4th November is the official saint’s day for
Charles Borromeo, a noted reformer of the Catholic Church in the late 16th
century.
Born in 1538 to a family of nobility in northern Italy,
Charles Borromeo originally intended to follow a career in the law, but in 1559
his uncle, Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Medici, became Pope Pius IV. As was common
custom at the time, the new pope appointed his nephew to the post of Cardinal
in the church. This was a means by which popes could promote the interests of
their family, particularly as only cardinals could elect the next pope. The
practice of favouring nephews in this way is the origin of the English word
“nepotism”.
Charles appears to have taken his new duties seriously,
living an austere life himself and encouraging others in the Roman Curia to do
the same. He was active in helping to organise the final sessions of the
Council of Trent (1562-3) which sought to respond to the Protestant Reformation
by setting the Catholic Church’s house in order.
When Charles’s elder brother died in 1562, he was urged by
his family to give up his church career and manage the family estates. However,
he refused to do so and instead became ordained as a priest (one could be a
cardinal without being a priest in those days!) and thereafter as a bishop. In
1564 he was appointed Archbishop of Milan, but was only allowed to take up his
duties a year later.
The Archdiocese of Milan was huge, stretching from Geneva to
Venice, with more than 3,000 clergy. Abuses were rife, caused largely by
indifference and corruption on the part of its past leaders, and Charles
Borromeo set about a wholesale cleansing and reform of what he found, based on
the conclusions handed down by the Council of Trent.
Needless to say, he faced a lot of opposition from those
whose cushy lifestyles were put under threat, and in 1569 he was shot and
wounded by a would-be assassin, but survived. He determined to be even more
vigorous in his efforts, especially when they were of direct benefit to the
poorest members of his flock.
When famine struck Milan in 1575, followed by plague, the
city’s governor and many nobles fled the city but Borromeo stayed put to
organise relief efforts. He won the confidence of many leaders of religious
houses and was able to co-ordinate a programme that fed up to 70,000 people on
a daily basis, paid for in part out of his own funds. His devotion to the
people eventually shamed the governor into returning to the city to do his job.
Charles Borromeo travelled widely across his diocese in his
double mission to care for the poor and to reform religious institutions.
Eventually this constant endeavour wore him down, and he died in 1584 at the
age of only 46.
He was greatly venerated after his death and his progress
towards sainthood was a relatively rapid one – he was beatified in 1602 and
canonised in 1610. He is one of only two “cardinal nephews” to have become
saints.
One of the most remarkable memorials to a saint is the
massive statue of Charles Borromeo at Arona, north-west of Milan (the ancestral
home of the Borromeo family) . It stands 23 metres high on a 12-metre high
plinth (see photo above). It is second in size only to the Statue of Liberty among free-standing
bronze statues (and was a model for the later statue). The “Sancarlone” statue, designed by Giovanni
Battista Crespi, was begun in 1614 but only finally erected in 1698. As with
the Statue of Liberty, visitors can climb the interior and look out from the
top, in Borromeo’s case through his eyes and ears.
© John Welford
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