St. Charles Borromeo

St. Charles Borromeo (1538 to 1584) was Archbishop of Milan and the churchman who did more than anyone else to turn the decrees of the Council of Trent into working practice. Made a cardinal at twenty-one by his uncle Pope Pius IV, he helped bring the Council to its conclusion in 1563, then left Rome for Milan and spent twenty years rebuilding a vast and neglected diocese: seminaries, synods, parish visitation, catechism classes for children, and personal presence in the city during the plague of 1576. He died at forty-six and was canonised in 1610.

Born 2 October 1538, Arona Died 3 November 1584, Milan Cardinal at 21 Canonised 1610 Feast: 4 November

The Reformer from Within

St. Charles Borromeo was born on 2 October 1538 at the family castle of Arona on Lake Maggiore, into one of the great houses of Lombardy. His mother was a Medici of the Milanese branch, and her brother Giovanni Angelo de' Medici was elected pope as Pius IV in 1559. Charles had every advantage available in sixteenth-century Europe and used them for a programme of reform that cost him most of them.

He took a doctorate in civil and canon law at Pavia in 1559. Within months of his uncle's election he was in Rome running the papal administration. He could have lived the life of a prince of the Church, which was the normal course for a papal nephew, and the papal nephew as an office was one of the abuses the age most needed to end.

What turned him was the sudden death of his elder brother Federico in 1562. The family expected Charles, who had not yet been ordained, to leave the clerical state and marry to continue the line. He refused, was ordained priest in 1563, and was consecrated bishop the same year. From then on his household became austere by policy: he cut his own expenditure sharply, gave away revenues, and kept the fasts himself.

He became Archbishop of Milan, one of the largest dioceses in Europe, and found it in bad condition. The see had gone without a resident archbishop for roughly eighty years, the clergy were often untrained, the parish structure had decayed, and the religious houses had drifted. He revitalised the clergy, established seminaries for their proper training, and restored discipline to the religious orders, doing it by visitation, legislation and personal supervision.

Cardinal at Twenty-One

Pius IV created his nephew a cardinal in 1560, when Charles was twenty-one and still a layman, and made him administrator of the Archdiocese of Milan and effectively secretary of state. Nepotism of this kind was exactly what reformers, Catholic and Protestant, were attacking.

Saying that plainly is the fair way to tell the story. Charles Borromeo owed his position to family, at the age of twenty-one, in the way the system worked, and then used it to dismantle the assumptions behind it. He pressed the Council to require bishops to reside in their dioceses, and when it did, he resigned his other benefices and went to live in his own. He is the strongest available argument that a corrupt system can be reformed by someone inside it who declines to enjoy it.

The workload in Rome was enormous. He handled the correspondence of the pontificate, organised the legates to Trent, and, from 1561, ran the Vatican's dealings with the Council. He also founded an academy of clerics and laymen at his residence for study and discussion, whose proceedings were published.

Finishing the Council of Trent

The Council of Trent had been called in 1545 and had twice broken off. Its final period, from 1562 to 1563, was the decisive one, and it produced the decrees on the Mass, holy orders, matrimony, purgatory, indulgences and the veneration of saints, together with the disciplinary legislation that reshaped the Church for four centuries.

Borromeo, from Rome, was the hinge between the pope and the assembly at Trent. He managed the flow of instructions and information, worked to keep the Council from collapsing over the recurring disputes about episcopal authority, and pressed for its conclusion. Trent closed in December 1563.

After it closed he drove the implementation. The Roman Catechism, the Catechism of the Council of Trent, was produced in 1566 under his supervision, and the revision of the Breviary and Missal that followed in 1568 and 1570 belongs to the same programme. Then he did the thing that mattered most: he went to Milan and applied the decrees to an actual diocese, so that other bishops could see it done.

The site's page on the Reformation sets out the wider sixteenth-century context, and the Traditional Latin Mass covers the liturgical books that came out of Trent.

What He Actually Changed in Milan

Borromeo's Milanese programme is the most complete example anywhere of Tridentine reform carried out on the ground, and the specifics are worth listing.

Seminaries. Trent required every diocese to establish a seminary for training its clergy. Borromeo founded the Milan seminary in 1564, one of the first in Europe, and then several more across the province, including a college for the Swiss valleys of his territory. He wrote the rule and supervised the studies.

Councils and synods. He held six provincial councils and eleven diocesan synods in twenty years, an extraordinary rate. Their acts were collected and published in 1582 as the Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, which became the standard manual consulted by reforming bishops across Catholic Europe for the next two centuries.

Visitation. He visited the parishes of an enormous alpine diocese personally, including remote valleys reached on foot, inspecting registers, buildings, vessels and clergy, and leaving written orders behind.

Catechism for children. He promoted the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine across the diocese, organising Sunday schools for children run by lay volunteers. By the end of his episcopate the network was teaching tens of thousands of children, and it is the ancestor of parish religious education as Catholics still know it.

The confessional. The enclosed confessional box, with a fixed screen between priest and penitent, was introduced in Milan under his reforms and spread from there through the Catholic world. The purpose was the protection of both parties, and it is the most visible piece of church furniture anyone owes to him.

Church building. His Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae of 1577 laid down detailed norms for the building and furnishing of churches, and it was used far beyond Milan.

New clergy and new orders. He founded the Oblates of St Ambrose in 1578, a society of diocesan priests bound to the service of the archbishop, and he brought in Jesuits, Barnabites, Theatines and Capuchins to staff schools and missions. He also founded the Collegio Borromeo at Pavia in 1561 for poor students, which is still in operation.

The Plague of Milan

Plague reached Milan in 1576 and killed a large part of the population over the following two years. Milan still calls it the plague of St Charles. The governor and much of the civil administration left the city. Borromeo stayed.

He organised relief on a scale the city could not have managed otherwise: he turned his own resources and his palace to the work, sold or pledged household goods including, by contemporary account, the hangings and the plate, and arranged for the daily feeding of many thousands. He recruited clergy to serve the lazarettos, the quarantine hospitals, and buried and anointed the dying when others would not go near them.

He visited the sick himself and brought them the sacraments. Because quarantine kept people inside, he had altars erected at street crossings throughout the city so that Mass could be seen and heard from windows and doorways, which is a solution to a problem that came round again in 2020.

He also led public penitential processions, walking barefoot with a rope around his neck and carrying a relic of the Holy Nail, offering himself for the city. Whatever a modern reader makes of the theology of that gesture, the population understood precisely what he was doing, and his standing in Milan afterwards was unassailable.

Attack on his Life

His reforms were unwelcome to those who profited from the old arrangements. The sharpest conflict was with the Humiliati, an old Lombard order that had become wealthy, small and lax, and which resisted his attempt to reform it.

In October 1569 a priest of the order, Girolamo Donato, known as Il Farina, fired an arquebus at Borromeo while he knelt at evening prayer in his private chapel. The shot struck him in the back and he was bruised without being seriously wounded, apparently because the heavy embroidered vestment absorbed the charge. He continued praying and the community finished the office before anyone was allowed to move. He took the escape as a sign that God intended more work from him, and he asked for clemency for the men involved, which the civil authorities refused.

Pius V suppressed the Humiliati in 1571. Borromeo's opposition did not stop there: he was in open conflict at various times with the Spanish governors of Milan, with the cathedral canons, and with several religious houses, and he was excommunicated by nobody and threatened by many.

The Ambrosian Rite

Milan has its own liturgical rite, the Ambrosian Rite, named for St Ambrose, its fourth-century bishop. It has its own calendar, its own chant, and its own order of Mass, all older than the Roman books.

When the Tridentine reform standardised the Roman Missal in 1570, rites in continuous use for more than two hundred years were permitted to continue. Borromeo, the great enforcer of Trent, used that provision to keep the Ambrosian Rite in Milan, and he revised and republished its books rather than replacing them with the Roman ones. The Ambrosian Rite is still celebrated in the Archdiocese of Milan today, and it survives largely because he decided it should.

That decision is a useful corrective to a caricature. Borromeo enforced uniformity of discipline and defended a legitimate local tradition at the same time, on the reasoning that antiquity and continuity are themselves reasons.

Patron of Seminarians

Because of his emphasis on the education of the clergy, St. Charles is the patron saint of seminarians and catechists. He believed that ignorance was the root of much of what had gone wrong in the Church and attacked it with schools, catechism classes, preaching and printed books.

The seminary system he built is the direct ancestor of every diocesan seminary now operating. Before Trent, most priests were trained by apprenticeship to another priest, or barely trained at all. Borromeo's model, a residential house with a fixed curriculum, examinations, a rule of life and supervision by the bishop, became the norm.

He is also patron of spiritual directors and of bishops, and he is invoked against stomach ailments, a patronage that arose from the illness of his final months.

Death, Canonisation and Tomb

Borromeo drove himself hard, fasted severely and slept little, and his health failed in his mid-forties. He made a retreat at the Sacro Monte of Varallo in the autumn of 1584, returned to Milan with a fever, and died on the night of 3 November 1584, aged forty-six.

His cause moved quickly. He was canonised by Paul V on 1 November 1610, twenty-six years after his death, which for that era was very fast and reflects the pressure of Milanese devotion. He is buried in the crypt beneath the high altar of Milan Cathedral, in a rock crystal casket given by a Spanish king, and the tomb is open to visitors.

His influence on the generation after him was direct. St Francis de Sales used his Milanese model in Savoy, and reforming bishops across France, Spain and central Europe worked from the Acta of his synods.

Feast Day and Devotion

His memorial is 4 November in the general Roman calendar. In Milan it is kept as a major feast of the archdiocese.

Devotion to him is strongest in Lombardy and among clergy and seminarians everywhere. The colossal bronze and copper statue of him at Arona on Lake Maggiore, over twenty metres tall and completed in the seventeenth century, can be climbed to the head, and it was among the largest statues in the world for two centuries. Seminaries, colleges and parishes on every continent carry his name.

In art he is usually shown gaunt, in cardinal's robes, with a rope around his neck from the plague procession, and often carrying the Holy Nail.

Quotable Wisdom

"If we wish to make any progress in the service of God we must begin every day of our life with new eagerness."

The passage comes from an address he gave to the last synod he held, and the Church reads it in the Office of Readings on his memorial. The rest of it is characteristically practical. He tells the clergy that if they are teaching in church and then go home to conversation that undoes it, they will pull down with one hand what they built with the other, and he asks them to keep a little time for meditation each day, however busy they are.

What a Reader Can Take From Him

Reform yourself first, and visibly. Borromeo cut his own household before he legislated for anyone else's. Every reform he imposed he had already imposed on himself, which is why it stuck.

Show up in person. He walked to alpine parishes and stayed in a plague city that his government had abandoned. Presence is most of pastoral care and there is no substitute for it.

Fix the training. His answer to a Church in crisis was to build schools for the people who would run it in twenty years. That is a slow, unglamorous, decisive kind of work.

Write it down so others can copy it. The Acta of his synods let bishops he never met reform dioceses he never saw. Documenting a method multiplies it.

Begin every day with new eagerness. His own line, and the answer to the ordinary problem of a practice that has gone stale.

For the wider story he belongs to, see the Reformation, and for the office he held, see the priesthood.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St Charles Borromeo?

St Charles Borromeo was Archbishop of Milan from 1564 to 1584 and the leading figure in putting the Council of Trent into practice. Born in 1538 into a noble Lombard family, he was made a cardinal at twenty-one by his uncle Pope Pius IV, helped bring the Council to its conclusion in 1563, and then spent twenty years reforming his diocese through seminaries, synods, parish visitation and catechism classes. He died in 1584 at forty-six and was canonised in 1610.

What did St Charles Borromeo do during the plague of Milan?

When plague struck Milan in 1576 and the governor and much of the civil administration left, Borromeo stayed. He organised the feeding of many thousands, pledged and sold household goods to pay for relief, recruited clergy for the quarantine hospitals, visited the sick himself with the sacraments, and had altars erected at street crossings so people under quarantine could hear Mass from their windows. He also walked barefoot in penitential processions with a rope around his neck.

Who tried to assassinate St Charles Borromeo?

In October 1569 a priest of the Humiliati, an old Lombard order resisting his reform, fired an arquebus at him while he knelt at evening prayer in his chapel. The shot struck his back and left him bruised without serious injury. He finished the office before allowing anyone to move, and asked for clemency for the men involved. Pius V suppressed the Humiliati in 1571.

Why is St Charles Borromeo the patron saint of seminarians?

The Council of Trent required every diocese to found a seminary, and Borromeo built the model. He founded the Milan seminary in 1564, wrote its rule, supervised its studies and established further colleges across his province. His residential seminary with a fixed curriculum, examinations and episcopal supervision replaced the older practice of training priests by apprenticeship, and became the norm across the Church.

Did St Charles Borromeo invent the confessional box?

The enclosed confessional with a fixed screen between priest and penitent was introduced in Milan under his reforms and spread from there through the Catholic world. Its purpose was the protection of both the penitent and the confessor, and it is the most visible piece of church furniture that traces back to his episcopate.

When is the feast day of St Charles Borromeo?

His memorial is 4 November in the general Roman calendar, and it is kept as a major feast in Milan, where he is buried in the crypt beneath the high altar of the cathedral. He is patron of seminarians, catechists, bishops and spiritual directors.