Wednesday, 11/5/14
Today is the feast of St. Charles Borromeo who could be the
patron saint of strict disciplinarians. Born in 1538, he was the third child of
the Count of Arona, whose castle looked across a lake to Switzerland.
As we have seen with other noble families, this child’s
quick mind was seen as an asset that could bring wealth to the family. They had
the monastery of Arona in their possession, so the father of Charles, with a
view towards later installing Charles as abbot there, had him tonsured at twelve,
and sent to Milan to acquire doctorates in church and civil law.
But two things thwarted that plan. For one thing, that
father died, and the family chose Charles over his older brother to be head of
the family. The other thing was that his mother’s a brother was elected pope as
Pius IV. That pope called on his twenty-one year old nephew Charles to serve as
Secretary of State and as governor of the Papal States.
Charles was twenty-five in 1583 when the Council of Trent
came to an end. Then, when his family was urging him to come home to father an
heir and to rule the family, his uncle the pope named him archbishop of Milan.
As the new archbishop took possession of his archdiocese he
was so zealous in carrying out the reforms mandated by the Council of Trent
that several times he was shot at. When he ordered all convents to install
grills to prevent visitors from seeing the faces of the nuns, most nuns
complied with his ruling, but his mother’s two sisters who were superiors at
convents would not let the grills to be brought in.
At the 1555 Council of Worms Catholics and Protestants reached
an agreement by which the people of each Swiss canton would be obliged to adopt
the religion of its ruler. Charles Borromeo, with several Catholic cantons in
his possession, set up the Inquisition to bring around or to do away with
non-Catholics in the cantons where he was in charge.
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