The Guise of Reform

When Pope Pius IV died on the ninth of December in 1565, neither Rome nor the world around Rome looked very promising. Even the glitter of the New World was beginning to tarnish, for beyond the waved ocean lay many of the same problems of the old lands. besides new human and material burdens. As a malaise, the situation has some familiar ring in these years after the enthusiasms of man’s walk on the moon. An increasing cynicism about new things and achievements has promoted indifference to excellence and invention under the guise of cultural pluralism; the term New World has become suspect, and the past generation’s romance about space exploration has degenerated into nature mysticism and an obsession with the extinction of Planet Earth. As for pluralism, the philosophers of indifferentism would be scandalized by Saul Bellow’s very sensible question: “Where is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him.” In 1565, the temptation to a cultural and moral depression similar to ours was not so ideological or stupid. A new maturity about the new lands was the more positive gift of discovery, and man was beginning to learn that there is a difference between exploration and running away from home and that there is no hope for society or the soul that does not begin at home. It is a lesson we are being taught by the distress of our native culture. It was that way more than four centuries ago, too, and has always been so. If the late Renaissance world was reassessing its hopefulness about the new age abroad, its domestic analysis was also sobering.

In the dying days of Pius IV, the condition of the European homeland hurt even more than the new colonies, for civilization hung in the balance with the Turk menacing Hungary and, if Hungary, then all Europe. The next year, the Turks would actually dare to lay siege to Szigetvár as only the beginning of raucous threats. Fortifying Rome and funding the war with Islam cost the papal coffers hundreds of thousands of scudi; there was little left to rehabilitate the Papal States and to finance reforms in the Church. And for reform the Church’s better angels cried, for Islam was from without, but heresy was from within, and the ecumenical council that had closed two years earlier had barely begun to be understood. The previous year, Protestantism had been restored to England and was spreading through Germany and Austria and the Lowlands; 1562 had seen a Dutch conspiracy to drive Cardinal Granvelle from power and Calvinism had secured the freedom of its own French cities. Under Luther’s guise of reform and renewal, an entire ecclesiastical revision was under way, and the confusion he caused was made noisier by Melancthon and Calvin, who claimed that what they were doing was Catholic while what they were destroying was not Catholic but “Papist”. They had sympathizers in Rome and among the bishops and were artful in exploiting the new medium of the press, though the proliferation