Saint Charles Borromeo

Saint Charles Borromeo is the principal pastoral reformer of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and one of the most influential bishops of the sixteenth century. As Cardinal Archbishop of Milan for twenty years (1564-1584), he implemented the decrees of the Council of Trent in the largest diocese in Italy, founded the first modern Catholic seminaries, and provided the model of the reform bishop that would shape the Catholic Church for the next four centuries.

Early life as Carlo Borromeo

Carlo Borromeo was born on October 2, 1538, at the family castle of Arona on Lake Maggiore, into one of the most powerful aristocratic families of Lombardy. His father Count Gilberto Borromeo and his mother Margherita de' Medici (sister of the future Pope Pius IV) provided him the elite education of a sixteenth-century cleric: theology at Pavia, civil and canon law also at Pavia.

In 1559, when Charles was twenty-one and still a layman, his maternal uncle Cardinal Giovanni Angelo de' Medici was elected pope as Pius IV. The new pope immediately summoned his nephew to Rome and appointed him to a series of high offices, in a striking example of Renaissance ecclesiastical nepotism: Cardinal Deacon (1560, at age twenty-two), Administrator of the Archdiocese of Milan, Secretary of State of the Holy See, and effectively the principal collaborator of the new papacy.

Charles's family, on the death of his elder brother in 1562, expected him to leave the clerical state and marry to continue the dynastic line. Charles refused. He determined to remain a cleric and was ordained priest on September 4, 1563. He was consecrated bishop on December 7 of the same year.

The completion of the Council of Trent

Charles's principal early contribution was to the Council of Trent. The Council had been convened in 1545 in response to the Protestant Reformation and had met intermittently for eighteen years. Pope Pius IV, with Charles as his principal secretary, drove the final phase of the Council to completion. The third and final session (1562-1563) produced the bulk of the Council's pastoral and disciplinary decrees: the reform of the clergy, the requirement that bishops reside in their dioceses, the canonical regulation of marriage, the requirements for seminary education.

Charles personally coordinated the final phase of the Council from Rome and was the leading architect of the implementation that would follow. He held a series of provincial and national synods, drafted the Tridentine Catechism (the Roman Catechism of 1566), and worked on the reformed Roman Breviary (1568) and Roman Missal (1570) that would standardize Catholic liturgical practice for four centuries.¹

Archbishop of Milan

In 1565, on the death of his uncle Pope Pius IV, Charles obtained permission from the new pope to take up the actual residence of his archdiocese at Milan. He arrived at Milan in April 1566. The archdiocese had not had a resident archbishop for eighty years; it was the largest diocese in Italy, comprising approximately three thousand parishes, fifty thousand religious, and a Catholic population of about 800,000.

Charles's pastoral reform of Milan was the great work of his life. The principal elements:

1. Episcopal residence: Charles lived continuously at the archbishop's palace, the first Archbishop of Milan in eighty years to do so.
2. Pastoral visitation: Charles personally visited every parish in his diocese. The visitations took years and produced extensive documentation that survives today.
3. The seminary system: Charles founded the Milan diocesan seminary in 1564, the first modern Catholic seminary on the Tridentine model. He then founded a network of regional seminaries (the Seminario Maggiore, the Seminario Minore, the Collegio Borromeo at Pavia). The Milan seminary model became the template for seminaries across the Catholic Church.
4. Provincial synods: Charles convened six provincial synods of the Catholic Church of Lombardy and eleven diocesan synods of Milan. The decrees of these synods, collected as the Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, became the most influential corpus of post-Tridentine Catholic pastoral legislation.
5. Care of the poor: Charles personally sold the inherited Borromeo family wealth and gave the proceeds to the poor of Milan. He lived austerely in the archbishop's palace, refusing the luxury of his predecessors.

The plague of 1576

In 1576, the great plague of Milan struck the archdiocese, killing tens of thousands. Charles refused to flee the city as the civil authorities did. He walked through the plague-stricken neighborhoods, ministering to the dying, organizing food distributions, leading public penitential processions through the streets. The mass deaths he witnessed and the suffering he ministered to are recorded in the pastoral letters he composed during the plague.

The Catholic memory of Borromeo's witness during the plague (a bishop who stayed with his flock, who walked into the worst-stricken streets, who carried the Eucharist personally to the dying) has been one of the principal Catholic episcopal images of the modern era.

Death and canonization

Charles's health, never robust, collapsed under the unremitting pace of his pastoral labor. He died at Milan on November 3, 1584, at forty-six years of age, on the eve of the Feast of Saint Mark (whose body had been at Milan before the Venetian translation, and whose veneration the saint had reinvigorated).

Charles was beatified in 1602 by Pope Clement VIII and canonized on November 1, 1610, by Pope Paul V, only twenty-six years after his death. The canonization was extraordinarily rapid by Catholic standards.

Patronage and devotion

Saint Charles Borromeo is patron of bishops (the model bishop of the modern Catholic Church), of catechists (from the Roman Catechism he supervised), of seminarians and the seminary system he founded, of spiritual directors, of Lombardy, and (curiously) of starch makers (from a medieval Lombard association).

His feast on November 4 is celebrated as a Memorial in the universal Catholic Church.

Charles's personal motto, Humilitas ("humility"), inscribed on the family arms, became one of the most famous Catholic episcopal mottos. The Catholic episcopal ideal he embodied (resident, pastoral, simple of life, devoted to the seminary, the catechism, and the poor) shaped four centuries of subsequent Catholic episcopal practice.

For the broader Catholic teaching on the seminary system Charles founded, see What is a sacrament? and the Catholic understanding of the diaconate. For the related Lombard saint Charles helped venerate, see Saint Ambrose of Milan.

Sources

Footnotes

1. For the principal modern critical biography, see Cesare Orsenigo, Life of Saint Charles Borromeo (Herder, 1943). The documents of his episcopate are collected in the multivolume Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, edited by Achille Ratti (the future Pope Pius XI) in the early twentieth century. ↩