Pope Paul III approves the rule of a new order at Tivoli

TIVOLI, Papal States, this week, September 1539 AD — At Tivoli this week Pope Paul III approved the Formula of the Institute — the five-chapter rule of the new order that ten priests are asking his permission to found — after Cardinal Gasparo Contarini read it aloud to him. The Pope ordered that a bull or brief be drawn up at Rome.

The five chapters are the work of ten priests, all Masters of the University of Paris, who have worked together in Italy for years without a rule and without a superior of their own. This spring they met in the evenings for three months, in the house of Antonio Frangipani at the tower dei Melangolo in Rome. They had one question to settle: whether to add a vow of obedience to one of their own number and become an order, or stay as they were, a group of secular priests. They decided for obedience, and the decision was unanimous. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the man they had left to draft, put what they had settled into five sections.

What they were asking for is not a small thing. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 AD forbade anyone to found a new religious order, and told whoever wanted to enter religious life to enter one already approved. The Second Council of Lyons of 1274 AD renewed that prohibition, and suppressed the orders founded since Lateran IV that had not won the confirmation of the apostolic see. The danger the ten weighed in the spring was that the Pope, in taking them up, would impose one of the ancient rules on them and end everything new in what they do.

Cardinal Contarini wrote out what happened at Tivoli in his own hand and signed it. His attestation reads: “I, G. Cardinal Contarini, attest that at Tivoli I read the above five decrees to our Holy Father, leaving out the introduction and final conclusion. His Holiness understood them and approved them, and authorized that a bull or brief should be drawn up, whichever seemed better, in accordance with the report of the Master of the Sacred Palace, whom His Holiness had instructed through me to report what he thought after due reflection on the matter. I have written this with my own hand and signed it.”

The introduction he left out is long. It is drafted in the Pope’s own voice, for the Pope’s signature. It names all ten men. The document spells them Ignatius de Loyola, Pierre Favre, Diego Laynez, Claude Jay, Paschase Broët, Francisco Xavier, Alfonso Salmerón, Simão Rodrigues, Jean Codure and Nicolás de Bobadilla. The dioceses it gives for them are Pamplona, Geneva, Siguenza, Toledo, Vizeu, Embrun and Palencia. It calls them poor priests of Christ from various parts of the world. They joined into one body by their own free choice, the document says, with the Holy Spirit impelling them. What they give their lives to is the service of Jesus Christ and of his vicar on earth.

The draft says they have worked for years in the Lord’s vineyard “by publicly preaching the word of God, by privately exhorting, by hearing confessions, by directing people in holy meditations, by serving in hospitals, by pilgrimaging, by teaching children and the uninitiated what is necessary for the instruction of a Christian”. Then it states their request: that a man the Pope appoints should consider whether their way of living agrees with the evangelical counsels and the teaching of the fathers, and that it then be blessed and approved. What they want, in the document’s words, is to take everything experience has shown them works and “solidify in writing and by the bond of obedience”.

The conclusion he left out is the answer. It declares the way of life worthy of praise, approves it and blesses it. It receives the way of life under the protection of the Holy See. And it gives the ten the faculty to draw up particular constitutions of their own. The five chapters are not those constitutions. They are the summary of the rule; the constitutions would come after, and only if the faculty to write them is granted. Cardinal Contarini read the Pope the middle of the document and none of the frame.

The examination the request asked for had already been made. The Pope gave the text to Tommaso Badia, a Dominican from Modena who has taught theology at Ferrara, Venice and Rome and has held the office of Master of the Sacred Palace since 1523 AD, as the record has it. The Master of the Sacred Palace is the Pope’s own theologian, an office always held by a Dominican. Badia reported that the whole intent of the Society seemed to him good and holy, and that the summary of the rule the men wish to follow is contained in the five decrees. The Pope’s further instruction at Tivoli, passed through Cardinal Contarini, was that Badia should think the matter over again and report.

The ten had wanted to hand the paper to the Pope in person, with nobody in between. They used Cardinal Contarini because the Pope was about to leave Rome and they did not want to wait until he came back.

The cardinal they used is not a bystander. Cardinal Contarini is a Venetian who served as his republic’s ambassador to the court of the Emperor Charles V, and Pope Paul III made him a cardinal in 1535 AD. He presided over the commission the Pope appointed in 1536 AD to report on the abuses of the Roman curia, and its programme, the Consilium de emendanda ecclesia (Advice on reforming the Church), went in early in 1537 AD. He made the Spiritual Exercises under St. Ignatius. He thought so much of the book that he copied the whole of it out in his own hand. He had already told the Pope that the ten men’s manner of life is praised by many, and that some would like to follow it.

Tivoli is where the papal court passes the summer, and where business can be put before the Pope in his presence, away from the city.

None of the ten was in the room. Paschase Broët and Simão Rodrigues are at Siena, asked for and sent there to reform a monastery, with Francisco Strada, who is about twenty. Strada wrote to St. Ignatius from Siena this week. The citizens of Montepulciano have written to him more than once asking him to come to them. The prior and gonfalonier of the people of Montepulciano wrote to the men at Rome on August 26, addressing them as the brothers of the company of pilgrim priests.

St. Peter Faber and Diego Laínez are at Parma. They travelled with Ennio Filonardi, Cardinal of Saint Angelo, who left Rome on June 20. St. Peter Faber set down the departure in his memorial: “Master Laínez and I set out from Rome for Parma by order of the Pontiff, with the cardinal of Saint Angelo.” The men who left Rome gave their votes to the men staying. That let St. Ignatius and the others in Rome settle the form of life and ask for confirmation in the names of all ten.

The work in Rome has gone on through this year: charity, settling quarrels, and help given to men of standing. Cardinal Contarini is one of those men. Another is Doctor Pedro Ortiz, the Emperor’s envoy at Rome, to whom St. Ignatius gave the full forty days of the Exercises at Monte Cassino last year. Pietro Codacio, a Lombard from Lodi who gave up a considerable church income this year to join them, begs the alms that keep the rented house and carries their business through the offices.

The approval covered the whole of the formula, and the Pope praised it in no small measure, as Cardinal Contarini’s letter shows. The cardinal wrote to St. Ignatius the same day. Jerónimo Nadal, who preserves the saying, records the words of Pope Paul III when the fathers offered their form of life for confirmation: Spiritus Dei est hic (the Spirit of God is here).

Nothing is sealed. A word from the Pope is not a bull, and the text still has to be written out at Rome as a bull or brief, with Badia’s second report behind it, and then signed. The Pope has given the drawing up of it first to Cardinal Girolamo Ghinucci, whose office is prefect in the signing of briefs. A brief is the short form of papal letter, drawn up without the formalities a bull requires, written on vellum and sealed in red wax with the ring of the fisherman. Until that document is signed, the ten men are what they were last week: priests under no rule, working in Rome and in Parma and Siena, with the Pope’s word and nothing on parchment.