Pope Paul IV
Hero or Villain of the Counter-Reformation?
There’s a lot to disparage about the state of the modern world. Despair, wars, rumors of wars, social media dystopia. One recent social development I absolutely love though is this phenomenon where younger folk are taking characters that Progressive Hollywood filmmakers write as archetypes of certain villainous tendencies, and making them unironically heroes. The examples of this are numerous and often quite hilarious. Baldwin of Jerusalem from Kingdom of God, Dr. Jenkins from Starship Troopers, Pope Pious XIII from the Young Pope; all of them have been weaponized as means to subvert liberal hegemony in the arts and academia. (And yes, academia is also not immune to this mockery. Many despised historical characters are being given a new evaluation, including the most extreme villain allowable in modernity, Adolf Hitler.1 )
One of the newer faces of the antihero right, though certainly less famous or infamous, is Gian Pietro Carafa, also known as Pope Paul IV. Now again, I get the irony of making him an ally to look up to (those of you who want to “stick it to the Jews” for example may find ne’er a pope who more fulfills that quota.) Sometimes the point is made just for the sheer sake of defiance, granted. The last thing I want to do is to become the self-unaware angry old man shaking his fist at the clouds. But this particular pope is one I am interested in as the legacy he left had ramifications down to our own day, affecting even the cause of the more orthodox members of the faith. So at the risk of fist shaking, let’s pose the question: was Pope Paul IV actually a hero, or a villain?
To understand the nature of my complaints, one must first know the context. The Papal States, by the 16th century, had become a den of excess, greed, and corruption. Ever since the return from Avignon (1376), and the ending of the Papal Schism (1417), the papacy, beginning with Pope Martin V attempted to rebuild Rome to its former glory, mostly by patronizing the arts. Granted, the work begun by Martin spring boarded the entire Renaissance movement, which did in many respects return Rome from its state of disrepair to one of the more magnificent pilgrimage destinations in all Europe. But it did little to restore the honor and dignity of the office of the bishop which had been so damaged during its exile and schism. Popes like Alexander VI, Julius II, Leo X became synonymous with worldly affairs. Into this moral vacuum steps the Augustinian monk, Martin Luther.
While much of the attention in history books has undeniably been spent on the Protestant Reformation, little has been given to the concurrent Catholic Reformation that was underway even before Luther took his position at Wittenberg. Holy men like Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros and Bishop John Fisher had long been sounding the alarm on the need for reform both within and without the Roman Curia. Consider Milan for example, the seat of the great and holy Western Father, St. Ambrose. It had gone for 80 years without a bishop before St. Charles Borromeo arrived (1560). There was a desperate need for reform at all levels of the Church. Unfortunately, the Magisterium was too slow to respond before the lid was blown off, and by the time the Colloquy of Ratisbon (1541) failed to bring about a resolution, the Protestant rebellion had become [permanently entrenched.
While the papacy fiddled as Christendom burned, a small group of dedicated reformers, known as the Spirituali, came on to the scene. Galvanized by Calvin’s reforms in Geneva, these men sought an internal reform, one that took serious the complaints by even those who had schismed from Holy Mother Church, like the Indulgences controversy in Germany that so early on set off Luther. And these were not nobodies either, they were men in the highest offices of the Church: the cardinalate. Men like Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto, Cardinal Reginald Pole, and yes, Cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa.
And lest anyone think they were in the business of simply giving lip service to reform, they elected Pope Paul III, a reform minded prelate who immediately tasked a group of his most trusted advisors to investigate and report back to him the root causes of the problems faced by the Church. This report, Consilium de Emendanda Ecclesia,2 was absolutely devastating in its truthfulness and transparency. It placed the blame squarely at the feet of the papacy; the previous popes who had profited greatly while failing to reign in the corruption. All of Europe was amazed at its scathing retort of the office which to that point had casted about looking for whom to assign blame.3 Among the signatures of the report was Card. Carafa.
Pope Paul III used this report as the incentive to convene the first sessions of the Council of Trent (1545-1547). Here’s where it gets dicey. Somewhere during this period, Carafa went from a man who was active and instrumental in the Spirituali, to one who was actively opposed and worked against it. From early on he had personal issues with the Spanish legates in the movement.4 He was convinced many of them were crypto-Protestants. When Trent opened and the influential Card. Pole of England made a defense of justification that looked a little too similar to Luther’s, Carafa’s paranoia grew all the more. The falling out of Carafa from the Spirituali is in my opinion the first great tragedy of this story as they were making undeniably positive inroads in the process of reforming the Church. Then Carafa is elevated to the papacy under the name Paul IV in 1555.
Now, while he took the name of his predecessor as a sign of his continuity with Paul III’s reforming agenda, he was anything but ecumenically minded. The first thing he did was make it very clear he would not be reassembling Trent which had ended due to fighting in the Holy Roman Empire. The council was in his mind, an assembly of heretics and near-schismatics. Reform would be carried out from the end of his pen. He began close to home, imprisoning beggars, expelling priests, moving Jews into confined areas known later as ghettos.5 He established the first Roman Index and opened the Roman Inquisition, modeling itself after the Spanish Church.
In one of the most astonishing blunders of any papacy, he took an almost apocalyptically vengeful stance toward the Spanish crown who up to that point had been the most faithful country to the papacy. As one European prince after another fell to the temptations of Reformation independence, Spanish princes stayed with St. Peter. And for their thanks, the pope was now conspiring with Spain’s enemies in a vendetta that everyone knew was personal rather than spiritual. Protestant and Catholic countries alike watched perplexed at this geopolitical blunder taking place.
He also set his sites on many of his old colleagues, including Card. Pole. Consider the situation there: England had teetered for years before officially breaking communion with Rome in 1534 with the passing of Parliament’s Acts of Supremacy. Finally, in 1553 Henry VIII’s daughter Mary, a Catholic, takes the throne. She is in the process of reestablishing the Catholic Church in England making Pole the Archbishop of Canterbury (1556). After the devastations first under Henry, then even more significantly under his son Edward VI, the Church in England was barely holding on. It would take a miracle to keep it, and Archbishop Pole was doing everything in his power to maintain what gains Mary could acquire in their favor.
While this is going on, word reaches him that Pope Paul IV would like him to report to Rome for suspicions of heresy. Queen Mary, aghast at the idea of losing the most holy and reform minded man in her kingdom, refused to release Pole. As a result, Pope Paul denied any approval of bishops in England, and began formal inquest into Pole’s alleged heresy in absentia. English Protestants watching these events transpire in exile humorously noted the irony that their greatest chance of returning England back into the hands of the Reformation came from the help of the papacy.
On November 17, 1558, Queen Mary I dies. A few hours later Pole dies as well. He was the last Catholic to sit in the chair of Canterbury.
Meanwhile, Italy had become a police state. Men like Peter Martyr Vermigli and Bernadino Ochino (who had helped to form the Franciscan Capuchins) are forced to flee the country, seeking haven and eventually coming over to the Protestant side. No amount of orthodoxy could save someone if the right person made an accusation. Cardinal Giovanni Morone, a stalwart reformer, present at the sessions of Trent, was imprisoned by Paul for what many believed was again a personal vendetta against someone who had been a loyal ally to the causes of reform. The opportunity for a true and lasting Counter Reformation seemed to be slipping away, as more and more left for Protestantism.6
Looking at all this from a sympathetic vantage is hard to do. Yet it is worth considering that Italy in this time was a bastion of entrenched corruption. Clearly Pope Paul IV meant business, and in many respects did not do more than he asked of others. The man led a very austere life, one in which right up to the end was hectic in its routine. It is said papers would fly off his desk as he signed so many bulls, wrote so much correspondence, that it was like a windmill.7 When he was done, there was no going back to the old ways. But at what price, victory? A general can claim he routed the enemy but if he bombed his own troops and the civilians in the process, is it hardly counted a win?
People around him thought somewhere during the years of reforming he seems to have grown increasingly agitated and paranoid. It’s impossible to psychoanalyze a man centuries removed, but the personal choices he made had lasting consequences that even the most ardent edgelord would take issue with. He wanted to condemn the canons of Trent and all those who partook in it. He almost brazenly lost Spain to the Church. He certainly helped to push England further into the Reformation death spiral. With all the other “based” popes who would certainly make Progressives uncomfortable in their seats, I see no need to lionize Carafa to make a stand against modernity.
Next time we will look at the legacy the Carafan party had on the Counter Reformation.
The recent promotion of Hitler to this level of appreciation often time transcends the intended irony of the humor, to the point even Catholics seem to be genuinely convinced he was a good man. For an examination on why Hitler and the Nazi’s were in fact not friends of the Catholic Church, see my lecture: The Centre Party: A Catholic Political Party in Pre-War Germany, https://www.patreon.com/posts/centre-party-in-114630670
https://sthughofcluny.org/2017/11/consilium-de-emendanda-ecclesia-transparency-and-reform-in-1537.html
The Protestant Reformers actually reveled in it, and weaponized it in their arguments to justify their schism. This would later effect how Carafa felt about these types of attempts.
Paul IV’s hatred of the Spanish is legendary. More on this later.
I have no doubt this last one is why some of those on the right like Carafa.
Many felt if they were going to be accused anyway, why not become one?
Much of this is of course idiosyncratic. There have been other saintly, reform minded popes who didn’t also manage to make enemies with everyone. Carafa was also know to be nearly iconoclastic in his aesthetics, remarking often how St. Peters should be whitewashed.