A History of the Reformation (Vol. 2 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

The improvement of the secular clergy was more important for the Church in Italy than any reforms of the monastic orders. An attempt to do this was begun by two members of the Oratory of Divine Love, Giovanni Pietro Caraffa and Gaetano da Thiene. Their idea was that in every diocese there ought to be a small band of men doing the work of secular clergy but bound by monastic vows. Their idea was taken from Augustine’s practice of living monastically with some of his clergy; and fulfilled itself in the order of the Theatines. The name was derived from Theate (Chieti), the small See of which Caraffa was Bishop. These picked clergy were to be to the Bishop what his staff is to a general. The Theatines were not to be numerous, still less to include the whole secular clergy of a diocese; but they were to incite by precept, and above all by example, to a truly clerical life. The idea spread, and similar associations arose all over Italy.[658]

Such were the preparations in Italy for the Counter-Reformation. There was no prospect of any attempt to set the Church in order while Pope Clement VII. lived. He exhausted all his energies in preventing the summoning of a General Council—a measure on which Charles V. was growing more and more set as the only means of ending the religious dispute in Germany.

The accession of Paul III. (1534) seemed to inaugurate a new era full of hopes for the advocates of reform at the centre of the Roman Church. The new Pope made Gasparo Contarini, Caraffa, Sadoleto, and Pole Cardinals. A Bull, which remained unpublished, was read in the Consistory (January 1536), sketching the possibility of reforming the Curia. The Pope appointed a commission of nine members to report upon the needful reforms, and the commission was everywhere regarded as a sort of preliminary Council, a body of men who were appointed to investigate and tabulate a programme of necessary reforms to be laid before a General Council. The Commissioners were Contarini, Caraffa, Ghiberti, Sadoleto, Pole, Fregoso, all of whom had been members of the Oratory of Divine Love, Aleander who had been Nuncio at the Diet of Worms, and Tomaso Badia, Master of the Sacred Palace. They met and drafted a report which was presented to the Pope in 1537, and is known as the Consilium delectorum cardinalium et aliorum prælatorum de emendanda ecclesia. A more scathing indictment of the condition of the Roman Church could scarcely be imagined, nor one which spoke more urgently of the need of radical reformation. Its very thoroughness was disconcerting. It revealed so many scandals connected with the Papacy that it was resolved not to make it known. But it had been printed as a private document; a copy somehow or other reached Germany; it was at once republished there, with comments showing how a papal commission itself had justified all the German demands for a reformation of the Church. At Rome the appearance of reforming activity was maintained. Contarini, Caraffa, Aleander, and Badia were appointed to investigate the workings of those departments of the Curia which had most to do with the abuses detailed in the report of the Commission of Nine—the Chancery, the Datary, and the Penitentiary, where reservations, dispensations, exemptions, etc., were given and registered. They presented their report in the autumn of 1537. It was entitled Consilium quattuor delectorum a Paulo III. super reformatione sanctæ Romanæ Ecclesiæ. But Contarini evidently felt that the Pope needed pressing. When the Commission of Nine had been appointed, the Pope had summoned a General Council to meet at Mantua in May 1537, in a Bull published on May 29th, 1536, and had also published a Bull of Reformation in September of that year. The Council never met—the war between Charles V. and Francis I. preventing. The Council was then summoned to meet at Vicenza, but was again postponed. The Emperor had no wish for a General Council in Italy, and the Pope was determined not to call one to meet in Germany. In these circumstances Contarini published his Epistola de potestate Pontificis in usu clavium, and his De potestate Pontificis in Compositionibus.[659]

Historians differ about the sincerity of Pope Paul III. in the matter of reform, and there is room for two opinions. His Italian policy was anti-Hapsburg, and the German Romanist Princes, at all events, had little belief in his sincerity, and were seriously meditating on following the example of Henry VIII. Cardinal Morone, the Nuncio in Germany, made no concealment of the difficulties attending the position of the Romanist Church there, and urged continually substantial reforms in Italy, and the necessity of a General Council. Perhaps these energetic messages stirred the Pope to renewed activity in Rome, and also to the necessity of formulating a definite policy with regard to the Lutherans beyond the Alps. In April (1540) commissions were appointed to reform certain offices in the Curia—the Rota, the Chancery, and the Penitentiary. Consultations were held about how to deal with the state of affairs in Germany. For the moment the ideas of the more liberal-minded Italian Reformers were in the ascendant. Charles had determined to find out whether it was not possible to reunite the broken Church in Germany. Conferences were to be held with the leading Lutheran theologians. The Pope determined to reject the advice of Faber, the Bishop of Vienna, and to refrain from pronouncing judgment on a series of Lutheran propositions sent to him for condemnation. Cardinal Contarini, whose presence had been urgently required by the Emperor, was permitted to cross the Alps to see, in conference with distinguished Lutherans, whether some common terms of agreement might be arrived at which would serve as a programme to be set before the General Council, which all were agreed must be summoned sometime soon.

§3. Cardinals Contarini and Caraffa.

This mission of Contarini’s to Germany dates the separation between two different ways of proposing to deal with the Reformation movement. The two methods were embodied in two men, Cardinals Contarini and Caraffa. They had both belonged to the Oratory of Divine Love; they were both zealous to see the Church reformed in the sense of reviving its moral and spiritual life; they both longed to see the rent which had made itself apparent repaired, and the Church again reunited. They differed entirely about the means to be adopted to bring about the desirable end. The differences originated in the separate characters and training of the two leaders.

Gasparo Contarini belonged to an ancient patrician family of Venice, and spent the greater portion of his life in the service of the Republic. He was looked on as the ablest and most upright of its statesmen. He had drunk deeply of the well of the New Learning, and yet can hardly be called a Humanist. He had been a student at Padua, and had there studied and learned to appreciate Scholastic Theology. He had been trained as a Venetian statesman, and clung to the political ideas of the mediæval jurisprudence. The whole round of mediæval thought encircled and possessed him. Christendom was one great commonwealth, and embodied three great imperialist ideas—a world King, the Emperor; a world priest, the Pope; a realm of sanctified science, the Scholastic Philosophy under Theology, the Queen of the Sciences. He held these three conceptions in a broad-minded and liberal way. There was room under the Emperor for a community of Christian States, under the Pope for a brotherhood of national Churches, under Scholastic for the New Learning and what it brought to enrich the mind of mankind.

Erasmus had ridiculed Scholastic; Contarini’s friend Cortese called it a farrago of words; Luther had maintained that it sounded hollow because at its centre was the vague eternal Something of Pagan Philosophy and not the Father who had revealed His heart in Jesus Christ; but Contarini saw the grandeur of the imposing edifice, believed in its solidity, and would do nothing to destroy it. But this did not prevent him sympathising strongly with Luther’s doctrine of Justification by Faith, nor from believing that room might be found for it and other Protestant conceptions within the circle of medieval theological thought. He had little sympathy with the enthusiasm which some of his friends—Cardinal Pole for example—expressed for Plato. Aristotle was for him the great master-builder of human systematic thinking; but the Aristotle he recognised as the Master was not the sage revealed in the Greek text or commentaries (although he studied both), but the Aristotle who had cast his spell over Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus. He was firmly persuaded that the Bishop of Rome was the Head of the Church, and as such had his place in the political system of Christendom from which he could not be removed without serious danger to the whole existing framework of society; but he looked on the Pope as a constitutional monarch bound to observe in his own person the ecclesiastical laws imposed by his authority on the Christian world. Luther, he believed, had recognised this in his earlier writings, and in this recognition lay the possibilities of a readjustment which would bring Christendom together again. On the other hand, Calvin’s Institutio filled him with mingled admiration and dread. He recognised it to be the ablest book which the Protestant movement had produced; but the thought of a Christian democracy with which it was permeated, the stress it laid on the procession of the divine purpose down through the ages, and the manner in which it taught the prevenience of divine grace, were conceptions whose acceptance, he thought, would be dangerous to the political governance of mankind.