for Moro than his making them thus his first-born’s God-parents. And Moro’s subsequent history makes this, his intimate collocation and spiritual affinity with Catherine a matter suggestive of much reflection.
With her beautiful young mother still alive and living at home with her, Tommasa, a child of precocious intelligence, took to writing verse of various kinds, as early as at ten years of age. Vallebona quotes, from Semeria’s Secoli Christiani della Liguria, ten short lines written by her at that age, and which he apparently holds to have been addressed to her God-mother. They are, however, too vague and hyperbolical for one to be sure as to whom they are dedicated; her own mother or the Blessed Virgin would, I think, fit the case respectively as well as, or better than, Catherine. The “short days” prophesied for herself by the little girl, were destined to amount to ninety years![333]
On her mother dying, some time in 1508 or 1509,—Bartolommea can hardly have been more than thirty-two years of age, and Ettore some six years older,—Vernazza decided, as we know, against continuing an establishment of his own and keeping his three daughters with him. It is certain from his Wills that he had no near female relative whom he could have asked to come and help, or to take, the children; and clear that he was determined not to marry again, so as to remain completely free for his philanthropic work. And hence he was driven to the alternative of boarding the girls in the two convents that we know.
And already on June 24, 1510, on the feast of her father’s favourite Saint and prison-work Patron, Tommasa received the habit of an Augustinian Canoness of the Lateran, and changed her name to Battista. Catherine had still not quite twelve weeks to live, and may well have been deeply interested in her God-daughter’s taking of the veil in that very Convent and at the very age where and when she herself had, half-a-century before, desired to receive it.[334] We cannot but feel that the Superiors were wise who, at that earlier date, had found thirteen too young an age for even an Italian, so early physically mature, and a Catherine, so little suited for marriage, to take even this first and revocable step in the Religious life; and we would doubtless have experienced some uneasiness at the time when Tommasa was somehow allowed to take this identical step at the very same age. Yet we have, as we shall see, full and absolutely conclusive, because first-hand, evidence, that every one concerned in the case acted with true insight. Rarely indeed can a woman have been more emphatically in her right place, than Battista during her seventy-seven years at Santa Maria delle Grazie. And this complete and comfortable appropriateness of vocation no doubt helped her large, balanced, virile mind to feel, with the Church, that such a vocation is but one amongst the numberless forms of even heroic devotedness, a devotedness of which the essence is interior and is capable of being exercised, and which requires to be represented in every honest circumstance and calling of God’s great, many-coloured world.
Of Catetta’s further history, beyond her reception of the veil in the same Convent, under the name of Daniela, some time before November 1517, and of Ginevrina’s later lot, beyond her becoming a Cistercian Nun, under the name of Maria Archangela, at Sant’ Andrea, some time between 1517 and 1524, I have been unable to discover anything. But as to Battista, I wish to dwell upon three characteristic episodes of her long life; they all three throw much light both upon Catherine and (still more) upon the whole question of Mysticism.
II. Battista and her God-father, Tommaso Moro.
The first episode illustrates the rigoristic side of the pre-Reformation Catholic temper and teaching, and the terrible complications, perplexities and pitfalls of those strenuous, confusing times. For we must now move on fifteen further years from that interview with her father, a few days before his death, in June 1524, to reach this event, the first fresh one in Battista’s life of which we have a record.
1. The early stages of Lutheranism and Calvinism.
The Religious Revolution had now well nigh reached its culmination. Battista’s father had only lived to see what may rightly be termed the first step in the Teutonic stage and element of the movement, a stage which, in spite of its political and social, indeed religious, violences and fanaticisms,—and even these came mostly after Vernazza’s death,—retained, if in large part illogically yet with great practical advantage, a considerable portion of the old Catholic convictions and spiritual attitude. Luther had indeed, as we saw, published his Theses in 1517, and Pope Leo X had condemned nearly one-half of them in 1520 in his Bull of Excommunication. And Melanchthon, the mild and deeply learned, had also broken with the Old Church, and had begun, in 1521, the publication of his Loci. But an earnest Catholic (in this case a Teutonic) Reformer had become Pope, in the person of Adrian Dedel of Utrecht (Hadrian VI), in 1522, 1523. And in the very year of Ettore’s heroic death, Erasmus, proving, under the stress of the times, substantially true to the Old Faith, was writing against Luther; whilst in Italy, Vernazza’s old patron, Cardinal Caraffa, was helping to found the Theatine Order.
But within the next fifteen years matters move on and further. For first the Teutonic stage of the Revolution takes its second step, and hardens, and formally and permanently organizes itself; whilst its socially anarchical effects reach their zenith. For there are the Peasants’ War and Luther’s marriage in 1525; and the capture and the sack of Rome by the Imperial (largely Lutheran) troops in 1527; and the Revolutionists’ assumption of the name of “Protestants,” at the Diet of Speyer, in 1529. And, on the Roman Church’s part, the Capuchins are founded in 1525, and the Barnabites in 1530. And this whole Teutonic stage of the Revolution can be taken as closed, for the time, by the terrible Saturnalia of the Anabaptists at Münster, 1533-1535; the executions of the Catholic Humanists, Bishop Fisher and Chancellor More, in England, 1535; and Erasmus’s death in 1536.