Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (38 page)

Whatever the temperamental contrasts between the popes, the drive to concentrate authority and initiative in the hands of the papacy was a feature of the whole Counter-Reformation period. In many ways this was a surprising outcome. On many issues, the papacy seemed still to many an obstacle in the way of reform, rather than the best agent of reform. The final sessions of the Council of Trent in 1562–3 were stormy because many bishops, led by the Spaniards, wanted strong decrees on the ‘divine right’ of bishops. These were to emphasise that bishops derived their authority and their obligations direct from God, not merely by delegation from the Pope, as the Jesuit theologians at the Council argued. Therefore popes could not give bishops dispensations to live away from their bishoprics (for example in Rome, as cardinals in the Curia). Skilful
diplomacy by the papal legates chairing the Council avoided a showdown on this issue, but the Pope had become extremely alarmed at the hostility of many bishops to papal claims, and even set a watch on the legates, in case they wavered. Many bishops were also uneasy about leaving the implementation of the reforms to the Pope, and called for the establishment of some permanent Conciliar body which would see that the Council’s wishes were carried out. Once again, the Jesuits at the Council argued in favour of leaving implementation to the Pope, including the reform of the Curia – but in private they considered that the Pope should be threatened with deposition by the Catholic powers if he failed to deliver.

Nevertheless, it was the papacy which in fact inherited the task of reform. When the Council of Trent finally ended in 1563 many of its reforms were incomplete, and all needed implementation. It was left to Pius IV and especially Pius V to confirm the decrees of the Council, to publish the revised Index of Prohibited Books (1564), to revise and reform the missal (1570), the breviary (1568) and other service books, to produce a catechism (1566) which would interpret the Council’s work to the parish clergy, and to promote the foundation and proper staffing of seminaries.

The enhanced role of the papacy was in part the result of the collapse or abdication of other traditional agents of religious reform. Since large parts of Europe had become Protestant, the old reliance on Catholic rulers to care for (and to some extent finance) the work of the Church could no longer be taken for granted. It fell to the popes to organise and promote the missionary drive to recover the lost populations of Europe. Rome became, what it had never before been, the working headquarters of the most vital movements for reform and renewal in the Church. Papal seminaries like the Germanicum poured out new-style priests to reconvert Europe. Gregory XIII was particularly active here, establishing the Gregorian University (1572), transforming the English pilgrim hospice into a seminary (1579) which sent a stream of missionaries – and martyrs – to Elizabethan England, and establishing Greek, Maronite, Armenian and Hungarian colleges. The clergy produced by these colleges became fundamental to the recovery of Catholicism in Europe and beyond, and wherever they went they carried with them a renewed sense of
Romanitas
, and loyalty to the Pope.

Most of these establishments were staffed by Jesuits, and new religious
orders and congregations, like the Jesuits or the Oratorians, added to the prestige and centrality of the papacy by the simple fact that their headquarters were established in Rome, under the eye of the popes. In the later sixteenth century Rome became a beacon for a renewed Catholicism, a status symbolised in the rebuilding of its churches and streets, crammed with lavish imagery expressing the new dynamic spirit of orthodoxy, loyalty, activity for God. The Jesuit headquarters church, the Gesu, or the Oratorian Chiesa Nuova, still capture the exhilaration and upbeat confidence of this time, and the sense that the city of the popes was once again
Roma Sancta
, Holy Rome. In 1575 a Jubilee Year was declared, and tens of thousands of pilgrims from all over Europe flooded into Rome to gaze on the renewed city and to imbibe the spirit of the new Catholicism.

Reform of the Curia was a high priority at Trent, as it had been since the outset of the Conciliar movement. In the late sixteenth century it was also a papal priority, as the popes systematically sought to reduce the cardinalate to powerlessness and docility. The mere increase in numbers of cardinals, and the promotion of poor men among them, went some way to achieving this, as did the routine appointment of a cardinal nephew as private secretary to the Pope. But the decisive move was made by Sixtus V in 1588, when he established the number of cardinals at a maximum of seventy, and divided them into fifteen separate congregations, six with responsibilities for the secular administration of the Papal States, the other nine to deal with various aspects of the papacy’s spiritual concerns – the Inquisition, the Index, the implementation of Trent, the regulation of bishops, matters of ritual and cult, and so on. This delegation to separate congregations was a tidying up and extension of existing arrangements. In itself it made for greater efficiency, but it also marginalised the Consistory, by taking most of its business away from it. It was plain that the cardinals now functioned as the Pope’s agents and servants, and the Pope related to the cardinals in small groups on specific issues, rather than to the concerted might of the College as a body.

Everywhere, pressure was needed to ensure that the reforms were implemented; and that pressure had to come from the popes. To push the secular princes into co-operation, Gregory XIII developed the use of diplomatic agents, the nuncios, as the principal instrument of papal policy in every Catholic state. These papal representatives, usually given the dignity of a titular archbishopric, worked to secure
practical reforms, to stir Catholic rulers to fight Protestantism, to establish seminaries, and to urge local hierarchies on to vigorous action. The post of papal legate, once the chief instrument of the reform papacy outside Italy, now became an honorific one bestowed on local grandees: the nuncios became the Pope’s hands, eyes and ears all over Europe. Delegated papal powers now became a powerful tool in the hands of the local Catholic hierarchies. Zealous reforming bishops, such as Cardinal Borromeo in Milan, frequently found themselves resisted in their efforts to cleanse their diocese by recalcitrant religious houses, armed with ancient papal privileges exempting them from episcopal control. Nothing but fresh papal commands could override such exemptions, and the obstacles they had always placed in the way of episcopal inspection and oversight in the localities had long fuelled anti-papal resentments among conscientious men: they were prominent among the grievances against the pope and Curia aired in the early stages of the Council of Trent. In the wake of Trent however, Borromeo and his colleagues were able to call on those same papal powers, using delegated papal authority as legates in their own diocese to trump the older papal grants of exemption, and bulldoze away resistance to reform.

In all this, the drive towards centralisation in the organisation of the papacy resembled the aspirations of the strong national monarchies which dominated Europe. It was signalled accordingly In an age of Absolutism, the popes more than any other rulers surrounded themselves with the trappings of absolute rule, rebuilt throne-rooms and ceremonial approaches, commissioned grandiose programmatic art and architecture which spoke of power. The century of rebuilding in Rome, which would culminate in the work of Bernini under the popes of the mid-seventeenth century, was designed to proclaim the untrammelled rule of the sovereign pontiff. But the sober reality was a good deal more complex. Central as the papacy now was to every major Catholic enterprise, the direct authority of the popes encountered even in Italy, and emphatically beyond it, a hundred drags and resistances: the political interests of the kings of Spain who governed southwards in Naples and northwards in Milan, the inertia or vested interest of the bodies which made up the local churches – religious orders and religious corporations, convents or colleges of canons – the non-cooperation of local bishops or priestly collectives excessively (or realistically) deferential to petty princes, regional aristocracies or
city governments. Popes were elected monarchs, their reigns for the most part short, their freedom of action curtailed even in Rome by the presence of independent-minded cardinals – their wealthy families and clientages – who had been created by their predecessors, and who were often at odds with each other, jostling for influence or promoting the rivalries of the Congregations they headed or served in, and sometimes hostile or indifferent to the policies of new popes. The consistent formulation and promotion of long term strategies in such circumstances was dogged with difficulty. Even the best-intentioned papal attempts to forward the programme of Trent involved in practice a constant exercise in the art of the possible, and a hundred compromises.

Not least of these papal difficulties was the fact that popes often found themselves in conflict even with devout Catholic princes. In some cases, this was a matter of the jealous national defence of the ‘liberties’ of the local church. The French crown had got control of an almost separatist church in France by the Concordat of 1516. It resisted any moves on the part of the popes or the wider Church, however laudable in themselves, which might erode that control. France was by no means alone in this. It absolutely refused to accept the disciplinary decrees of Trent, Spain accepted them only after much delay, and then only with a restrictive clause ‘saving the royal power’.

Resistance by the secular ruler might touch any number of ‘spiritual’ issues, large and small. In 1568 Pope Pius V prohibited bullfights as sinful, and ruled that no one killed in a bullfight might receive Christian burial. The Spanish crown refused to allow the decree to be promulgated in its territories, and found theologians to prove the Pope was wrong. The appointment of reform-minded clergy might be hindered, as in Spanish-ruled Sicily, by the crown’s traditional monopoly on clerical appointments.

Such frictions arose in direct proportion to the zeal of the popes. The Counter-Reformation papacy saw itself as called to unite all Catholic princes in an effort to reform the Church internally, and to suppress the enemies of the Church, be they Turks or Protestants. The undoubted papal triumph in the latter of these endeavours was the Christian League between Spain and Venice which in October 1571 defeated the Turkish fleet in the Gulf of Corinth, at Lepanto. Clement VIII in the 1590s raised and paid for an army of 11,000 soldiers
to help break the Turkish hold on Hungary, and Paul V and Gregory XV between them would pour more than 2,000,000 florins in subsidies to the Catholic armies in the opening years of the Thirty Years War (1618–48).

No pope, however, could now hope to act as arbiter over the fate of nations in the way that Innocent III had done, though the universal prestige of the papacy might still have an impact on the international scene. Popes or their nuncios might play a key role in negotiating peace between warring princes – as the future Gregory XV did between Spain and Savoy in 1616. The popes, however, were not content with such walk-on parts in the history of Europe. They believed that the princes should pursue Catholic policies in all things, and believed that the papacy was the divinely chosen instrument for shaping such policies.

Catholic princes rarely saw things so simply. The Habsburg emperors in the second half of the sixteenth century presided over a complex and ramshackle empire in which Catholics coexisted with every conceivable variety of Protestant, from high Calvinist to Unitarian. The popes thought that for the Emperor to tolerate religious error was to abdicate his imperial responsibilities as protector of the Church. They urged drastic measures to produce conformity, demanded that earlier concessions made to Protestant sensibilities, like marriage of the clergy or communion from the chalice, should now be withdrawn. The emperors, receptive enough to the idea of a strong state with only a single religion, knew that as things stood it was an unattainable ideal, and dreaded the rebellion such measures would provoke. They saw to it that their Church was staffed by men who shared their realism, and who could stonewall Roman centralism. Between 1553 and 1600, no Hungarian bishop set foot in Rome, and neither the Inquisition nor the Index was sanctioned in imperial lands.

Elsewhere in Europe, the popes pursued a similar aggressive policy towards heresy. Successive popes poured money into supporting the Catholic side in the French Wars of Religion, and worked to prevent the accession of the Huguenot (French Protestant) King Henri of Navarre as Henri IV of France. In 1572, after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France, during which between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants had been butchered, Gregory XIII ordered the celebration of a solemn ‘Te Deum’ of thanksgiving. Such policies threw the popes
into alliance with extremist forces like the Catholic League in France, which in turn was being bankrolled by Spain. It was difficult in such circumstances for the popes to preserve the neutrality among Catholic princes looked for in the Father of all the Faithful. Under the saintly but realist Pope Clement VIII (1592–1605) better counsels prevailed, and the papacy came to terms with Henri IV, accepted (though after long hesitation) the toleration granted to Protestants by the Edict of Nantes, and thereby freed itself, for the time being at least, from its unhealthy dependence on Spain.

The frictions between the papacy and the Catholic powers were symbolised and rubbed to rawness each year by the annual proclamation of the bull
In Coena Domini
, which was essentially a solemn list of condemnations for crimes against the Church. In 1568 Pope Pius V expanded this bull with clauses listing the usurpations of secular authorities against the rights of the Church and the clergy. The new clauses excommunicated anyone who appealed to a general council against the Pope, any ruler who banished a cardinal, bishop, nuncio or legate, and any secular court or individual which instituted criminal proceedings against clerics. Spain and Austria both forbade the promulgation of this bull, the Viceroy in Naples confiscated and destroyed all copies, and Venice, which had recently expelled a cardinal, refused to allow it to be published on Venetian soil.