This Day in Catholic History (Birth of Pius IV: Compromise Conclave Choice, Arts Patron and Counter-Reformation Pontiff)

 

Mar. 31, 1499— Gian Angelo Medici, who as Pope Pius IV brought to a successful conclusion a council that would guide Church doctrine and practices for the next four centuries, exerted a moderating influence on policy, and served as a patron of Renaissance artists, was born to an impoverished family in Milan, Italy.

Mark that place of birth—this branch of the Medicis did not partake of the activities of the flamboyant Florentine family who, as mercantile princes, cut a wide swath through Renaissance commerce and the arts. The papacy had three successors to Saint Peter (Leo X, Clement VII, and Leo XI) who came from the latter portion of the clan—and their accomplishments were dubious (the first two) when not minimal (the third).

The obliviousness of Pius’ 16^th-century predecessors had left the Church vulnerable to the challenges of Martin Luther and other key figures of the Protestant Reformation. As historian Barbara Tuchman noted in The March of Folly:

“The folly of the popes was not pursuit of counter-productive policy so much as rejection of any steady or coherent policy either political or religious that would have improved their situation or arrested the rising discontent. Disregard of the movements and sentiments developing around them was a primary folly. They were deaf to disaffection, blind to the alternative ideas it gave rise to, blandly impervious to challenge, unconcerned by the dismay at their misconduct and the rising wrath at their misgovernment, fixed in refusal to change, almost stupidly stubborn in maintaining a corrupt existing system. They could not change it because they were part of it, grew out of it, depended on it.”

The history of these popes reminds me at times of Game of Thrones or The Sopranos, complete with tangled family relations, power struggles, revenge, and even violence. It reached a particular depth with the reign of Pius' immediate predecessor, Paul IV, who not only waged war on Spain himself but appointed to high church offices two nephews who (without his knowledge) looted their coffers, engaged in philandering, and even ordered the  assassination of an alleged lover of one of their wives.

In terms of his own background, Gian Angelo Medici might not have seemed a particularly holy man. But by comparison with Paul, he was quite an upgrade. 

His initial instincts led him towards the law, where he excelled, but his brother persuaded him to take up holy orders.

He then worked successively as a governor in the Papal States, Commissioner of the papal military forces in Hungary and Transylvania, and vice–legate to Bologna before being named a cardinal by Pope Paul III in 1549.

A decade later, Medici emerged the victor in the conclave called to name Paul IV’s successor. I had always thought that the 1924 Democratic National Convention—the one requiring 104 ballots over 16 days to produce a Presidential nominee—was the most preposterously long contest I’d ever heard of for high office.

But it took four months—once the doors of the Vatican’s Sala Regia were locked— before Medici received the gift of the papacy. 

The College of Cardinals was supposed to be sequestered, but that didn’t stop the French and Spanish factions from furious politicking. With riots following the death of Paul in Rome, considerable money was spent on security measures to keep the population in check.

One of the 47 electors died in this tense period, while two others became ill and had to be taken away. (See Katharine Fellows’s review of Mary Hollingsworth’s Conclave 1559 in the November 2021 issue of History Today for more background on this.)

I don’t think you’ll be surprised to hear that, after Medici emerged as the compromise choice acceptable to the factions and he took the name of Pius IV, he instituted measures to ensure that no such electoral madness occurred again.

As far as popes go, Pius was more pragmatist than zealot. He was no stranger to sins that beset other Renaissance popes, including lack of chastity (three illegitimate children before his election as pope on Christmas Day 1559) and nepotism.

But in the case of the latter defect, it could have been far worse as far as Pius was concerned. If you’re Artie from The Larry Sanders Show or J. B. Biggley of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, you pick a relative manifestly unfit for his duties.

But Pius not only passed over any of his progeny for Church offices, but among the nephews he did favor, one was Carlo (Charles) Borromeo, as remarkable for his administrative ability as for concern for his flock.

In other words, the worldly pontiff selected one of the most important and beloved saints in the 2,000-year history of the Roman Catholic Church. (See my blog post from 15 years ago on how Borromeo—by this time, an archbishop—survived an assassination attempt.)

In addition to charging Borromeo with governing the Papal States, Pius named him Secretary of State, where he supervised the Council of Trent. Though this ecumenical council had been called originally back in 1545, it had only proceeded in stops and starts, and had not convened at all since 1552.

With Pius reconvening members in 1562 and Borromeo working with enormous energy, the third period adjourned in December 1563. By this time, nearly a half century since Luther had challenged Church authority with his 95 Theses, Pius and the council members had given up any hope of bringing the Protestants back into the fold.

However, Pius was able to prevent more members lost to the new European sects by reforming Church practices and governance in some cases while reaffirming fundamental doctrine in others, including through:

*The first catechism for the Church;

*Limiting the practice of indulgences (the abuse that had launched Luther’s original protest) without completely forbidding their use;

*Reaffirming the number of sacraments as seven and salvation coming through faith and good works;

*Formally defining as dogma the concept of purgatory while warning against "unnecessary speculations concerning the nature and duration of purgatorial punishments";

*Rejecting calls that the Church modify its ban on clerical celibacy;

*Defining the relative authority of bishops and the pope.

By leaving implementation of the decrees in the hands of the pope, the council also boosted the primacy of the pope in Church affairs.

The Council of Trent kick-started the Counter-Reformation, resulting in a Catholic Church culture that was more:

*Emotional, often marked by tearful contrition, pathos in depicting martyrdom, and emphasizing the transitory nature of life on tombstones;

*Puritanical, with even Michelangelo’s nude figures on “The Last Judgment” covered with fig leaves (but, as I explained in this prior post, such proscriptions defanged fanatics who, alarmed by "lascivious" and "pagan" subjects proscribed, allowing religious imagery to continue flourishing);

*Mystical, particularly with reference to saints;

*Devotional, including in more frequent reception of the Eucharist.

As with so much of Church history, reform and reaction alternated under the Renaissance popes. In contrast to Paul IV, for instance, Pius avoided harshness and persecution.

Though Queen Elizabeth of England was favoring Protestantism, Pius did not excommunicate her. The worst excesses of the Index of Forbidden Books and the Inquisition were curtailed, though not completely abandoned. He moderated, and in some cases eliminated, restrictions on Jews that had been implemented under Paul. Non-believers could move around more freely than they could under Paul.

Like other Renaissance popes, Pius genuinely believed in the power of art to further the Church’s mission. He gave Michelangelo one of his last commissions: turning a large hall of Diocletian's Baths into the church of S. Maria degli Angeli.

Pius died at age 66 in 1565, serving only five years—less than the seven-year average for pontiffs. But it was long enough to re-energize a Church rocked by tumult and corruption.

This Day in Catholic History (St. Charles Borromeo Survives Assassination Attempt)

October 26, 1569—St. Charles Borromeo narrowly escaped the fate that befell England’s Thomas Becket for asserting ecclesiastical authority at the expense of civil law: martyrdom. 

The Archbishop of Milan, a prime mover behind the Catholic Church’s Counter-Reformation as an architect of the Council of Trent, was saved from assassination in his chapel when the fired bullet grazed him slightly.

Nowadays, the Renaissance Popes are remembered for their venality and abuses, very much including the practice of nepotism, while the city-states of Italy are mostly recalled for the glories of the art and artists of the time.

But all of that culture mixed almost inextricably with more objectionable tendencies, and in that respect the Papacy was as much shaped as shaper of its era. 

Orson Welles’ shadowy Harry Lime put it best in The Third Man: “Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

The larger Renaissance culture was frequently cutthroat, and, as I discussed in a prior post on the “conspiracy of the privies” involving the election of 15th-century pope Pius II, the Vatican was not much different.

Add to that the fact that many cardinals felt no loyalty to each succeeding pope and you can begin to understand why pontiffs began, to an alarming degree, appointing nephews to key church posts. After all, if they couldn’t trust their own family, who could they trust?

You might liken nepotism, in its way, to Abraham Lincoln’s use in the Civil War of "political generals"—the patronage practice of according senior army positions to key regional and ethnic constituencies necessary for the war effort. Many of these “political generals” were hapless soldiers, but two turned out to be the best commanders on the Northern side: Grant and Sherman.

And so it was when Pius IV named his nephew Carlo, or Charles, Borromeo as his secretary of state. A tireless worker, trained in civil and canon law, Borromeo combined formidable administrative skills with a bone-deep personal asceticism that made him a model for the reforms he wanted to implement from the Council of Trent—ideas that quickly put him at odds with civil authorities when he took over the Archdiocese of Milan at the age of 28.

As Borromeo interpreted it, little fell outside his ken: hospitals, hunger relief, orphanages, colleges, catechisms, priestly formation—and clipping the wings of religious orders who had had their way, without any archbishop supervising them for 80 years. 

One of these orders was known as the Umiliati, or “Humble Ones”—who, if later accounts are to be believed, had become anything but that over the years. Eventually, members plotted to do away with the young archbishop.

Borromeo was with his staff in his chapel at Martins at 1 o’clock AM. In light of the events about to take place, English translations of lyrics to hymns being sung took on far greater weight: “It is time I return to Him who sent me” and “Let not your hearts be troubled."

The chosen assassin, Geronimo Donato, agreed to the hit for the price of 40 crowns. Those who hired him probably felt afterward that they hadn’t gotten their money’s worth. Oh, he rushed into the chapel, all right, and fired an arquebuse at the kneeling archbishop. The bullet did no serious damage to Archbishop Borromeo.

The young cardinal forgave Donato and interceded to have his life spared, but Pius V, who had succeeded Borromeo’s uncle as pontiff, was having none of it, and not long after he was apprehended, Donato was sentenced to death.

Already indefatigable, Borromeo must have felt that God had given him a reprieve. He lived another 15 years after the failed assassination. The archbishop’s identification with his flock only strengthened, as he sold some church property to care for the poor and stayed in the city to tend to the sick during a plague. He died utterly spent from his labors.

It’s significant that, when Eugenio Roncalli selected the date for his installation as Pope John XXIII, he chose it to coincide with the Feast of St. Charles Borromeo, another cleric who had engineered a revolution in the church through a major council.

Quote of the Day (The Council of Trent, on Religious Imagery)

“And the bishops shall carefully teach this,-that, by means of the histories of the mysteries of our Redemption, portrayed by paintings or other representations, the people is instructed, and confirmed in (the habit of) remembering, and continually revolving in mind the articles of faith; as also that great profit is derived from all sacred images, not only because the people are thereby admonished of the benefits and gifts bestowed upon them by Christ, but also because the miracles which God has performed by means of the saints, and their salutary examples, are set before the eyes of the faithful; that so they may give God thanks for those things; may order their own lives and manners in imitation of the saints; and may be excited to adore and love God, and to cultivate piety. But if any one shall teach, or entertain sentiments, contrary to these decrees; let him be anathema.

And if any abuses have crept in amongst these holy and salutary observances, the holy Synod ardently desires that they be utterly abolished; in such wise that no images, (suggestive) of false doctrine, and furnishing occasion of dangerous error to the uneducated, be set up. And if at times, when expedient for the unlettered people; it happen that the facts and narratives of sacred Scripture are portrayed and represented; the people shall be taught, that not thereby is the Divinity represented, as though it could be seen by the eyes of the body, or be portrayed by colours or figures.” —Decretum de invocatione, veneratione, et reliquiis Sanctorum, et sacris imaginibus (Decree On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics, of Saints, and on Sacred Images), Council of Trent, December 3, 1563

(As Eamon Duffy noted in his papal history Saints and Sinners, the Council of Trent “came a generation too late, a generation during which the split in the Church had widened and hardened.” Yet the Council, which lasted through five pontificates and nearly 20 years, off and on, was crucial in the Roman Catholic Church’s Counter-Reformation—its attempt to halt the Protestant Reformation in its tracks and, wherever possible, win back the hearts and minds of people and their rulers. It clearly defined the major issues separating the Church from the Protestant movement, including justification, transubstantiation, the sacraments, and purgatory. As the session drew to a close, it rendered what I believe was particularly important service to the history of European culture with its decree on religious imagery.

Among the matters dividing Protestants from Catholics was religious art. At the height of the Renaissance, artists such as Michelangelo, powerfully influenced by “rediscovered” art from ancient Greece and Rome, had increasingly emphasized the human body, including through nudity. That greater stress prompted an outcry that this art was secular, even pagan, violating sanctions against worshipping statues dating back to Deuteronomy 5:9. Increasingly, Protestant leaders removed such images from their own houses of worship.

Nowadays, art historians are wont to lament that the post-conciliar period resulted in the removal of genital nudity from religious art. But the alternative—the removal of all religious art—was far worse. By inducing artists to modify those elements that gave rise to charges of superstition, the Council of Trent managed to defang additional opposition. At least now, the architects, sculptors and painters who would follow in the Baroque Era—including Bernini and El Greco--could relax in the knowledge that they still had livelihoods.

As a blogger, I can’t be anything but grateful for the democratization of the written word fostered by the Reformation. But I also don’t see why artists can’t trace, with all the skills God gave them, the ways of the Lord to humanity, or celebrate the beauty of His creation. Whether touring a cathedral or even a smaller house of worship such as my own St. Cecilia’s Church in Englewood, NJ, Catholics can take pride in contributing so much of the great splendor of Western art.

The leaders of the Council of Trent were correct to emphasize the instructional function of religious art; over the years, it fostered an appreciation for narrative and the sense that God could be found everywhere—what theologian David Tracy and sociologist-novelist Andrew Greeley have termed “the sacramental imagination.”)