"The Holy Scriptures should be the garden of a bishop."
Feast Day: November 4
Canonized: November 1, 1610 — Pope Paul V
Beatified: May 12, 1602 — Pope Clement VIII
Order / Vocation: Secular clergy — Cardinal, Archbishop of Milan
Patron of: Bishops · Catechists · Seminarians · Spiritual directors and leaders
Charles Borromeo was made a cardinal at twenty-one. His uncle was the pope. He was running a large part of the Church's government in Rome while still in his early twenties, and he was not even a priest. A young man in that position can become one of two things. He can become what his family expected, a comfortable prince of the Church. Or something in him can break open.
In Charles it broke open, and the difference came down to a death in the family and a decision to take his own soul seriously.
He ended up in Milan, in a city that had not had a resident archbishop in many years. He fixed the clergy, built the seminaries, opened the schools, and survived being shot in his own chapel. Then plague came, and the nobles left, and Charles stayed. By the end he had given away nearly everything he owned, including the bed he slept in.
This is the saint for anyone who has more power than they asked for, and for anyone who works in an institution that needs repairing and can't be repaired with talk. It is also for people who are not brilliant, because Charles was not.
A Count's Son on the Lake
Charles was born on October 2, 1538, in the castle of Arona, on the western shore of Lake Maggiore, a few hours from Milan. His father, Count Gilbert Borromeo, came from one of the oldest families in Lombardy and served at the court of the emperor. His mother, Margaret, was a Medici, of the Milan branch of that family. It was a house with money and standing, and it was also a religious house. Gilbert was known for his charity and his fasting, and he made a point of never sitting down to a meal without first giving alms.
There were six children. Charles was the second son, and from an early age he was the quiet one. He liked prayer more than games. He did not seem much like a future statesman.
When he was twelve, an uncle left him the revenues of a Benedictine abbey, a common arrangement in the sixteenth century, in which a boy held the income of a monastery he would never govern. Charles told his father that the money belonged to the poor and ought to go to them. Gilbert, who knew what such revenues were usually spent on, was moved to tears.
The world he was born into was one in which the Church had been badly shaken. The Reformation had split Europe. Bishops often did not live in their dioceses. Clergy were poorly trained and some lived scandalously. The Council of Trent was in session, off and on, trying to repair what could be repaired. Charles would end up as one of the men who put its decrees into practice.
The Student Who Was Not Clever
By most accounts Charles was not a natural scholar. He had a slow mind, a weak memory, and a speech problem that made him talk too fast and stumble over his words. He was reserved and sometimes awkward. If a family had been choosing the son who would run the Church, he would not have been the obvious pick.
What he had was steadiness. He studied civil and canon law at the university of Pavia and worked through his weaknesses by sheer regularity. He took Communion every week and examined his conscience each day before the crucifix. He took the education of his sisters seriously after his father's death, and when it fell to him, though not the eldest son, to manage the family's affairs, he did it with a wisdom beyond his years. He earned his doctorate in law in 1559.
Then his uncle, Giovanni Angelo Medici, was elected pope as Pius IV. Charles was in his early twenties and the pope wanted him in Rome.
What followed was an extraordinary rise. Within months he was made a cardinal, appointed administrator of the archdiocese of Milan, and given a long list of other offices. In practice he acted as the pope's secretary of state, running the Church's business with the kingdoms of Europe. He was protector of Portugal, of the Catholic cantons of Switzerland, and of several religious orders. He carried all of this at an age when most men are still learning their trade.
And he was still a layman. He had not been ordained.
Rome at Twenty-Three
The sources agree on one thing about those years. Charles did not enjoy his own success. He took no money for his appointments. He kept a plain table. He seems to have understood, early, that holiness would not come to him by accident while he was surrounded by that much power, and that if he wanted it he would have to work.
He also did something unexpected. He started an evening study group for young clerics at the Vatican, a place to read, discuss, and sharpen the mind. Part of the reason was that he knew how little the clergy around him were prepared for their work. Part of it was personal. Speaking in front of other people, in a setting he trusted, helped him overcome his stammer. He was building what he needed.
Meanwhile he was worrying about Milan. He had a scruple that a bishop belonged in his diocese, and he was a bishop in all but name of the largest diocese in Italy, and he was in Rome. When he asked an experienced cardinal what to do, he was told that the pope wanted him there, and that this was the will of God for the present. It was not an easy answer, and he did not forget the question.
He also pushed his uncle to reconvene the Council of Trent, which had stalled. When it resumed, he worked on its decrees. He had a hand in the Roman Catechism that came out of it, and the section addressed to parish priests bears his mark.
The Death of Federico
In November 1562, in the middle of all this, Charles's older brother, Count Federico, died suddenly.
It was a family disaster. Federico was the heir. He had been expected to carry on the Borromeo line, and with his death the burden shifted. Charles, the cardinal who was not even a priest, was now the only one who could take it up. His relatives pressed him to leave the Church, marry, and have children. The family name was at stake and the family's wealth with it.
Charles was shaken in a different way. His brother's death struck him as a warning. He had been moving through a world of power with part of his attention on God. Now, with a young man dead, he understood that none of it was permanent. He resolved to give himself more completely to spiritual things.
He refused to leave. The pressure lasted for some months, and then he settled the matter by being ordained a priest, quietly, in late 1563. On December 7 of that year, the feast of Saint Ambrose, the great bishop of Milan, he was consecrated a bishop.
Learning to Be What He Had Been Made
It would be easier to tell this part as a sudden transformation. It was not. Charles was the same slow, serious, conscientious man he had always been, and he now had to do the harder thing, which was to turn his office into an actual vocation.
He started with himself. He gave up the comforts that came with his rank. He ate once a day, often only bread and water. When someone suggested he should have a garden in Milan where he could get some fresh air, he said that the Scriptures should be a bishop's garden. He had plenty of other occasions to be hard on himself, and he took most of them.
He started with others too. When the pope fell ill in 1565, Charles was the one who stayed beside him, held out a crucifix, and asked him to put away worldly concerns and turn to God. The pope died that December. Charles was an influential voice in the election of his successor, Pius V, a strict reformer. The new pope reluctantly agreed to let Charles go to Milan.
He entered the city as archbishop on September 23, 1565. He was twenty-seven. His diocese had not had a resident archbishop in many years.
The Archbishop Who Never Stopped Moving
What Charles found in Milan was a diocese in poor condition. Clergy were badly educated, some were negligent, and some lived in open disregard of their vows. Religious houses had lost their discipline. The people were uninstructed in the faith.
He attacked all of it at once. He held a provincial council in his first year, attended by eleven bishops, and five more councils followed, along with eleven diocesan synods. He wanted bishops who would reform their priests, and priests who would reform their people.
He built seminaries, among the first in Europe to be set up as Trent had decreed. One was run by the Jesuits for poor young men at no charge, on the grounds of his own family's abbey, which did not please his relatives. Another was for the sons of the nobility. He believed that a priest's formation was the most important work a bishop could do.
He set up schools of Christian doctrine in the parishes, with trained lay catechists. By the later years of his life there were hundreds of them, teaching tens of thousands of children and adults. He preached constantly, sometimes three times in a day, in a plain, direct style, and by the account of those who heard him, the longest sermons seemed short.
And he travelled. He visited the remotest corners of his archdiocese, in the Alps and on the lakes, often in dangerous weather and over bad roads, and regarded the danger as unworthy of mention. When he heard a bishop of a small diocese argue that his diocese was too small to require his constant residence, he said, with force, that the value of one soul was enough to merit the whole time of the greatest of men.
He was strict. He was also tender. He would sit by the roadside and teach a poor man the Our Father and the Hail Mary.
The Shot in the Chapel
Reform makes enemies. Charles's list of them grew with each year.
Many of the clergy resented him. Nobles resisted his demands. He clashed with the Spanish governor of Milan over questions of jurisdiction, and at times even faced misunderstanding from the Holy See itself. He was a difficult man to be around when his standards were not being met. He was not subtle.
He had a way of handling criticism that surprised people. He kept in his household a priest who liked to find fault with everything he did. Charles treated him with great consideration and left him a pension for life in his will.
The worst opposition came from the Humiliati, an old religious order that had fallen into disorder. There were around 170 members in some ninety houses, and their rule was largely ignored. Charles set out to reform them, firmly and patiently. They resisted, and a group within the order decided to kill him.
In 1569, a Humiliati priest was paid forty gold pieces to do it. He fired a gun at Charles's back while the archbishop was kneeling at evening prayer in his chapel. The ball struck him and rolled harmlessly down his rochet, the linen vestment he wore. Fragments of the shot tore through a heavy table and ripped his clothes, and he was not hurt. He stayed on his knees and kept praying.
The people of Milan took it as a sign. A saying arose, which lasted for generations, that anything proof against metal was the rochet of Saint Charles. Charles himself carried a small tumor at the spot for the rest of his life.
He did not want the attackers punished. Pius V and the courts were less forgiving. The conspirators were executed and the Humiliati were suppressed.
The Plague
In 1576, plague struck Milan.
The authorities and many of the wealthy left the city. Charles's counselors told him he had good reason to follow them. A bishop was permitted, in the circumstances, to protect his own life. He said that a bishop is obliged to choose what is most perfect, and that it was more perfect to stay with his flock than to abandon them in their need.
He stayed for the better part of a year. He visited the sick in their houses, in the lazarettos, and in the convents. He gave them the sacraments. He organized food, nursing, and shelter. In procession, he is remembered walking through the streets barefoot with a rope around his neck, praying for the city. He stripped his own palace bare. He sold the principality of Oria, which he had inherited from his brother, and gave the money to the poor. He gave away furniture and linen, and finally even the straw mattress he slept on.
One story from the plague sums up the man. He heard a faint cry from an upper room of a locked, infected house. He climbed a ladder to reach it, and came down carrying a small child who had been lying beside its dead mother.
He built a house for girls orphaned by the epidemic and another for beggars. Roadside shrines went up spontaneously across the city, and he had them fitted with crosses and iron rails. The devotion of the Forty Hours' prayer, which he promoted, became popular in this period.
The cost of the plague in Milan was heavy. Charles was at risk throughout, and he was spared.
What It Cost Him
Charles was a man who was hard on others, harder on himself, and never knew when to stop.
His fasting and long hours wore down his health. His colleagues urged him to rest. He kept pushing. When the final illness came, in 1584, he was already worn out by two decades of travel, synods, and austerities.
In April of that year he held his last diocesan synod from his sickbed. In August he made a last visit to the Shroud of Turin. In the autumn he went to the hills north of Milan for a retreat. A fever came on. His advisers told him to cut back his penances, and he did. He returned to Milan and had to take to his bed.
He died on the night of November 3, 1584, at the age of forty-six. The old accounts say his last words were Ecce venio, "Behold, I come." All the religious houses in the diocese were praying for him.
Milan was in mourning.
The Saint of Trent
The Church moved quickly for Charles. Pope Clement VIII beatified him on May 12, 1602, and Pope Paul V canonized him on November 1, 1610, twenty-six years after his death. His feast is November 4.
His patronages describe his work.
Bishops. He was the model of the resident bishop that Trent had called for. He lived among his people, visited every corner of his diocese, held synods, and preached. A bishop who asks what a bishop is for can look at him.
Catechists. His schools of Christian doctrine, with their trained lay teachers, were among the largest systems of religious education in Europe in his time. He understood that the faith had to be taught patiently, to children and adults, by people who were prepared to do it.
Seminarians. He built seminaries when most dioceses had none, and he insisted on a real formation for priests. His model shaped the seminaries that followed.
Spiritual directors and leaders. He gave priests his own example of prayer and penance, and he carried the work of guiding the clergy as a daily duty. His influence reached well beyond Milan.
A great statue of him stands above the shore at Arona, where he was born. His remains are in the crypt of Milan Cathedral, in the chapel called the Scurolo, where pilgrims still come.
A Prayer to Saint Charles Borromeo
O God, you gave Saint Charles Borromeo to your Church as a shepherd who would not leave his flock. Make us faithful where we have been placed, generous with what we own, and patient with those who find fault with us. Give your Church bishops who teach, priests who pray, and teachers who serve the young, and give each of us the courage to stay when it would be easier to go. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saint Charles Borromeo, Pray for us.
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