Catholic Reformer

CATHOLIC REFORMER A Life of St. Cajetan of Thiene by Paul H. Hallett i Contents FOREWORD iii One: THE SPARK ENKINDLED 1 Two: SMOLDERING EMBERS 9 Three: THE SPARK GLOWS 19 Four: FLAMES BURST FORTH 33 Five: THE FLAMES REACH OUT 47 Six: THE FIRE SPREADS 65 Seven: DEVASTATING FLAMES 87 Eight: THE CONQUERING FLAME 109 Nine: THE FLAME UNEXTINGUISHED 121 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 127 i Nihil obstat: EDWARD A. CERNY, S. S., S. T. D. Censor Librorum Imprimatur: FRANCIS P. KEOUGH, D. D. Archbishop of Baltimore July 30, 1959 ii Foreword Though the Reformation period is one of the most popular parts of modern history, as it deserves to be, the story of the Catholic Reform (miscalled the Counter-Reformation) is still too largely unknown. Most educated Catholics know something of St. Charles Borromeo and of the work of the pioneer Jesuits. They have read something of the work of Paul III and the reform decrees of the Council of Trent. But how many really know the spadework of the early sixteenth century, which made the zeal of Borromeo and the decrees of Trent as effective as they were? Yet there were men of eminence and sanctity working to reform the Church at the very time Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin were doing so much to destroy it. These men were not “Counter- Reformers”; they were like Hildebrand of the eleventh century, seeking to bring the Church to new health and vigor, and not merely defending it from enemies from without. The Catholic Reform was first and foremost the work of a clerical élite, a body of disciplined priests living under a rule with the ideal of raising the mass of society by acting as a leaven for the clergy in general. These priests were known as clerks regular, of whom the Jesuits themselves were but a species. The clerks regular were established in 1523 by the two men who figure most largely in this book, St. Cajetan of Thiene (not to be confused with the more noted Dominican theologian who was his contemporary, Tommaso de Vio Cardinal Cajetan) and Giano Pietro Caraffa, who became Pope Paul IV. These two men, with their associates, sketched and influenced the adoption of every reform worked within the Church: the residence requirement of bishops, the strengthening of the central administration of the Church, the tightening of regulations concerning benefices and the granting of dispensations, the reform of the Breviary and the liturgy, the systematic education of priests, the improved tone of popular sermons, great attention to scriptural reading among the clergy – the list could be long extended. The Church discipline of today has many of its roots in the Theatine spirit. Indeed, the name Theatine was almost a generic one in the sixteenth century for any priest who strove by the power of his example to raise the tone of the Renaissance. The Theatines have never exercised their influence by force of numbers. In the first 244 years of their existence they could record only 4,500 priests. But almost a third of these were elevated to hierarchical rank. To quote Father Philip Hughes: After nine years there were but a score of Theatines. But as preachers in the streets of the great Italian cities, as apostles of the hospitals and the gaols, as confessors, they made a mark wherever they went. And presently they became an obvious stock from which the Popes could draw reforming bishops; more than two hundred before their first century was out.∗ St. Cajetan, incidentally, was one of the first movers of the modern credit union through the Monti della Pietà. that he sponsored in the Italian towns. This work the Theatines in our own ∗ Hughes, Philip, A Popular History of the Reformation (New York: Hanover House, 1957), p. 93. iii country have splendidly advanced among the impoverished Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest. As a Denver Catholic newspaperman for eighteen years, it has been my fortune to know some of the sons of St. Cajetan, who have been stationed in Colorado since the first Theatines came to the U.S. in 1906. No one can estimate how much the Theatines have done for people of Spanish descent, whose relations with the Anglo-Saxon have been so difficult. As these people increase in numbers, both here in the U.S. and below the Border, the work of the men who claim their inspiration from the great Catholic Reformer will become known to an ever-wider circle. PAUL H. HALLETT Feast of St. Cajetan August 7, 1957 iv THE SPARK ENKINDLED I The Spark Enkindled ? I am come to cast fire upon the Earth, and what will I but that it be enkindled? (Luke 12:49). Religion is full of names inapplicable to what they designate, names inspired in the beginning, perhaps, by a spirit of derision – Methodist and Quaker come to mind – or bestowed originally on a particular occasion in history, now forgotten to all but scholars – Protestant is a prime example – or struck off at first to create a presumption in favor of a cause, which now, after centuries, has lost the salt of controversy. Such pre-eminently is the word Reformation. No one nowadays thinks of the name Reformation in the same sense as most people think of the name Reform Bill of 1832 – as something referring to a change transforming a whole society for the better. One may think the movement initiated by Luther and Calvin right, and the Catholic system wrong, but hardly anyone will say that Christianity today is “reformed” in relation to what it was at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Reformation implies a single object that is changed for the better, and, though much in the Christian religion is changed – even Catholicity in its accidentals – the changes are too conflicting and affect too many varied groups for anyone to speak of a reformation of Christianity. Catholicity, however, has, on the whole and in its human side – the side that is subject to decay, like all things human – changed for the better since the early sixteenth century. Hence we can speak, properly and without a capital letter, of the Catholic reformation of the sixteenth century, as we can speak of Catholic reformations in earlier periods. This reformation came about only secondarily in the machinery of ecclesiastical government; it had first to begin in the lives of its protagonists. The reform of the papacy began definitely in 1534 with the accession of Paul III, who had been Alexander Farnese. But this reform would not have come about but for the reform in the life of Farnese, who was forty-five years old when he broke with his former laxness of life. From first to last the reformation of the Catholic Church of 450 years ago was accomplished by men who were, according to their talents, great humanists, like Thomas More; great administrators, like Charles Borromeo; great preachers, like Peter Canisius; great planners, like Ignatius Loyola; but above all and in everything, the man of the Catholic reform was a man who, in Chaucer’s famous couplet, Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve, He taught; but first he folwed it himselve. Lord Acton complains that “the Reformation was extended and established without any strong reaction among Catholics, or inspiring them with a policy.” This is true enough, and tragically true, but policy had first to wait on the formation of character, of persons sufficient in moral weight and numbers to frame and support an effective policy against the poisons spread by the religious revolt. Hence in this biography the development, under Divine Grace, of the character 1 CATHOLIC REFORMER of St. Cajetan of Thiene will always precede the formulation of the great outlines of administrative reform of which he was a prime designer. Almost coincident in their life spans, Cajetan (1480 – 1540) and Luther (1483 – 1546), the Catholic reformer and the Protestant revolutionist, led lives of strong contrast. In willing St. Cajetan’s birth to precede that of Luther, notes the Congregation of Rites, God seemed to anticipate an evil that His omniscience could permit. Cajetan, the reformer, was to rekindle the dying embers of Divine Love, whereas Luther, the revolutionist, would tear himself and others from the embrace of Christ’s Mystical Body. The Saxon priest was of peasant origin; Cajetan came of one of the proudest families of the Italian Renaissance. One of the great motors that propelled the German Reformation was German jealousy of Italy; Cajetan worked to reform Italian life in precisely those areas that lent most support to German grievances. Cajetan was thirty-six before he became a priest. Luther was about that age when he finally left the priesthood. Cajetan remained the Italian aristocrat all his life, but had great sympathy for the poor and himself embraced poverty; Luther, though he liked to think of himself as volkstümlich – one of the German people – turned against the people from whom he sprang in the terrible Peasants’ War. Luther’s life was probably more dramatic than that of Cajetan, as destruction seems more dramatic than reconstruction; but Cajetan produced fruits that will be with us when Wittenberg no longer evokes passions. Cajetan (in Italian, Gaetano) was born in October, 1480, in the city of Vicenza, in Venetian territory. He was the second of three sons of Gaspar, Count of Thiene, who at one time had been captain in the service of the Holy Roman Empire. In the town of Vicenza, midway between Venice and Padua, the family shared in the cultural life characteristic of the Italian nobility in the days of the Medici.

Load more