A History of the Popes Named Leo, Part 5: The Medicis, Leo X and XI

This is the fifth installment of a series on the thirteen papal namesakes of our new Holy Father Leo XIV; click these links to read part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.

The tenth and eleventh Popes to bear the name Leo were both members of the Medici family, the ruling dynasty (at first de facto, later de jure) of Florence. Thanks to the family’s disastrous lack of concern for the Church’s laws about consanguineous marriage, Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici was related to Leo X on both his father’s and his mother’s side, and took the name in honor of his relative. But since he died on the 27th day of his papacy, he is really more of a footnote to this series than anything else. He was born on this day in the year 1535, in the reign of another Medici, Clement VII, exactly 300 years before the birth of another Pope, St Pius X.

A portrait of Pope Leo X Medici, with his cousins Giulio de’ Medici, the future Pope Clement VII (born 1478, r. 1523-34), and Luigi de’ Rossi (1474-1519), both of whom he made cardinals; painted ca. 1518/20 by Raphael Sanzio, one of the artists who most benefitted from Leo’s generous patronage of the arts.

Lazy historians, and those who have been unknowingly misled by them, often use the name Medici as a kind of by-word for a general sense that during the Renaissance, the Church was extremely corrupt; and likewise, that the religiosity professed by members of the ruling classes was extremely hypocritical. It is far beyond my scope to untangle the many ways in which this is fair to say, and the many ways in which it is unfair. For those interested in learning more about the matter, I cannot recommend highly enough the relevant chapter (11) of a book I am currently reading, Inventing the Renaissance, by Dr Ada Palmer, who teaches history at the University of Chicago, and whose writing style is very engaging. Suffice it therefore to say that while Leo X’s early career is very astonishing by modern standards, it was not so by the standards of his own age; but the fact that they were the standards of the age goes a long way to explaining why the protestant revolt broke out during his pontificate, and why the Council of Trent needed to happen.

I also need to state that since he lived at the beginning of the 16th century, his papacy is far better documented than those of the Leos we have seen earlier in this series, and this article does not pretend to be anything more than a vary basic summary of his career.

He was born Giovanni de’ Medici in December of 1475, the seventh child of Lorenzo the Magnificent and his wife, a Roman noblewoman named Clarice Orsini. As a second son, he was destined from childhood for a career in the Church, which began at the age of seven, when he was tonsured and made an apostolic protonotary. The following year, he was made commendatory abbot of two different abbeys, one being the great Montecassino; when he was 13, Pope Innocent VIII (his sister Maddalena’s father-in-law) made him a cardinal, although he was not allowed to dress as one until he reached 16. He was then sent to study theology and canon law at the highly prestigious university of Pisa, but found literature far more to his liking. Among his tutors were the two of the greatest scholars of the era, Angelo Poliziano and Cardinal Bernardo Bibbiena.

The wooden paneled ceiling of the Roman basilica of Santa Maria in Domnica, made in the time of Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, who held the title of this church from 1489 until his election to the papacy in 1513, with the name Leo X. Each section represents a title of the Virgin Mary from an earlier form of the Litany of Loreto. (Photo by Mr Jacob Stein.)

The façade, photographed by our favorite Roman pilgrim Agnese during an evening station procession on the Second Sunday of Lent in 2014.   

Shortly after he was formally vested as a cardinal in 1492, he took possession of his title church in Rome, Santa Maria in Domnica, which he retained for 24 years, until his papal election. The building as it appears today is mostly the result of the major restorations he commissioned, which included the very beautiful paneled wood ceiling shown above. Within less than a month, his father died, and he returned to Florence, only to come back to Rome at the death of Pope Innocent in July, to participate in his first conclave.

The pope thus elected was Alexander VI, the second of the two Borgias, a name which eclipses that of the Medicis as a byword for corruption. Since Alexander was quite hostile to the family, Cardinal Giovanni deemed it best to return to Florence, but shortly after, Italy was invaded by France, and plunged into a period of extraordinary chaos. The Medici were driven out of their city, and the cardinal was forced to flee with several members of his family; he eventually returned to Rome, and stayed out of the Borgia palace intrigues, living quietly in the family palace (now the seat of the Italian senate) and keeping a court devoted to literary pursuits.

The Medici family palace in Rome, known as the Palazzo Madama; engraving by the Italian artist Giuseppe Vasi (1710-82).

The year 1503 saw the death of both his older brother, at which he became head of the family, and of Pope Alexander, after which he participated in two conclaves, since the cardinals’ first choice, Pius III, died after only 26 days. The new Pope, Julius II, was not as hostile to the Medicis as Alexander had been, but not especially friendly either, and for eight years, Cardinal Giovanni’s life continued much as it had under Alexander, until he was made the papal legate to Bologna, which was part of the Papal State.

Julius II is often referred to as “the warrior pope”, since his reign was taken up almost entirely with a vexingly complicated series of wars. The aforementioned book by Ada Palmer contains this absolute gem of sentence which sums things up as follows: “The War of the League of Cambrai is so incomprehensible (that) its Wikipedia page had to develop a new table format to index the betrayals.” Here I note only that in one of the crucial battles of this period, which took place at Ravenna on April 11, 1512, Card. Giovanni was taken prisoner by the French, who would have brought him as a hostage back to France, but he was able to escape and return to Ravenna.

The Liberation of St Peter from Prison, 1513-14, by Raphael Sanzio. This fresco is in the same room as the painting below; the choice of subject was certainly chosen as an allusion to Pope Leo X’s escape from capture after the battle at Ravenna.

Since the republic established in Florence after the fall of the Medici was allied to France, Julius II, hoping to subvert it, sent troops into Tuscany to support their restoration. This led to an appalling sack of the city of Prato, after which the terrified Florentine government allowed the family to return. Cardinal Giovanni and his younger brother Giuliano entered the city in September of 1512, hoping to reconcile the various factions tearing it apart, but republican sentiment against the Medici ran high. In the midst of a plot to assassinate the brothers, the news of Pope Julius’ death (February 1513) arrived, and Cardinal Giovanni departed for Rome to participate in his fourth and final conclave.

The Meeting of Pope St Leo I and Attila the Hun, 1514, by Raphael and students (more the latter than the former), a fresco within the rooms of Pope Julius II, now part of the Vatican Museums. The cardinal at the far left is Giovanni de’ Medici. Julius died before the artist got around to painting him as Leo I, and was then succeeded by Card. de’ Medici, who chose the papal name Leo, and was therefore painted into the image a second time, as his namesake. 

After the high intensity political drama of Julius II’s papacy, the choice of a Medici to replace him was aimed very deliberately at reconciliation. (Plus ça change...) Partly at the instance of his old friend and tutor Cardinal Bibbiena, Cardinal de’ Medici was elected on the very first day of balloting. His papal name Leo was apparently chosen in remembrance of St Leo I, on whose feast day the battle of Ravenna, and his own deliverance from capture, had taken place the previous year. He was only thirty-seven at the time; after him only one other pope, his cousin Clement VII, would ever be elected at a similarly young age. He is also the last pope who was not already a priest at the time of his election.

The hopes of the cardinals that his papacy would be one of peace and reconciliation were soon realized. Late in Julius’ papacy, a group of cardinals had rebelled against him, withdrawn to Pisa, and attempted to call an ecumenical council against him; Julius’ response was to excommunicate them all, and convoke a council of his own. (In one of the most touching displays of popular devotion to the venerable person of the Holy Father, the citizens of Pisa gathered each night outside the place where these cardinals were staying to serenade them with death-threats.) Leo pardoned them all, along with the leaders of the assassination plot in Florence, and of a would-be uprising in Rome. Later on in his papacy, a group of cardinals, including one of Julius II’s nephews, Raphael Riario, would engage in a conspiracy to poison him. The plot was exposed, and the principal leader executed. Leo would have been perfectly within his rights to execute the rest as well, but he let them off with substantial fines, and confiscated Cardinal Riario’s very large palace.

The Palazzo Riario in another engraving by Vasi; originally known as the palazzo Riario, confiscated and turned into the chancery of the Roman Curia by Leo X.  

Pope Julius did not live to see even the beginning of his counter-council, which was continued by Leo, and lasted for almost five years; this is Lateran V, one of the great and ghastly failures among the ecumenical councils, a missed opportunity to enact badly needed reforms. The eruption of the so-called Reformation just after its closure was certainly one of those signs of the times that a more recent ecumenical council said the Church should look out for, and which the Church then, as more recently, completely failed to see. But this was no more the fault of Pope Leo than of thousands of other churchmen of his era, a truth that was recognized many years later by the opening speech of the Council of Trent.

However, he looms large in any history of the Reformation, in part simply because he was the Pope, and in part because he excommunicated Martin Luther. It was also he who issued the indulgence that became the flash-point for the rebellion, which was offered in exchange for monetary contributions to the rebuilding of St Peter’s basilica, a project which had been begun, but just barely, by Julius II. His nepotism, typical for the period, furthered the ecclesiastical careers of several relatives, among them his cousin Giulio, who would become Pope Clement VII after his death and the brief reign (20 months) of Adrian VI. He also expanded the territory controlled by his family, paving the way for them to eventually take absolute control of the Florentine republic and transform it into the Duchy of Tuscany.

A sketch by the Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498-1574), made when he visited Rome in 1532-36, showing the ruins of the old St Peter’s basilica, and the beginnings of the construction of its replacement.

In other ways, Leo was actually a very successful Pope. He negotiated a new concordat to regulate relations between the Church and the kingdom of France, which remained in effect until the French revolution. This was part of a more general pacification of relations with France, which in turn brought much needed calm to the whole Italian peninsula. But the politics of the era were such that it was often necessary to change sides, (see again the quote above from Dr Palmer), and towards the end of his reign, he took the part of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V against France, also hoping that the emperor would stem the tide of the Lutheran rebellion. This hope proved vain, but Leo did not live to see its failure, since he died, suddenly and unexpectedly, on December 1, 1521, at the age of only 46.

As stated above, for my purposes, the brief pontificate of Leo XI is really more of a footnote to that of his kinsman Leo X than anything else. He was born on this very day in 1535 to a cadet branch of the Medici family, distinguished from the main line as the Medici di Ottajano. In his youth, he was tutored by a Dominican priest (the Medici family had always had a close relationship with the order), and wished to enter the clergy, but was opposed in this by his mother, since he was the only male left in his branch of the family. It is a sign of the early success of the Counter-Reformation that she evidently did not think he could just as well have gotten ordained and fathered enough illegitimate children to continue the line, as e.g., Pope Paul III had. The former Florentine republic had now been established as a proper duchy, ruled by the main branch of the family, and she duly packed him off to the court in Florence.

In 1560, he visited Rome in the company of Duke Cosimo I, and became friends with his countryman St Philip Neri. Six years later when his mother died, he resumed his studies for the priesthood, and was ordained within a year. He then served as the Florentine ambassador to Rome for some years, residing in the city with his kinsman Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici. In 1573, he was appointed bishop of Pistoia, but within less a year, he was transferred to Florence, where he served as archbishop for 31 years. He was made a cardinal in 1583, and participated in a total of six conclaves. (Between September of 1590 and December of 1591, three popes in a row, Urban VII, Gregory XIV and Innocent IX, ruled for less than a year; Urban’s is the shortest papacy in history, 12 days.)

During his time as archbishop of Florence, the Carmelite nun Saint Maria-Magdalene de’ Pazzi had predicted to him that he would be elected Pope, but that his reign would be brief. This prophecy was realized in 1605; elected Pope on April 1st, he was crowned on April 10th, and died on the 27th. His papal reign is the eighth shortest in history!

The monument of Pope Leo XI in St Peter’s Basilica, by Alessandro Algardi. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Torvindus, CC BY-SA 3.0)

A History of the Popes Named Leo, Part 4: St Leo IX, and the Gregorian Reform

This is the fourth installment of a series on the thirteen papal namesakes of our new Holy Father Leo XIV; click these links to read part 1, part 2 and part 3.

The church of Rome and the papacy have usually been late-comers to the great movements of reform and renewal in the Church, and have just as often been themselves in dire need of reform and renewal. But eventually Our Lord’s prayer that Peter, being once converted, confirm his brethren, comes again to fulfillment, the papacy at last accepts the need for a reform, and becomes its most important leader. This pattern is exemplified by the career of St Leo IX (1049-54), whose papacy is the point at which Rome, so long caught up in the general decadence of the Church in the West, definitively embraced the cause of reform. To understand this, we must back up a bit and explain some history.

Pope St Leo IX heals a man possessed by a devil, an illustration from a collection of Saints’ lives known as the Passionary of Weissenau, ca. 1170-1200. (Fondation Bodmer, Coligny, Switzerland; Cod. Bodmer 127, fol. 191r; http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/cb/0127. The dark blue lines across the figure of the possessed man are stiches across a tear in the folio.)

Pope St Nicholas I, who traditionally shares the epithet “the Great” with Ss Leo I and Gregory I, and is famous inter alia for his defense of the Church’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, died in 867 after a reign of nine years. And yet, the papacy then underwent such a rapid moral collapse that it was a distance of but thirty years and eight Popes from him to Stephen VI, whose reign of roughly sixteen months is summed up as follows in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

“Whether induced by evil passion or perhaps, more probably, compelled by the Emperor Lambert and his mother Ageltruda, he caused the body of (his predecessor) Formosus to be exhumed, and … placed before an unwilling synod of the Roman clergy. (Note: this is often referred to as ‘the Cadaver Synod’.) A deacon was appointed to answer for the deceased pontiff, who was condemned for performing the functions of a bishop when he had been deposed and for passing from the See of Porto to that of Rome. The corpse was then stripped of its sacred vestments, deprived of two fingers of its right hand, clad in the garb of a layman, and ultimately thrown into the Tiber. Fortunately it was not granted to Stephen to have time to do much else besides this atrocious deed. Before he was put to death by strangulation, he forced several of those who had been ordained by Formosus to resign their offices …”

Pope Formosus and Stephen VI - The Cadaver Synod, by Jean-Paul Laurens, 1870 (Public domain image from Wikipedia.)

After this infamous event, which has provided endless grist for the mills of anti-Catholic controversialists, the papacy remained essentially quiescent as simony, lay investiture (the de facto control of ecclesiastical appointments by lay civil rulers) and clerical incontinence became nearly omnipresent in the Church over the course of the tenth century, the first in which there is not a single canonized or beatified Pope.

Nevertheless, it is often darkest just before the dawn, and the tenth century also saw, less than 15 years after the reign of Stephen VI, the foundation of the abbey of Cluny. What made Cluny so important, especially in the 10th and 11th centuries, was the fact that the duke who founded it in 910, William of Aquitaine, renounced all control over it, in an age when monasteries were essentially the private property of the nobility, who appointed whomever they wished as abbots and officials. Given the tenor of the times, such appointments were very often made solely for the sake of providing an important connection with a salary, and with no reference to whether the man so appointed had any intention of living as a monk. Much the same applied to clerical offices of all ranks.

In the case of Cluny, however, its independence from lay control, and almost 200 years of long-lived Sainted abbots (919-1109), enabled it to become a true model of religious life, a model spread throughout Europe by innumerable daughter houses, and adopted by many older foundations.

The consecration of the third abbey church of Cluny by Pope Urban II, depicted in a manuscript of the early 12th century.

The previous article in this series covered the reigns of Leos V-VIII, all of which were fairly brief, and not much is known of them, so it gave no more than a hint of the sad state of things in Rome in their time. Suffice it to say for now that Leo V was unlawfully deposed, and Leo VIII was the successor of John XII, whose reign has traditionally been described as a “pornocracy – a reign of harlots.” And thus did things continue in Rome until the reign of another particularly unworthy successor of St Peter, Benedict IX (r. 1032-48), whom St Robert Bellarmine described as “the nadir” of the papacy, and over whose career we draw a veil, as the sons of Noah drew a veil over their father. His deposition at the hands of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry II was as unlawful as that of John XII had been, and just as impossible to regret.

His successor, Damasus II, died on the 24th day of his reign, at which point the emperor chose a kinsman, Bruno, the bishop of the French city of Toul (about 180 miles to the east of Paris), and an active and enthusiastic reformer, to replace him. From this point on, the reform party within the Church was in the ascendant, and would go from strength to strength, with the Popes very much at its fore, promoting the Cluniac ideal of religious life for all the ranks of the clergy. As a result, the clerical vices which were universal in the mid-11th century were almost entirely gone by the end of the 12th.

A notable sign of this radical volte-face was the custom of taking a regnal name, which took hold in this period, and has held ever since with almost no exceptions. Bruno of Toul was not the first to do this, but he was the first to choose the name Leo. From 1046 to 1145, thirteen of the eighteen Popes were “second of that name”, followed by eight “thirds” out of eleven from 1145 to 1227, a clear signal that after the long period of decadence, the papacy was now returning to its glorious past.

The cathedral of St Stephen in Toul; the current building was begun in the 13th century, long after Leo IX’s time.

Bruno was born in the Alsace region, which was then part of the Holy Roman Empire, in 1002; his father was a close relation of the emperors. When he was five, he was sent to the school at Toul, and upon completion of his studies, made a canon of the cathedral. In 1026, he accompanied the emperor Conrad II on a military expedition to Italy, commanding a company furnished to the emperor by his bishop. During his absence, the bishop died, and Bruno was swiftly elected to replace him, taking possession of the see on the feast of the Ascension, 1027, at the age of only twenty-five, well below the canonical age for the episcopacy. But despite his youth, he was highly successful in reforming the clergy and monks of his diocese, following the Cluniac model.

After twenty years as a model bishop, he was chosen to become Pope in the summer of 1048 by his kinsman the emperor, now Henry II. On his way to Rome, he stopped at Cluny, and where he persuaded a Roman monk named Hildebrand, who had retired there some years earlier, to join him and help him in the great project of reform; this is the future Gregory VII, the fifth pope after Leo, whose feast day is kept tomorrow.

The relics of Pope St Gregory VII, in his chapel within the cathedral of St Matthew in Salerno. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by NicFer, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Gregory’s career as a reformer was so successful that the movement as a whole is often called “the Gregorian reform” after him. But it was so because of the momentum first given to it by Leo, who brought to the see of Peter the same energetic reforming spirit with which he had governed Toul. The revised Butler’s Lives of the Saints describes his papacy as “a kind of visitation of Western Christendom in order that he might personally enforce his regulations and arouse the conscience of those in authority.” All over Italy, France and Germany, synods were held, presided over either by the pope in person, or a legate sent by him, at which the vices which had crept in were denounced, and the pattern of a reformed clerical life established. It is astonishing to consider how effective this program was, often in the face of indifference or intense opposition from both clergy and laity; all the more so, when one considers how low the reputation of the papacy had been just a few years before. For this, Leo is often called a “peregrinus apostolicus – an apostolic pilgrim”, and in this regard, laid the pattern for the rules of many of the popes who came after him, especially in the following 80 years or so.

Of course, no reformer is wholly successful in all that he attempts, and it should not surprise us to read of failures of his pontificate as well. As ruler of the papal state, he became deeply embroiled in the political affairs of Italy, and particular the problem of the oppressive rule which the Normans had established in the south. (Conflict with the Norman monarchy of Sicily would dominate the affairs of the papacy well into the 13th century.) This brought him to take to the field in arms against them, but he was defeated and captured, which weakened the prestige and the position of his own person, and of the papacy as an institution, and earned him the harsh criticism of no less a giant of the reform than St Peter Damian.

A statue of Pope St Leo IX on a public fountain in the town where he was born, Eguisheim. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Veronique Paignier, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Likewise, his reign saw the beginning of the definitive break between Rome and Constantinople in 1054, precipitated by the violence, both literal and rhetorical, of the patriarch Michael Cerularius, and by the response of Leo’s legates to it. This matter is, of course, far too complicated to delve into in an article such as this; suffice it to note here that the mutual excommunications were issued just under two months after his death. When Leo knew that he was dying, he had his bed set up, and a coffin next to it, at the high altar of St Peter’s; he passed to eternal life on April 19, 1054. Miraculous cures began taking place at his tomb immediately, and he was formally canonized by Bd Pope Victor III in 1087.

A Saint to Remember in Evil Days

When I first published this article in 2018, I introduced it by saying that “In the last few weeks, Catholics have been very forcibly reminded of the serious problems of doctrinal and moral corruption that run rampant in the Church.” The more things change... But in these last few weeks, the Church has suffered yet another terrible blow to Her unity and peace, and to the necessary cause of reform, with the issuance of Traditionis Custodes. I do not intend to address these matters here, since they are being more than adequately dealt with elsewhere. However, today is the feast of a Saint whose life provides us with a good example of what to do when the Church is in dark times.

The Vision of St Cajetan, by Michelangelo Buonocore, 1733. While praying in the Chapel of the Crib at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome on Christmas Eve, the Saint beheld the Virgin Mary, who then passed the Baby Jesus to him to hold; he is frequently represented this way in art.

St Cajetan was one of the founders of the Clerks Regular of the Divine Providence, the very first order of Clerks Regular. They are usually referred to as the Theatines, since one of the other founders, Gian Pietro Caraffa, was bishop of the city of Chieti, “Theate” in Latin, in the Abruzzo region; he would later be elected Pope with the name Paul IV (1555-59). Cajetan himself was born to a noble family of Vicenza in the Venetian Republic, but spent much of his life in Rome. After studying theology and both civil and canon law, he came to the capital of Christendom in 1506, convinced that he was called to do some great work there. He was ordained a priest in 1516, and was actively involved in the foundation or revival of several small confraternities, both in Rome itself and northern Italy, through which zealous and devout Christians, clergy and laity, were able to keep the true spirit of their faith alive.

The revised Butler’s Lives of the Saints describes the state of the Church in his time as “not less than shocking. The general corruption weakened the Church before the assaults of Protestantism and provided an apparent excuse for that revolt, and the decay of religion with its accompaniment of moral wickedness was not checked by the clergy, many of whom, high and low, secular and regular were themselves sunk in iniquity and indifference. (my emphasis) The Church was ‘sick in head and members’.”

To elaborate on this solely in reference to Rome: St Cajetan was ordained in the reign of Pope Leo X. Bad historians, who abound in every age, have in some respects unfairly tarnished the reputation of the two Medici Popes of the early 16th century, Leo (1513-21) and his cousin Clement VII (1523-34), along with that of their entire family. Nevertheless, Leo presided over one of great abject failures among the ecumenical councils, Lateran V (1512-17), which was called in part to deal with serious abuses that had become almost omnipresent in the Church, and did absolutely nothing to correct them. (The agenda of the Council of Trent is to no small degree that of Lateran V, done properly.) The failure of Lateran V did much to encourage the Protestant revolt, which could credibly point to the two highest authorities in the Church, the Pope and the ecumenical council, as evidence that things had gone badly wrong within it. Clement VII would then steer Rome into one of its greatest political catastrophes, the infamous Sack of 1527.

Pope Leo X, with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici (left), the future Clement VII, and Luigi de’ Rossi, painted by Raphael in 1518-19.

Among those who participated in the conclaves that elected them was one Alessandro Farnese; his sister Giulia was the mistress of the infamous Pope Alexander VI Borgia, who made him a cardinal in 1493. In accordance with one of the common abuses that Lateran V notoriously failed to correct, Cardinal Farnese held several incompatible benefices at the same time, in order to draw the revenues attached to them. He was simultaneously first a Cardinal-Deacon, then a Cardinal-Bishop, while also administrator of a see in France, archpriest of the Lateran basilica in Rome, and bishop of Parma, holding the latter two positions until his election as Pope in 1534. In the early years of his episcopacy, he fathered five children.

Butler’s Lives goes on to say, “The spectacle shocked and distressed Cajetan, and in 1523 he went back to Rome to confer with his friends … They agreed that little could be done otherwise than by reviving in the clergy the spirit and zeal of those holy pastors who first planted the faith; and to put them in mind what this spirit ought to be, and what it obliges them to, a plan was formed for instituting an order of regular clergy upon the model of lives of the Apostles.” The name “Clerks Regular of the Divine Providence” refers to the fact that, in imitation of the poverty of the Apostles, whose spirit they hoped to revive in the Church, they neither begged like the mendicants, nor accepted permanent endowments like the monks, but lived on whatever might be offered to them spontaneously by the faithful.

At the time of the Sack of Rome, the Theatines numbered only twelve members; their Roman house was almost destroyed in the sack, and Cajetan himself was cruelly treated by soldiers who hoped to extort money from him, assuming (as well they might) that a cleric in Rome must be rather wealthy. The community was forced to flee to Venice. After serving for a time as superior, Cajetan was sent to Verona, where he and his confreres worked in support of a reform-minded bishop against the fierce opposition of both the clergy and laity. He then went to Naples, where he spent the rest of his life, and where the reforming principles promoted by his order bore greater and longer-lasting fruit. The Breviary lessons for his feast day note that “more than once he detected and put to flight the evils and subterfuges of heresies.” This refers to his successful opposition in Naples to three heretics (two of them apostate friars) who had been corrupting the faith of the people.

The high altar of San Paolo Maggiore, the Theatine church of Naples. The order did not unlearn the important lesson imparted to the Church by earlier Orders like the Cistercians and Franciscans, that the poverty of religious is not practiced by impoverishing the house of God.

The altar of the crypt, containing the Saint’s relics.

What would a man like Cajetan have thought when a man with a past like that of Alessandro Farnese was elected Pope in 1534, taking the name Paul III? What would he have thought of the fact that within a month of his election, the new Pope had appointed his 14-year-old grandson, also called Alessandro, as his own successor in the see of Parma, raising him to the cardinalate shortly thereafter? Was he perhaps tempted to despair on learning that another papal grandson, Guido, was raised to the cardinalate alongside his cousin? Or did he sigh with relief, thinking that Guido, at the ripe age of 16, was at least more experienced in ecclesiastical affairs, since he had been a bishop since shortly before his tenth birthday?

And yet, almost from the moment of his ascent to the Chair of Peter, Paul III showed himself the first Pope to actively and effectively work to oppose the Reformation, not only as a challenge to the Faith, but as a problem of internal reform. In 1540, he formally recognized the Society of Jesus, the shock troops of the Counter-Reformation, and despite political difficulties of every sort imaginable, began the Council of Trent in 1545. Among the many cardinals he made in his twelve consistories is numbered yet another of his grandsons, but also Gian Pietro Carafa, who was as ardent a reformer as Pope as he had been as a religious priest and then bishop, and a good many other worthy men. One of his two English cardinals, St John Fisher, died as a martyr for his opposition to England’s new pastoral approach to adultery. The other, Reginald Pole, was for the same reason very nearly murdered in a park outside Rome by men in the pay of his kinsman, King Henry VIII.

In The Church in Crisis: A History of the General Councils, Mons. Philip Hughes wrote that “It fell to (Card. Pole) to write the opening address of the legates to the council--a frank admission that it was clerical sin mainly that had brought religion to this pass, and a passionate plea for sincerity in the deliberations. One who was present has recorded that as the secretary of the council read the speech, the bishops instinctively turned to look at Pole, recognising from its tone and content who was its actual author. Paul III could have given no clearer sign of his own sincerity than (this) in the direction of the longed-for council.”

In 1500, no one could possibly have guessed that a man like Alessandro Farnese, who was so thoroughly the product of the vices then rampant in the Church, would play such an important part in the events that would lead to the extirpation of those vices, and the lasting fruits of the Counter-Reformation. History is thoroughly unpredictable, and there is no reason for us to despair that the seeds of the future reformation of which the Church stands in such dire need may not be budding even now.

A sixteenth century image of one of the sessions of the Council of Trent, from the Tyrol region (now part of northern Italy) which includes Trent. (Public domain image from Wikipedia.)

St Cajetan’s ministry in Rome, and that of his order, was certainly important, but never very large, and would be overshadowed by that of his near contemporary St Ignatius, the founder of what would become a vastly larger and more widespread order of Clerks Regular, and by St Philip Neri and the Oratory in the following generation. He belonged to the generation of good men who suffered through evil days, trusting that the evils they deplored, but could oppose only partially or not at all, would come to an end in God’s time and by His grace. Though they knew not the day nor the hour, their good example laid the groundwork for the sweeping and highly effective reforms of the Counter-Reformation. Therefore, if the corruption, heresy, and obstinate refusal of reform which we read about from the days of St Cajetan seem depressingly familiar, let us take encouragement from his example. Let us each do what we can so that future generations remember the Catholics of these days as those who laid the groundwork for the next Catholic Reformation.