Saint Charles Borromeo

That shepherd was Charles Borromeo (Carlo Borromeo). He was the living picture of the kind of bishop the Council of Trent hoped to form: he used the whole enormous fortune he had inherited from one of the most powerful families in Italy to feed the poor in a famine, bandaged with his own hands the plague victims everyone else avoided, and gave every last ounce of his strength to reforming the clergy and rebuilding holiness in a Church that needed healing.

Anyone who met Carlo as a child saw a boy with a stammer, quiet, of few words, somewhat shy before a crowd. But behind that reserved exterior was an iron will that astonished even adults. At twelve, following the custom of the time, which allowed noble families to “place” their children in church offices to enjoy the revenues, the boy was given charge of the huge income of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Gratian at Arona. Most other noble children in that position would simply have treated it as personal income. But Carlo, at twelve, told his father plainly: all those revenues were property belonging to the poor, and he would keep only the minimum needed for his studies, giving all the rest away to those in need.

At fifteen, he went to study law at the University of Pavia, one of the most prestigious centers of learning in Italy at the time. Overcoming his stammer with remarkable perseverance, in 1559, at twenty-one, he earned his doctorate in both civil and canon law with distinction.

In the history of the Renaissance Church, the abuse of “nepotism” (Popes favoring their relatives with lucrative offices) was almost always bound up with corruption and a life of luxury unworthy of clerical rank. But this time there was something different: God seemed to use that very flawed system to bring a worthy soul to exactly the position from which he could rescue a whole Church in crisis.

The young cardinal worked with rare diligence. He ran the entire diplomatic machinery of the Holy See and helped restore order to the troubled city of Rome. Yet though he lived right in the middle of the splendid Vatican palace, amid every temptation of power and luxury that a man in his position could have fully enjoyed, Carlo kept a quiet, austere way of life, eating frugally and caring nothing for personal fame or gain.

In 1562, a family event tested him once again: his elder brother Federico died suddenly without an heir. Pressure from the whole Borromeo family and from noble friends poured in, urging Carlo to lay aside the cardinal’s robes, return to lay life, marry and have children to keep the family line and inherit the vast fortune waiting for him. By the standards of the age it was a reasonable demand: the family needed an heir, and Carlo was the only choice left.

By 1562, the Council had been stalled for nearly a decade by bitter political disputes between the Holy Roman Emperor, the king of France and the king of Spain, each wanting to tilt the Council in its own favor. Many in the Church at the time had almost given up hope, thinking the Council would never be finished.

After the Council ended, Carlo himself headed the commission that produced the “Catechism of the Council of Trent” (Catechismus Romanus), the standard catechism used to form priests and lay people throughout Europe for centuries afterward. At the same time, he took a direct part in reforming the Roman Missal and the Breviary, laying the foundation for a unified liturgy throughout the Latin Church.

Back in Milan, Carlo began a thorough reform, true to the spirit of the Council of Trent he himself had helped to save. He sold the gold and silver plate and the valuable paintings left in the bishop’s house to give to the poor, turning the luxurious episcopal palace into something close to an austere monastery. He was the first in the history of the Church to set up a properly organized system of major seminaries, forming priests in character and spiritual life as well as in theology, a model that later became the standard for priestly formation throughout the world.

He founded the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (Confraternita della Dottrina Cristiana), opening hundreds of Sunday classes for more than forty thousand poor children in the diocese, children whom no one had ever before taught the faith in any systematic way. He held eleven provincial councils and six diocesan synods to correct the lax discipline that had taken root among the clergy over decades. He went in person, on foot or sometimes riding a mule, to visit every parish, even the most remote, including places perched on the snowy peaks of the Alps, journeys no bishop before him had ever made.

He wrote his will, gave away everything left of the family fortune to the poor, then threw himself into the fight against the plague with everything he had. He turned the city’s churches into field hospitals. He took all the expensive velvet and silk curtains left in the bishop’s palace and had them cut up and sewn into warm clothes for patients shivering with fever. Every day he fed the sick with his own hands and anointed hundreds of dying people with holy oil, despite the ever-present risk of infection.

When the city was placed under strict lockdown (“no one out, no one in,” under the harsh quarantine measures of the time), he had altars set up at street crossroads, so that people shut up in their homes could stand at their windows and join in the Mass and receive the Body of the Lord from afar. At the city’s largest quarantine camp, called the Lazzaretto, a church of its own was later built, commissioned by him, to keep the memory of those tragic days.

He spent the entire remaining family fortune, even shouldering a huge debt, just to buy enough food to save tens of thousands of lives. That extraordinary courage, at a time when almost everyone with power had fled, won the admiration of all Europe: not because of any miracle of healing, but because he stayed, steady and present, in the most dangerous place of all.

Pope Clement VIII beatified him in 1602, and on November 1, 1610, Pope Paul V solemnly canonized Charles Borromeo. The Church celebrates him on November 4 each year. In Milan Cathedral, the Duomo, where he stopped to pray before plunging into the heart of the plague in 1576, his remains are still kept in a crypt of their own beneath the sanctuary, and the faithful still come from everywhere to pray there. Not far away, in his hometown of Arona, stands a colossal statue thirty-five meters high including its pedestal, affectionately called the “Sancarlone”. Completed in 1698, it is hollow inside, with a framework of stone, brick and iron, and for nearly two hundred years it was the tallest statue in the world that visitors could climb inside, until the Statue of Liberty in New York surpassed it in 1886. Visible from far across Lake Maggiore, it is a lasting reminder of a man who chose to stay in the most dangerous place when everyone else had fled.