Italy has a number of significant anniversaries that fall of November 4th:
1918 – Austria-Hungary signed the armistice of Villa Giusti, ending WWI on the Italian front — why today is Italy’s National Unity and Armed Forces Day
1737 – Teatro di San Carlo, Europe’s oldest active opera house, opened in Naples
1852 – Cavour became Prime Minister of Piedmont-Sardinia; he was the architect of Italian unification
1966 – The Arno flooded Florence, damaging millions of books and works of art.
But perhaps most significant of all, November 4th is the Feast of San Carlo Borromeo.
I realise that asking an Anglican community to commemorate one of the Counter-Reformation’s most effective administrators – it is a bit like studying the away team’s best player. But he repays the attention.
Borromeo was born in 1538 at Arona on Lake Maggiore, into a family of Milanese bankers — his mother was a Medici. When his uncle became Pope Pius IV in 1559, Carlo was made a cardinal at twenty-two and archbishop of Milan soon after: renaissance nepotism in its purest form. The interesting part is what came next. Milan’s archbishops had been absentees for nearly a century, collecting the revenues from the diocese while living in Rome. However, on his appointment, Carlo Borromeo resigned as papal secretary of state and actually moved to his diocese, a decision so unusual it made him famous across Europe.
He then ran Milan as though the Council of Trent were an operating manual rather than a set of ideals: he walked into Alpine valleys that had never seen their archbishop — and founded seminaries, because he concluded that most pastoral failures were training failures. His legislation was published as the Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis and copied by dioceses across the Catholic world: essentially the first exportable manual of how to run a diocese. When plague struck Milan in 1576, he stayed, walked the streets, and sold the archiepiscopal tapestries to fund the hospitals.
Two things you may not know. First: he was shot. In 1569 his attempts to reform the order of the Humiliati provoked three of its priors to hire an assassin, a priest named Girolamo Donati, who fired point-blank at him while he was at evening prayer; miraculously, the bullet only grazed him. Borromeo asked for clemency for the shooter, who was hanged anyway, and the order was suppressed. Even a parish visitation could draw fire: when he tried to enter the church of Santa Maria della Scala, a canon was shot at him and hit the cross he was carrying.
Second, Borromeo ordered every Milanese parish to keep accurate records of baptisms, marriages and burials — among the first systematic rules anywhere, and a direct ancestor of civil registration.
At Arona you can climb inside the thirty-five-metre copper statue of him and look out through its ears. His motto was Humilitas, which, for a man memorialised like that, has a certain irony.
Whatever we make of his theology, he remains history’s most complete argument that reform can come from a saintly bishop. Let us keep our own Bishops, Robert & Andrew, in our thoughts today, as well as Italy’s armed forces.
And while making much of the 4th November in Italy’s calendar, I might also note what a significant date today is for another great democracy, as the United States comes to terms with the results of its mid term’s election. Let us hope that the presidency’s flirtation with autocracy and moral degeneracy is now coming to an end. God bless America, and God bless Italy!