Four Spaniards and One Saint!

So I was re-reading Kenneth Clark's chapter on the Counter-Reformation in Rome (Chapter/Episode 7 "Grandeur and Obedience") in Civilisation to find his view of the Catholic revival and how it succeeded after the Protestant Reformation. He mentions the day when "Ignatius, Teresa, Filipo Neri, and Francis Xavier" were all canonized as being "like the baptism of a regenerated Rome" (p. 175 in the 1969 paperback edition). But Clark gets the date wrong: he says it was on May 22, 1622, and he leaves out one of the saints canonized that day!

It really happened on March 12 in 1622. Pope Gregory XV capped off the Counter-Reformation era by canonizing four great reformer saints: St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Philip Neri and the patron saint of Madrid, St. Isidore the Farmer. In Rome, they were most proud of St. Philip Neri, the one Roman among the canonized, thus the quip, "Four Spaniards and One Saint." Jesuits around the world celebrate this day as a day of thanksgiving, according to this website:

A little-known day of Jesuit thanksgiving was celebrated on March 12 to mark the canonizations of two of the most famous Jesuits: St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Francis Xavier. Every year on that date, each Jesuit offers a special prayer or Mass of Thanksgiving for the gift of the saints’ canonizations, which occurred on March 12, 1622 — 66 years after the death of Ignatius and 70 years after the death of Xavier.

The founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius lived most of his priestly life in a small room in Rome, directing the newly founded Society. Francis Xavier, one of the Society’s most well-known missionaries, lived most of his Jesuit life traveling around Asia, preaching and baptizing.

Pope Gregory XV was responsible for canonizing the two Jesuits, and he held religious orders in high esteem. The pope was educated by the Jesuits at the “Collegio Romano,” the university founded by Ignatius in Rome that is now known as the Gregorian University.

On the same day Ignatius and Francis Xavier were canonized, Pope Gregory XV also canonized Teresa of Avila, reformer of the Carmelites; Philip Neri, founder of the Oratorian Fathers; and Isidore of Madrid, a simple but devout farmer, now patron of farmers, peasants, day laborers and rural communities.

The grouping of these five dissimilar saints took some by surprise and illustrated that there is no mold for being holy or even for becoming a canonized saint. Pope Gregory XV was never canonized, but he did keep his connection to the Jesuit saints. The pope was buried in the Church of Saint Ignatius in Rome when he died in 1623.

Blessed John Henry Newman wrote of St. Philip Neri, his patron as an Oratorian:

. . . Nothing was too high for him, nothing too low. He taught poor begging women to use mental prayer; he took out boys to play; he protected orphans; he acted as novice-master to the children of St. Dominic. He was the teacher and director of artisans, mechanics, cashiers in banks, merchants, workers in gold, artists, men of science. He was consulted by monks, canons, lawyers, physicians, courtiers; ladies of the highest rank, convicts going to execution, engaged in their turn his solicitude and prayers. Cardinals hung about his room, and Popes asked for his miraculous aid in disease, and his ministrations in death. It was his mission to save men, not from, but in, the world. To break the haughtiness of rank, and the fastidiousness of fashion, he gave his penitents public mortifications; to draw the young from the theatres, he opened his Oratory of Sacred Music; to rescue the careless from the Carnival and its excesses, he set out in pilgrimage to the Seven Basilicas. For those who loved reading, he substituted, for the works of chivalry or the hurtful novels of the day, the true romance and the celestial poetry of the Lives of the Saints. He set one of his disciples to write history against the heretics of that age; another to treat of the Notes of the Church; a third, to undertake the Martyrs and Christian Antiquities;—for, while in the discourses and devotions of the Oratory, he prescribed the simplicity of the primitive monks, he wished his children, individually and in private, to cultivate all their gifts to the full. He, however, was, after all and in all, their true model,—the humble priest, shrinking from every kind of dignity, or post, or office, and living the greater part of day and night in prayer, in his room or upon the housetop.

And when he died, a continued stream of people, says his biographer, came to see his body, during the two days that it remained in the church, kissing his bier, touching him with their rosaries or their rings, or taking away portions of his hair, or the flowers which were strewed over him; and, among the crowd, persons of every rank and condition were heard lamenting and extolling one who was so lowly, yet so great; who had been so variously endowed, and had been the pupil of so many saintly masters; who had the breadth of view of St. Dominic, the poetry of St. Benedict, the wisdom of St. Ignatius, and all recommended by an unassuming grace and a winning tenderness which were his own. 

Of St. Isidore the Farmer, Loyola Press notes:

Isidore was born in Madrid, Spain, and farming was to be his labor, working for the same landowner his whole life. While he walked the fields, plowing, planting, and harvesting, he also prayed. As a hardworking man, Isidore had three great loves: God, his family, and the soil. He and his wife Maria, who is also honored as a saint, proved to all their neighbors that poverty, hard work, and sorrow (their only child died as little boy) cannot destroy human happiness if we accept them with faith and in union with Christ. Isidore understood clearly that, without soil, the human race cannot exist too long. The insight may explain why he always had such a reverent attitude toward his work as a farmer.

Isidore and Maria were known for their love of the poor. Often they brought food to poor, hungry persons and prayed with them. During his lifetime, Isidore had the gift of miracles. If he was late for work because he went to Mass, and angel was seen plowing for him. More than once he fed hungry people with food that seemed to multiply miraculously. He died after a peaceful life of hard labor and charity.

I'll let you know why I was re-reading that chapter in Civilisation soon, after I finish reading this book: How Catholic Art Saved the Faith: The Triumph of Beauty and Truth in Counter-Reformation Art by Elizabeth Lev from Sophia Institute Press.

Another Recusant Scholar

From  I News:

They were monks who disavowed worldly possessions and are best known for their monastic scholarship and abstinence. 

But far from living a cloistered existence, sixteenth and seventeenth century Benedictines refused abstinence, died in duels and went off to war, a study has found. 

The Monks in Motion project led by Dr James Kelly of Durham University’s Department of Theology and Religion has also found that they spread illegal Catholic doctrine. 

It has brought together records of English and Welsh Benedictine monks exiled in Europe in a first-of-its-kind searchable database to uncover some of their remarkable histories.

Read the rest there.

Dr. James Kelly of Durham University:

I am St Cuthbert's Society Research Fellow in Early Modern British and Irish Catholicism and have been a member of Durham University's Department of Theology and Religion and its Centre for Catholic Studies since 2012. I am also Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded 'Monks in Motion' project, which is investigating the experience of the English and Welsh Benedictines in exile, c.1553-1800.

After completing my PhD at King's College, London, I was a member of the AHRC-funded ‘Who Were the Nuns?’ project and Project Manager of its AHRC-funded follow-on initiative, both at Queen Mary, University of London.

My interests are in post-Reformation Catholic history in Europe, with a particular focus on Britain and Ireland. The experience of the British and Irish Catholic communities at home and in exile is the main focus of my research.

I lead the History of Catholicism research strand within the University's Centre for Catholic Studies. I am also an associate and member of the steering committee of the Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature in English, as well as serving as secretary of the Catholic Record Society.

Here's more on that "Who Were the Nuns?" project. It's clear that the recusant Catholic community, clerical, religious, and lay, offers many avenues for research. A review of the table of contents for Dr. Kelly's co-edited book, Early Modern English Catholicism, demonstrates that:

Part I: Identity

1. Situating Early Modern English Catholicism by Brad S. Gregory

2. Creating an English Catholic Identity: Relics, Martyrs and English Women Religious in Counter-Reformation Europe by James E. Kelly

3. A British Catholic Community? Ethnicity, Identity and Recusant Politics, 1660–1750 by Gabriel Glickman

4. ‘Libera nos Domine?’ The Vicars Apostolic and the Suppressed/Restored English Province of the Society of Jesus by Thomas M. McCoog, SJ

Part II: Memory

5. ‘Attend to Me’: Julian of Norwich, Margaret Gascoigne and Textual Circulation among the Cambrai Benedictines by Jaime Goodrich

6. English Catholics and English Heretics: The Lollards and Anti-Heresy Writing in Early Modern England by Susan Royal

7. Joseph Reeve, SJ, the Park at Ugbrooke and the Cliffords of Chudleigh by Matthew J. Martin

Part III: Counter-Reformation

8. Underground Networks, Prisons and the Circulation of Counter-Reformation Books in Elizabethan England by Earle Havens and Elizabeth Patton

9. The Gospel, Liturgy and Controversy in the 1590s: Thomas Stapleton’s Promptuaria by William J. Sheils

10. Praying the Counter-Reformation by  Eamon Duffy

11. John Austin’s Devotions: Voicing Lyric, Voicing Prayer by Susannah B. Monta

Afterword by John Bossy

English recusant historians are discovering a world and people that were ignored for centuries. They are finding out how Catholics survived and endured through oppression and persecution, in exile and in their underground communities.

The Final Session of the Council of Trent Opens

The third and final session of the Council of Trent opened on January 18, 1562, convened by Pope Pius IV, a good Medici. This session decided many details about priestly formation: bishops were to ordain only suitable men to holy orders and to supervise their moral life; clergy were to reside in their parishes and to perform regular duties; a seminary was to be established in every diocese; the discipline of clerical celibacy was upheld, etc.

This was the session of the Council attended by the last Catholic Bishop of St. Asaph's, Thomas Goldwell. He had been appointed by Mary I and he gave the last rites to Reginald Cardinal Pole, but had to go into exile at the beginning of Elizabeth I's reign without ever really becoming the ordinary of his diocese in Wales. As the Catholic Encyclopedia explains:

He was the only English bishop at the Council of Trent, where he was treated with marked respect. He was there engaged in the revision of the Breviary and the Missal; and also urged the council to excommunicate Queen Elizabeth. His mere presence at Trent was a cause of such excessive annoyance to Elizabeth that she wrote the following extraordinary farrago of falsehood to her German envoy Mundt: "We think it may be that one Goldwell, a very simple and fond man, having in our late sister's time been named to a small bishopric in Wales called St. Asaph, though never thereto admitted, flying out of the realm upon our sister's death, is gone to Rome as a renegade, and there using the name of a bishop, without order or title, is perhaps gone in the train of some Cardinal to Trent, and so it is likely the speech hath arisen of a bishop of England being there."

Not only did Thomas Goldwell attend the third session of the Council of Trent, but he was active in implementing its reforms:

In 1563 Goldwell was vicar-general to the Archbishop of Milan, St. Charles Borromeo. In 1567 he was made vicar of the cardinal archpriest in the Lateran, and in 1574 the Cardinal Vicar Savelli made him his vicegerent; he thus became, so to speak, the "working" bishop of Rome. . . . One of the last acts of his long and strenuous career was to serve on the Congregation for the Revision of the Roman Martyrology, in 1582. On the death of the Bishop of Lincoln, in 1584, Goldwell became the sole survivor of the ancient English hierarchy. He died the next year [on April 3], and was buried at St. Sylvester's.

He had even tried to accompany St. Edmund Campion, Father Robert Persons, et al on the mission to England in 1580 but became too ill during the journey on the Continent from Rome to the coast. He had to turn back at Reims.