Pope Paul IV (1555-1559)

The next conclave brought to the papal throne an old man of seventy-nine, Gian Pietro Carafa, Pope Paul IV. Across the sixteenth century his short pontificate (1555-1559) stretches like some high embankment. Through him, at last, the Paganism of the Renaissance is driven from the papacy, the last association of secularism with that high office broken. His elemental zeal, his fire, his whole-hearted surrender of inexhaustible energy to the purpose in hand, his contempt for compromise and for half-measures, his entire devotion to the one purpose of purifying the Church and making it once more the fit instrument of God’s service now, after fifty years of impatient looking on, found the fulness of opportunity. His reign marked the end of that flanerie with worldliness which had dulled the achievement even of good popes. If Rome – papal Rome –bears to-day, and has borne for centuries, something of the appearance of a monastery, if the modern popes, whatever their faults as individuals and as popes, have all lived, primarily, as priests, in a setting of prayer and a certain religious decorum, this restoration of what should be is due, in the largest possible measure, to Paul IV. For he broke and broke forever, and broke by the sheer violence of his wrath, all the long tradition in which worldliness in the highly placed cleric was taken as rather in the nature of things. Certainly never since his time has it shown itself with that naive, unabashed impudence that, before him, had been for generations its very second nature. His violence smashed the pattern of austere living so deeply into the stuff of things that not even his worldly inclined opponents dared to destroy it when the inevitable reaction came.

The Roman mob, with the tacit consent of the authorities, might insult the monuments to him as the aged pope lay dying, but he had so firmly set the law of decent living upon its throne that no mob, nor any worldliness of high ecclesiastics, has since availed to cast it down.

His career had begun in the evil days of Alexander VI and he had lived in that court and not been stained thereby. He had been for years nuncio in London and then, for a still longer period, nuncio in Spain. He was by birth a Neapolitan, and second only to his passion for reform came a hatred of the Spaniards who now ruled his native land. It was a patriotism that would ultimately involve his pontificate in political disasters, which affected adversely his religious schemes too. He had been archbishop of Naples and had resigned this great see to found, with St. Cajetan, the order called the Theatines, and as a simple religious he had laboured for years in the slums of Rome and of Venice, preaching, catechising, and administering the sacraments. Paul III made him a cardinal and when the Inquisition was reorganised it was Carafa whom he placed at the head of it.

Never was there so iron a will, nor such rigidity; never, it must be added, such intolerance of any will but his own. He was a man to whom tact was treason, and of all the questions of the day, after those of heresy and the evil-living cleric, there was none moved him more than that of the hold of the Catholic princes over Church life and action. To end this he was ready to scrap everything, and unfortunately the only weapons he recognised as fit to use were such as had, centuries before, rusted into obsolescence. Paul IV was an Innocent IV born three centuries too late.

This vigorous reformer did not reassemble the Council of Trent. All the studious care of Paul III and of Julius III to bring the Catholic kings to an acceptance of the papal policies had irritated his austerity to the point of fury. Nor had he seen, in the history of the council – its delays, the endless negotiations, the compromises – any reason to alter his opinion that these methods were unworthy of the cause at stake and, moreover, fruitless. He had other methods, and while as cardinal he had not shrunk from rebuking the popes to their face for what was worldly in their way of life, now, like some grim Old Testament figure, he set himself, whip in hand, to speed up the pace of theimprovement, at whose slow progress he had, for twenty-five years, assisted with impatient helplessness.

Soon there began to appear, not new laws – there were enough laws already, the pope declared – but orders for the observance of the old and commissions to ensure it. Dispensations for lack of due age in those elected bishops [child bishops] ceased to be given, and alienations of Church property were made null – the cardinals being severely lectured on this within the first few weeks of the reign. Trusty bishops, with Jesuits to assist them, were sent down into Sicily to reform the monasteries and convents of women. Others were despatched to Spain for a similar purpose. The practice of giving abbeys to non-religious, in commendam, as it was called, was abolished and the Penitentiary was forbidden to give dispensations. The greatest strictness began to be shown in the nominations of bishops, and in one day, of fifty-eight proposed, the pope rejected all.

The old complaint of religious who left their order to find other – clerical – employment, Paul IV met with a terrible law that deprived them of whatever benefices, incomes, degrees, or offices they had since acquired – and this no matter what their present rank – and ordered them back to their monasteries under pain of instant suspension. All dispensations allowing such monks and friars to pass to other orders were declared invalid, even though granted by the popes themselves. For the future only the hermit orders of the Carthusians and the Camaldolesi could validly receive such religious. Rome itself was the scene of raids, and these unfortunates were arrested by the score. Nor did their rank or dignity save them. Some went to prison, others to the galleys.

Bishops were ordered to resign all benefices other than their sees, and the new decrees requiring bishops to live in their sees were rigorously enforced. It was discovered that in Rome there were living 113 diocesan bishops. They ignored the first order to go home and then a second was made with the penalty of deposition, and the punishments already enacted for vagrant monks, if within a month they had not obeyed. Within six weeks the bishops had all departed.

Evil-living bishops were treated more severely still. One, the bishop of Polignano, was sentenced to life imprisonment with an annual punishment of three months’ bread and water.

The whole financial side of the appointments was revised. Pallium fees were abolished, and the pope ended the long problem of the reform of the Dataria [the office that oversees the granting of legally binding statements of annulments and dispensations, in those days, for a fee] – which, it was held, the Holy See could not afford to reform, so greatly did it depend on the revenues that came in through it – by abolishing all the fees. That he lost immediately two-thirds of his revenue did not for an instant halt Paul IV. And he was no respecter of persons. Despite the excellent nominations to the Sacred College made by the popes since 1534, there were still not a few cardinals of the bad old type. The pope told the cardinals, who had so recently elected him, [many of whom were laymen, this not being an impediment] that there were none of them really to be trusted. To those not ordained he gave three months to receive the sacrament or resign. They were bidden to send in lists of the benefices they held, allowed to choose one, and the rest were considered as vacant and given away to others. In his own nominations the pope utterly refused to pay any attention at all to the wishes of the Catholic princes [who had been for centuries in the habit of appointing or nominating their bishops]. He deliberately, and explicitly, set them aside – even the demands of the king of France when, in the war against Philip II of Spain, France was the pope’s sole ally.

The end of the reign was, however, tragic. Political affairs, and the government of the papal States, Paul IV had left to his nephew, the cardinal Carlo Carafa, that he himself might be free to give all his time to Church matters and the reform. The nephew – a lesser Cesare Borgia – aimed at the establishment of the Carafa in some principality carved out of the States of the Church, as the della Rovere had been established and the Borgia and the Farnese. The pope, alone in Rome, was ignorant of the scoundrel his nephew was, and of the way things were going. Then one day he too understood. In a terrible scene he broke with his nephew and broke with the family for ever.

The wickedness had one good effect. The fury its discovery provoked ended for ever, not nepotism indeed, but nepotism on the grand scale. Never again did the relations of a pope attempt to establish themselves as a reigning princely family. A few months after this tragedy Paul IV died (August 18, 1559).