[310] It is described in A. Armand, Les Médailleurs Italiens, i., 172.
[311] See Pallavicini's Istoria del Consilio di Trento, bks. vi. and vii.
SIXTUS V. AND THE NEW CHURCH
The Council of Trent, which had been convoked with the formal aim of healing the great schism of Christendom, hardened that schism and made it irremediable. I have already observed how natural it was that the Papacy should refuse to make open confession of its decay, and in some degree surrender its authority, by permitting the Church to reform, not only its members, but its head. The inevitable conception of the Popes was to retain the work of reform in their own hands and to use the council, if council there must be,—we have seen that Popes had reason to look with suspicion on councils,—to secure an agreement on doctrinal standards by which the Inquisitors might judge, and secular princes might exterminate, heretics. They miscalculated the power of the northern rebels and the chances of an unselfish cohesion of the Catholic princes against them. Nearly half of Europe adopted a new version of the Christian faith, and, when the Thirty Years' War finally proved the indestructibility of that creed, the task of the Papacy was narrowed to the ruling and reforming of southern Europe and the spiritual conquest of the new worlds which had appeared beyond the seas. For this fourth phase of Papal development—the period from the consolidation of the Reformation to the first outbreak of Modernism in the French Revolution—the Pontificates of Sixtus V. and Benedict XIV. are the most illuminating and significant.
Even the failure of Paul III. did not entirely banish from the Vatican the levity which had been the immediate cause of its disaster. Julius III. (1550-1555) at first resumed, somewhat reluctantly, the sittings of the Council of Trent, but he again suspended its work in 1552 and entered upon a period of luxurious ease and frivolous enjoyment which deeply shocked the graver cardinals. At his death the fiery Neapolitan reformer, Cardinal Carafa, who had dictated the more severe decisions of Paul III., received the tiara, and he spent four energetic years (1555-1559) in a relentless attack upon heresy in Catholic lands. He made vigorous use of the Inquisition, which Paul III. had (largely at the instigation of St. Ignatius) set up in Rome, and he published a complete Index of Prohibited Books.[312] But his reforms, his heresy-hunts, and his hostility to Spain were enforced with such harshness that the Romans almost cursed his memory when his short Pontificate came to an end. It is a singular illustration of the tenacity of abuses at Rome that even the austere Carafa was a nepotist, and the nephews he favoured were of so unworthy a character that they were executed—though one of them was a cardinal—by his successor.
Pius IV. (1559-65) was a more persuasive reformer: a Milanese of lowly origin but of some distinction in canonical scholarship. He guided to their close the labours of the Council of Trent,[313] and on January 26, 1564, put the Papal seal on the precise formulation of the Roman creed. Pius V. (1565-72) brought to the Papal throne the austere ideals of a sincere Dominican monk. He was not content with persecuting the Italians who criticized the Papacy; he did much to reform the Papal Court and the city. Gregory XIII. (1572-85), a scholarly Pope, mingled in strange proportion the virtues and vices of his predecessors. His name survives honourably in the Gregorian Calendar, and he did more than any other Pope to encourage the spread of that network of Jesuit colleges throughout southern Europe which proved so effective a hindrance to the advance of Protestantism; but the Te Deum he sang over the foul "St. Bartholomew Massacre" (1572) and the condition of infuriated rebellion in which he left the Papal States at his death betray his defects. The Papal income had fallen considerably since the loss of England and north Germany and Scandinavia, yet Gregory wished to pay heavy subsidies to the militant Catholic princes. He imposed such taxes, and aroused such fierce anger by seizing estates after disputing the title-deeds of the owners, that Italy almost slew him with its hatred.
In these circumstances the famous Sixtus V. mounted the Papal throne. Felice Peretti had been born at Grottamare, in the March of Ancona, on December 13, 1521. The unwonted vigour of his character is traced by some to the Dalmatian blood of his ancestors, who, in the preceding century, had fled before the Turks to Italy. They had preserved their robust health, and attained no fortune, by work on the soil, and there is not the least improbability in the tradition—which some recent writers resent—that Felice at one time tended his father's swine.[314] But at the age of nine he was sent to the friary at Montalto, where he had an uncle, and he proved a good student. He became so excellent a preacher that he was summoned to give the Lenten Sermons at Rome in 1552, and he attracted the notice of St. Ignatius and St. Philip Neri, and of some of the graver cardinals. After presiding over one or two convents of his Order, he was put in charge of the friary at Venice in 1556, and was in the next year made Counsellor to the Inquisition. His ardent nature and strict ideals caused him to use his powers with such harshness that both his brethren and the Venetian government attacked him. He was forced several times to retire, and in 1560 Rome was definitively compelled to withdraw him.