Charles Borromeo was a leading figure of the Catholic Reformation.
He was born in a castle on the shores of Lake Maggiore in northern Italy, to a powerful family. He was related to the Medici through his mother. As the second son, he was destined for a career in the Church from an early age. He received a doctorate in civil and canon law at the University of Pavia, and when his uncle was elected Pope Pius IV in 1559 he was summoned to Rome and made a cardinal. Among many other responsibilities he was made administrator of the vacant diocese of Milan and protector of the Catholic cantons of Switzerland and of the Franciscans and the Carmelites.
He played a large part in the diplomatic efforts that led to the reopening in 1562 of the reforming Council of Trent, suspended since 1552. As long as the Church was in a weak and corrupt state, emperors and kings could control it and its assets – and they would not easily give up control.
In late 1562 Charles’s elder brother died, leaving him as head of the family. His relations wanted him to abandon his ecclesiastical career and marry, and even the Pope suggested it; but Charles saw his brother’s death as a sign of the vanity of human wishes. Eventually, in 1563, he settled the argument by secretly being ordained priest. He was soon consecrated as Archbishop of Milan, but the Pope would not let him leave Rome because he was needed there. He worked on the catechism, the Missal and the Breviary, and reformed his own diocese as well as he could from a distance through trusted deputies.
At length Pius IV died and in 1566 his successor permitted Charles to take up residence in his diocese. He began reform from the top, giving much of his property to the poor. He set up the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine to teach children the faith: it was the beginning and inspiration of the Sunday School movement. When famine struck the province, he fed 3,000 people at his own expense for three months and inspired others to do likewise. When plague came, he prepared himself for death, made his will, and went to the hospital where the worst cases were. After enormous amounts of nagging, preaching and persuasion the secular clergy at length followed his example.
As might be expected, Charles encountered determined opposition to his programme of reform. His aunts, in Dominican convents, treated the introduction of grilles as a personal insult. More seriously, the canons of one church slammed the door in his face to prevent him making a visitation and their servants fired at him, damaging the crucifix he was carrying; and the members of a rich and corrupt order of monks were so opposed to being reformed that one of them dressed as a layman, joined Charles’s household at evening prayer, and shot him. The assassin’s bullet did not penetrate Charles’s clothing. (Two years later the Pope had to suppress the order and distribute its assets: a sad end to an order that had done much good and produced many saints in its 350-year history).
The King of Spain, whose jurisdiction included Milan at the time, resisted any diminution of his power, and the next fifteen years are a complex tapestry of arrests, excommunications, denunciations, calumnies, and absolutions – ending at last in peace.
Charles’s final visitation was of the cantons of Switzerland in 1583, where as well as the usual corruptions and abuses he had to deal with senior priests who were practising witchcraft and sorcery, and enemies who claimed that his fight against heresy was a plot to extend Spanish domination into the region.
Charles died on 3 November 1584 at the age of 46.
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