Charles Borromeo

Charles Borromeo was made a cardinal at twenty-two by his uncle the pope, and then became the most effective reforming bishop of the Counter-Reformation. The appointment was pure nepotism - the word comes from exactly this practice - and he ran the papal administration for Pius IV as secretary of state, a young man with enormous revenues from benefices he had never visited. The death of his elder brother in 1562 changed him: he was expected to leave the church and continue the family line, refused, had himself ordained, and thereafter lived austerely. He was the decisive figure in reconvening the Council of Trent for its final session and in getting its decrees drafted and then actually enforced, which most bishops had no intention of doing. As archbishop of Milan from 1564 he held provincial councils and diocesan synods on a schedule nobody had kept, founded seminaries to train priests who could read, visited every parish in an enormous diocese including the alpine valleys, and suppressed the Umiliati order after some of its members hired a priest to shoot him at prayer; the shot wounded him and he continued the service. During the plague of 1576 he stayed in Milan when the governor and much of the nobility left, organised food and shelter for tens of thousands, sold the family plate, and walked barefoot in procession with a rope round his neck. He also wrote instructions on church architecture that shaped how Catholic churches were built for two centuries. He died at forty-six and was canonised in 1610. St Charles Borromeo churches exist on every continent, and Milan keeps his body in a crystal casket in the cathedral crypt. The Borromeo family still owns the islands in Lake Maggiore. His cousin Federico Borromeo founded the Ambrosian Library in Milan and appears in Manzoni s novel of the same plague.

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