If Pius V. met with opposition in the task of purifying the Augean stable of Rome, St. Charles Borromeo, encouraged and stimulated by his example, found himself involved in a more dangerous quarrel when he attempted, in the equally demoralized city of Milan, to enforce respect for the decrees of Trent. In 1569 he undertook to reform the canons of S. Maria della Scala, whose licentious mode of life was a scandal to the faithful. So persistently did they deny their subjection to his archiepiscopal jurisdiction, that, after a long discussion, his only resource for vindicating his authority was excommunication. The contumacious canons were still indisposed to yield, and, assembling in their church, they maltreated his messenger. Thinking that his presence might bring them to reason, he ventured himself to expostulate with them, and found them drawn up in their cemetery, with arms in their hands, and supported by soldiers whom they had hired. On reaching the gate, he dismounted from his mule and advanced towards them with his cross, which he had snatched from his cross-bearer. Unabashed by this symbol at once of religion and authority, the mutinous canons rushed upon him with shouts of “Spagna,” “Spagna,” brandishing their weapons and discharging their fire-arms at the cross in his hands—fortunately without injuring him. Having thus driven him off, they continued for some time in open rebellion, until they were at length obliged to submit, when Pius V. and Philip II. united their power in support of St. Charles.[1427]
Still greater was the peril to which the saint was exposed in his quarrel with the Umiliati. They were a branch of the Benedictine order, founded in 1180 by the Milanese who escaped the destruction of their city by Frederic Barbarossa. Sharing in the general license of the age, the excesses of the Umiliati became so infamous that they surpassed in turpitude the worst exploits of the unbridled youth of the city. Supported by the decretals of Pius, in 1568 St. Charles undertook to reduce the order to the observance of monastic rule. The Umiliati resisted with so much energy and success that, after two years of contest, they were still defiant. Regarding St. Charles as the cause of all their troubles, Girolamo Lignana, Provost of S. Cristoforo di Vercelli, who assumed their leadership in 1570, engaged a monk of the order named Girolamo Donati to murder him. The blackness of the deed was not relieved by the circumstances under which it was attempted. While the holy archbishop was absorbed at midnight in his devotions, Donati stole into the oratory and discharged full upon him an arquebuss loaded with slugs. Some of the missiles struck St. Charles, but rebounded to the floor, leaving him unhurt, and the miraculous nature of his escape was proved by the depth to which others penetrated the walls. At this moment the policy of Philip the Catholic supported the disaffected and rebellious monks, and for some time yet they escaped the retribution due to their many crimes, but at length those concerned in the attempted murder were caught and executed, and the order of the Umiliati was broken up.[1428]
These examples sufficiently show how little the great body of ecclesiastics was disposed to submit to a curtailment of the license which had become traditional, and how little respect was paid either to the commands of the great Œcumenic Council, or to the general and local authorities. It is easy to imagine that few prelates were so disposed to court martyrdom as the saintly Charles, and that churches with less conscientious pastors easily found means to purchase or compel exemption from the laws which bound them to morality. In fact, President d’Espeisses, in his memorial presented to Henry III. in 1583, against the publication of the council in France, drew one of his arguments from the greater corruption of the Italian church, where, though the council was received without demur, yet none of its orders reforming the morals of the clergy received the least attention.[1429] That the Tridentine canons in this respect were wholly inefficacious throughout Italy, and that the officials, with rare exceptions, did not venture to enforce them, can indeed be seen in the series of provincial councils held during the remainder of the century, from Lombardy to Naples.
The papacy had succeeded in crushing the reformers who had responded in so many Italian cities to the uprising in Germany; it had then convoked and managed at its will the great Congress of Catholic Christendom which was to put an end at once and forever to all the evils which had led to the schism; it had every opportunity and every motive for vindicating itself from the aspersions of its enemies, and yet we see it at once recur to the old machinery of local councils enacting canons whose frequency and wordy severity are the inverse measure of their efficiency. Had the promises of reform so liberally made been possible in their fulfilment, there had been no need of further legislation. A convocation of the ecclesiastics of each province to receive and publish the decrees of Trent would have been all-sufficient. When, therefore, we see the endless iteration with which the guilty clergy were threatened with the Tridentine canons, and with other new or revivified penalties—as at the councils of Milan in 1565 and 1582,[1430] and at those of Manfredonia in 1567, of Ravenna in 1568, of Urbino in 1569, of Florence in 1573, of Naples in 1576, of Consenza in 1579, of Salerno in 1596, of S. Severino in 1597, and of Melfi in 1597[1431]—we can only conclude that the evil was irremediable, in spite of the well-meant efforts to suppress it, or to throw off the responsibility of its existence.
In fact, the manner in which the council of Trent was greeted by the clergy may be judged from its treatment in the archiepiscopate of Utrecht. Though Philip II. had authoritatively ordered its reception in 1565, we find the Duke of Alva in May, 1568, issuing his commands to the prelates of the five churches of Utrecht to offer no further opposition to it. Even so stern a ruler could not obtain immediate obedience, however, to so obnoxious a series of regulations, and they responded by pleading their ancient privileges. This availed them little, for in June he replied that his instructions were positive, and he proceeded to enforce them by sending royal commissioners to the province, empowered to carry them out. In July, therefore, the Archbishop assembled his clergy and in conjunction with the commissioners issued a series of regulations designed to give effective force to the canons of the council. Visiting nunneries and haunting taverns, joining in dances and hunting and indecent songs were forbidden. The clergy were ordered to shave their beards and to give up their concubines, whom they were not to retake or to replace. Even yet they did not yield, but while they were ashamed to claim the right to keep their female companions, they demurred as to the sacrifice of their beards, and the Archbishop was obliged to issue another peremptory command.[1432]
Throughout the whole extent of Central Europe the Tridentine canons met with a like slackness of obedience. Even the question of sacerdotal marriage, which had been raised by the council to the dignity of a point of faith, was stubbornly contested, and was not yielded until after a protracted struggle.
In 1569 we find the synod of the extensive and important province of Salzburg virtually dividing its clergy into two classes—those who haunt the taverns under pretext of getting their meals, but really for the purpose of indulging in drunken riots with their parishioners, and those who keep houses, with concubines under the guise of female servants, whom they secretly marry, and who are openly known by their husbands’ names. To meet this condition of affairs, the synod devised an elaborate system by which the richer clergy were directed to keep as domestics respectable middle-aged married women with their husbands, while the poorer ecclesiastics were to club together for the same purpose.[1433] This expedient proved as fruitless as its predecessors, for in 1572 Gregory XIII. complained to the archbishop that in many places priests who were known to be married were permitted by their bishops to celebrate Mass and to handle the sacred elements.[1434] In spite of all this the evil continued unabated, and in 1616 the Archbishop of Salzburg, in his instructions for a general visitation, ordered that all priests should remove their concubines to a distance of at least six miles, and should not allow their illegitimate children to live openly with them, except under special license from him.[1435]
In 1565, Anthony, Archbishop of Prague, promulgated the council of Trent in his provincial synod. He was a man of more than ordinary vigor; he had been the imperial orator at Trent, understood fully the views of the council, and was not likely to underrate either their importance or their authority. Armed with the Tridentine canons, he set actively to work and instituted a very thorough system of inquisitorial visitations, which ought to have succeeded if success were possible. Yet, after the lapse of thirteen years, in a special mandate issued by him in 1578, he deplores the obstinate blindness of many of his clergy, who still believed, with the heretics, that marriage was not incompatible with priesthood, while those who did not marry were guilty of the less dangerous error of maintaining concubines and children on the revenues of their benefices.[1436]
The same wilful ignorance apparently existed in the diocese of Wurzburg, for Bishop Julius, in 1584, found it necessary, in his episcopal statutes, to discountenance clerical matrimony and to prove its nullity by laboriously quoting innumerable canons and decretals; and he even condescended to remind his priesthood that in taking orders they had willingly and knowingly entered into an engagement of continence, by the consequences of which they must be prepared to abide.[1437]