The Mendicant Era - Decline and Mitigation
During the late fourteenth century and the entire fifteenth century the Carmelite Order slipped into a state of severe decline, a period characterized by a loss of original religious fervor and shocking abuses. These were unsettled times in Europe, and in those pre-Reformation years the identical problem was shared by most religious orders. While no religious order lives in a vacuum, untouched by the secular conditions around it, and while it certainly must be profoundly affected by contemporary conditions, it must still not submit or be submerged by attitudes, which are diametrically opposed to its very purpose. An epoch of inimical conditions is a call to struggle, a summons to greater effort, it is not a time for capitulation.
In 1347 the most devastating plague in European history made it grim appearance, the Black Death, the bubonic plague, which is estimated to have killed almost a third of the entire European population in the four years duration. The disease apparently originated in the Orient and was carried back to Europe about the trade routes to Italy by small animals,, particularly rats. The victims skin turned black, and he suffered excruciating pain, usually dying in a matter of hours after the disease struck. The plague reached catastrophic proportions, and the terror was increased by the terribly infectious nature of the disease and the rapidity with which it felled its victims. In some cities more than half the population perished.
The Black Death was a major catastrophe in European history, it decimated the population, caused severe economic hardships, and depleted the labor force for economic recovery. There was famine, hunger, massive looting, and the almost inevitable moral decay. Understandably, the plague wreaked immense havoc in the monastic life of the fourteenth century, killing off great segments of it membership. In a single day, for example, seventy Carmelites died in the monastery at Avignon.
In the wake of this disaster, the Order found itself dangerously depopulated: there were not enough men to fulfill the religious observances of the monastic regime in the many monasteries throughout Europe, and the number of new vocations declined radically. One fortunate result was that the Order. like many of the contemporary religious orders, began to recruit and accept young boys into the monastery for the purpose of educating them into a religious vocation, a practice that later had drastic consequences. Carmel also suffered economically, as the amount of donations and freewill offerings decreased alarmingly. Many monasteries found themselves in extreme financial need. With few men and slender financial resources, the monasteries had difficulty in maintaining proper religious observances and providing adequate intellectual and spiritual formation for their members.
Another grievous problem was the Hundred Years War, which spanned the years from 1340 to 1453. This "war" between England and France actually was not an uninterrupted period of actual fighting, but rather a long epoch of hostility in which the French eventually drove the English from the Continent.
Armies roamed the countryside, attacking each other, destroying towns and villages, causing inestimable damage. As a result of the destruction and the havoc and the constant fear of raiding armies, the people became pathetically dispirited, despairing that a final settlement would ever come. Joan of Arc's major contribution at this time was to rally the people, restore their spirit, and ultimately crystallize a patriotism, which laid the foundation for a true French nation.
The religious orders suffered immensely during the long struggle Many monasteries were destroyed in the path of the fighting armies, usually by fire. records are inexact, but it is estimated that as many as fifty Carmelite monasteries were lost during the hundred-year period. But more tragic that the actual loss of buildings was the general demoralization the war caused in the religious life. During the various battles the religious of the town or city, the Carmelites among them, frequently fought with the towns people against the detested English, sometimes they were even placed in charge of the raiding parties. This created a mood hardly conducive to the original Carmelite ideal of prayer and solitude. Thus for almost a hundred years the monasteries of France lived in a spirit of insecurity, preparedness for battle, occasional famine, financial need, and consequently a deterioration of monastic discipline.
Another damaging influence on late medieval religious life was the emergence and distortion of the new humanism and the Renaissance. The rebirth of the culture of ancient Greece and Rome, which the Renaissance represented, was not a new phenomenon which originated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Latin literature had formed the basis of most medieval education. But there was a new penetration and a new emphasis on the entire ancient culture and language and art during the late Middle Ages. The impact of this movement was felt all over Europe, and there was rush to delve deeply into the human treasures of the ancient world. The new humanism was sponsored particularly at the courts of the local princes, who patronized the new culturists and made them tutors for the children, training their charges not only in classical literature, but also in art, music, athletics, dancing, military skill, and gentlemanly bearing. The 'universal man', (Renaissance Man) as he came to be called, was then the humanist ideal.
With invention of the printing press sometime in the middle of the fifteenth century, the movement was given a new impetus. Printed material became available, and ideas were communicated more easily, including an excessive dependence on reason without faith. From its earliest beginnings the popes had patronized the Renaissance. At Avignon, Pope Clement VI (1342-1352) was an enthusiastic devotee and sponsored a number of humanists. The religious problem in the Renaissance, however, developed with the growth of an unfortunate tendency to imitate not only the culture and wisdom of the ancient past, but also its paganism and hedonism.
The presence of authentic Christian humanism seemed to be more and more overshadowed by a growing number of neopagans who lacked any Christian frame of reference, and were intent only on celebrating the physical. Gatherings at the various courts began to descend from assemblies of scholars into scenes of orgies and revels, and this was true also at the papal and ecclesiastical courts. We can note a definite and perceptible decline of morality at the papal court through the fifteenth century, until Innocent VIII (1484-1492) became the first pope to recognize his illegitimate children publicly. His successor, Alexander VI, obtained the papacy by open simony, and it seemed the papacy was at a moment of depravity. Pious people in Rome prayed aloud in the streets, fearing that God would destroy the world.
Although the Renaissance did create a boundless enthusiasm to imitate the ancient pagan world, and although it did occasion the collection of many disreputable persons at the papal courts, many other factors intervened, the Avignon papacy, the Great Schism, and just simple human corruption. There were many dedicated and enthusiastic humanists who were also sincerely Christian. The Carmelites Arnold Bostius and Blessed Baptist Spagnoli were both gifted and respected humanists,, yet they were both saintly men, conscious of their Christian vocation and yet equally conscious of their obligation to discover and penetrate the human condition.
Christian Europe witnessed the moral decline in Rome, and it had its influence in weakening moral responsibility throughout the entire Church. And the religious orders participated in this decline: there were abuses, irregularities, a breakdown in religious discipline, a failure to keep the religious vows, and flagrant immoralities, with the Carmelite Order being no exception.
As a final indignity in this time of enormous trouble, the Church found itself slit wide open by perhaps the most grievous problem in its entire history . . . the Great Western Schism.
The Avignon residency of the papacy began with Pope Clement V, who after pleading ill health and the pressure of negotiation with the French King, Philip the friar, stayed in France, finally taking up residence with the Dominicans. During his nine-year reign he provided substance to the suspicion throughout Europe that the papacy was being converted into a French institution: he allowed Philip to appropriate Church funds, he appointed seven French cardinals, and the Fifteenth General Council all recent decrees not acceptable to the French king were annulled. At the time of his death two-thirds of the conclave of cardinals were French who in turn elected another Frenchman, John XXII. John permanently established the papacy at Avignon, where it remained for almost seventy years. During this time there was a constant effort and urging among European churchmen to restore the papacy to Rome. The Avignon papacy was not a bad papacy, but the main complaint against it was its subservience to the French crown, and the growing loss of identity with the original See of peter.
The papacy was re-established in the Vatican in January 1377 by Pope Gregory XI, with the encouragement of St. Catherine of Siena. Pope Gregory XI unfortunately died a year later, and a conclave of comic opera proportions followed. Ten days after Gregory's death, sixteen cardinals of the conclave -- eleven Frenchmen, four Italians, and a Spaniard -- assembled to elect a successor. The Roman people, milling outside the conclave, clamored for the election of a Roman pope, they did not want to lose the papacy to Avignon again. On the afternoon of the eighth of April the crowd forced its way past the guards, and surged into the conclave chambers.
In the meantime the cardinals had found themselves deadlocked between two French candidates, and had decided to compromise on an Italian: they chose Bartolomeo Prignano, who was not even present at the conclave. He was not Roman, but at least he was Italian. The cardinals were uncertain of the crowd's possible reaction to Prignano, so they quickly placed the papal robes on Cardinal Tebaldershi, the aged archpriest of St. Peter's and presented him to the Romans as their new pope. Then they took to hiding while awaiting the arrival of Prignano in Rome. His reception was remarkably peaceful; the people accepted him enthusiastically, the cardinal reassembled and reaffirmed their election; and Prignano took the name of Urban VI.
Urban VI set to work immediately to cleanse the Curia of many abuses that had developed in Avignon, he began to engage in public disputes with the cardinals, calling them to their face liars, traitors, and simoniacs. Whatever good he was attempting to accomplish, he greatly impaired it by his extraordinary lack of tact and prudence. When the cardinals began to leave Rome because of the hot weather, they gradually assembled in Agani, in the kingdom of Naples, and engaged in some long soul searching about the election of Urban VI.
They concluded that the freedom of the conclave was destroyed by the fear of violence from the threatening mob outside, and that consequently Urban was not validly elected. They issued a manifest to that effect and went into conclave again, electing a Frenchman, who took the name Clement VII. Urban promptly excommunicated Clement and the entire College of Cardinals, and appointed another whole college. Clement in turn excommunicated Urban. The Great Western Schism had begun.
Clement took up his residence with his college of cardinals at Avignon, and Urban remained in Rome with his group, and for the next thirty-nine years the Church was submitted to the sorry spectacle of two men with considerable followings, each claiming to be the true pontiff. And after the Council of Pisa in 1409 attempted to end the schism, there were three claimants to the papacy. The Church was split down the middle, with two Curia, two sets of legates, conflicting bulls of excommunication, and two organizations for the collection of money. The various religious orders followed suit and they divided according to their allegiance to one or the other of the two claimants, and thus there were two superior generals for each order and two different administrations. The nation of Europe followed their political interests rather than an appraisal of the facts in selecting their allegiance. The religious orders followed the same principle, and thus individual religious were not given any choice in the matter, they simply followed the allegiance of the nation.
The Carmelite general at the outbreak of the schism was Bernard Oller, a native of Catalonia and consequently a sympathizer of the Clementist faction. However, at Rome he prudently tried to hold the Order together and prevent a division. While allowing his sympathies to be known to the Clementist countries, he managed to retain the loyalty of the Urbanist faction in Rome. This fragile regime endured for two years until finally the suspicions of Urban VI were confirmed, and he deposed Oller from office. Michael of Bologna, whom Oller had already assigned as vicar general for "Urbanist affairs," was placed in the office of general by Urban, and in the following year he was duly elected at a chapter held in Rome. Oller retired to Avignon where he continued as general of the Clementist faction. The split in the Carmelite Order had been accomplished.
Michael of Bologna possessed an outstanding reputation as a scholar. A doctor from the University of Paris, a professor at the University of Bologna, he became one of the two leading Carmelite theologians of the late Middle Ages--the other was John Baconthorpe. However, Michael was less successful as an administrator in Rome. e allowed the financial situation to deteriorate, and Urban VI began to suspect him of Clementist tendencies. After a long, tedious canonical trial, the pope had Michael deposed from office. He had two successors.
The period of the Great Schism was a time of confusion and uncertainty, as well as a time of bitter hostility. Viewing the Schism from the dispassionate viewpoint of the twentieth century and examining all the documentation, historians generally agree that Urban VI was the legitimate pope. But the average citizen of the fourteenth century lacked the evidence we now possess. There were sincere and honest people to be found on both sides of the question: St. Vincent Ferrer and St. Collette support Avignon, and St. Catherine of Siena and St. Catherine of Sweden support Rome.
The one happy factor for the Carmelite Order in the confusion of the Pisan Council was that it prepared the way for the reunification of the Order. The Pisan pope, Alexander V, was a Franciscan, and was thus concerned about the divided condition of the religious orders. In an attempt to unite the Carmelites, he named the Avignon general, John Grossi, as general of the entire Order. This nomination was not accepted immediately by the Roman faction, but in the end the Order solved its problems of division six years before the Council of Constance was able to end the papal schism.
Grossi remained in office for nineteen years: during his vigorous administration he attempted to pull the Order out of its continuing descent; he made numerous visitations, enacted disciplinary decrees, convoked a series of general chapters, founded more monasteries, and even established the new provinces of Touraine and Bohemia. But he had no more than limited success in these efforts, and was not able to dispel the general mood of decadence within the order. A man of intelligence, tact and sensitivity, Grossi must be regarded in history as one of the outstanding generals of the order.
Among the many personal abuses of the Carmelites in this age of decline, one of the most fundamental was a general relaxation in the practice of the vow of poverty. Technically, the religious is obliged to relinquish all moneys when they entered the Order, and all moneys, which subsequently came to them in any way, should have been given to the Order; and the Order had the obligation of providing for its members. But grave abuses in these obligations began to be accepted as common practice.
Many Carmelites continued to participate in the revenue from their family estates, inheritances, and regular financial assistance from their relatives. The superiors, in turn, allowed men to retain money they acquired through preaching, teaching, and the copying of books. An unhealthy class system thus developed between affluent and the poor Carmelites, which engendered a spirit of avariciousness. Some of the Carmelites led comfortable lives with an abundance of material possessions, while others who came from poorer backgrounds were reduced to an almost impoverished state. The lay brothers, for instance, frequently adopted the practice of selling the vegetables they had secretly taken from the monastery garden so they could provide themselves with what they needed.
The teachers and university professors furthermore acquired a host of privileges, which placed them on a special plane elevated above their confreres. In addition to retaining their salaries, they were for all practical purposes dispensed from most of the community acts of the monastic schedule, even from the recitation of the Office. They were allowed to purchase their own food and eat in their rooms, rather than in the community refectory. And they could hire a servant to clean their rooms, prepare their meals, and wait on them.
In that age of easy dispensation, a little money could induce a variety of privileges from Rome. Those Carmelites who had not obtained an academic degree could apply for an indult from Rome. These so-called doctors by papal bull could then teach, and participate in the excessive privileges of the professors. Another document that could be readily obtained from Rome would declare the person bishop, which could be used to dispense oneself from any obligation to community or superior.
Europe was dotted with many thousands of revenue-producing churches, which returned an income to their holders for their endowments. After the Black Death, many of these smaller benefices fell vacant, and religious priests, Carmelites among them, eagerly applied for the title to these sources of income. They were willingly granted on the form of such as the occasional celebration of a Mass, but more often than not, there was no service required of any kind, and the chaplain merely collected his income.
The practice introduced after the Black Death of bringing young boys into the monastery began to pay grim dividends. These boys, some of them as young as eight years of age, were presented to the monasteries for the purpose of educating them into a religious vocation. They pronounced their religious vows at such an immature age that they could not have an accurate understanding of the religious life or the dimensions of their commitment. When they reached a more mature age they frequently discovered that they had no vocation, but were obliged by serious and binding vows. This produced generations of less than adequate and dedicated Carmelites, and this lowered the whole tone and spirit of dedication in the Order. Another sad effect was the reduction of the number of competent men to hold the office of superior, and consequently inadequate and grossly incapable men governed many of the numerous monasteries in Europe.
The cumulative result of all these irregularities was a vast breakdown in monastic discipline, and an amazing infidelity to the original aspiration of the prophetic vocation. The fast and abstinence of the Order were not maintained. Silence and solitude became a thing of the past, as the friars left the monastery on any pretext, and immersed themselves in the amusements and entertainments of the day. There also were reports of concubinage and illicit affairs.
Throughout this long, shameful period of more than a century and a half, there were almost constant admonitions by the general chapters pleading with the men for a return to regular observance. These admonitions, although unsuccessful, indicate that there was a wiser and saner segment in the Order, which deplored the current condition.
At the chapter of Nantes, confronted by the general breakdown in monastic discipline, the fathers chose to seek a solution by that most hazardous of routes: an expedient compromise born out of fear and uncertainty, the mitigation of the Carmelite Rule. Since so many of the Carmelites were not following the Rule, they argued, a solution might be found by mitigating the Rule and lessening its severity, thereby making legal and official that which was already being done in practice. If the Carmelites would or could not follow the Rule, they claimed, then the Rule must be changed and modified to a level where there was no excuse for infidelity. The men who were not following the original Rule did not practice the new one with any greater fidelity, and the men who were attempting to be faithful deplored and contested this further deterioration of the Order for it was a radical departure from the prophetic vocation.
The actual changes suggested by the chapter fathers concerned only the three items of solitude, fast, and abstinence, but it created a violent reaction from the contemporary Carmelites, who realized what the changes implied: these reductions in solitude and austerity would profoundly change the inner spirit of the Order and its original vision. The prophetic vocation, the imitation of the prophet Elijah, demanded solitude and an intensive program of penance, and with an abandonment of this tradition the Order was beginning a further confused descent.
The long fast from September 14 to Easter was reduced to three days a week, and Carmelites were free to leave their cells and walk around the precincts of the monastery, presumably talking and conversing freely. A true spirit of solitude and pray was now destroyed. What the mitigation had done to the Order was to reduce it to a community of active clerics who were only tenuously and historically united to the old prophets of Mount Carmel. For almost a century and a half the Carmelites who were trying to preserve intact the nature of the original vocation struggled to overcome the new burdens placed upon the by the mitigation.
From almost the very moment of the mitigation a vigorous reform movements developed in the Order, attempting to recapture the original spirit and ideals. Three things should be noted about these reform movements pf the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: first, they all ultimately unsuccessful, second, these movements include a great number of dedicated and saintly Carmelites, and third, they gave clear indication and expression of the fact that the original spirit was not dead - it only required something or someone to revitalize it.
One of the better-known men of this time was Blessed John Baptist Spagnoli. He was a man particularly devoted to the Blessed Sacrament, and Pope Pius X proposed him as a special model of virtue for young students. But his unique claim to fame is that he was not only a holy Carmelite and an incessant worker for ecclesiastical reform, but that he was also recognized as one of Europe's outstanding humanists and perhaps the greatest Latin poet of the Renaissance. Thus he proved the fact that humanist and sanctity were not at all incompatible, that one helped the other, and that the excesses and pagan distortions of many humanists did not have to be. Spagnoli was elected general of the entire Order in 1513 at the age of sixty-six and in quite poor health. There were high hopes that this saintly man would bring about effective reform measures in the Order, but the ailing prior general lived only three years, and his administration was insignificant.
Another well-known man of the time was Blessed John Soreth, who stressed the obligations of poverty, solitude, and fidelity to the religious vows. He was an indefatigable traveler for the cause of reform, visiting monasteries all over Europe, preaching against abuses and excessive privileges, which were destroying community life. Soreth was a gentle and sympathetic person, quietly urging his men, encouraging them to a more dedicated form of life. But despite his compassion and his vigorous efforts at reform, his admonitions were generally unheeded. His most enduring accomplishment was the foundation of the Carmelite nuns, and the Carmelite Third Order. His efforts with the Third Order seemed to parallel his work with the Second Order. His rule attempted to follow the broad outlines of the Rule of St. Albert, and there is marked insistence upon his constant theme: continual prayer. He prescribes fast and abstinence for the tertiaries, and obliges them to recite the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin, which could be commuted into a number pf Paters and Aves.
A unique factor of Soreth's rule, distinguishing it from all other third orders, was the profession of a vow of obedience and a vow of chastity according to one's state of life. Soreth's practice of the two vows for secular members endured throughout the centuries, and today Carmelite tertiaries are the only Third Order secular members in the Church who pronounce vows.
A successor of Blessed John Soreth was Nicholas Audet, who published a book, which outlined the principle abuses of the Order and the lamentable state into which it had fallen. He suggested the same basic area of reform as his predecessors, but again this voice of renewal fell on dead ears. It was during Audet's forty-year administration that the catastrophe that had been feared by many churchmen, the Protestant Reformation, took lace in Europe.
On October 31, 1517, q thirty-four-year-old Augustinian friar named Martin Luther tacked a list of ninety-five theses on the church door at Wittenberg in Saxony, attacking the doctrine of indulgences and the taxes levied on the Germans by the Italian Curia. Luther's action was catalytic, unleashing a vast and far-reaching series of reactions with such force and rapidity, that some prominent churchmen refused for a long time to believe what was really happening.
The indulgence controversy enabled churchmen and statesmen to turn their grievances against the Church into a form of an open revolt. The age of the national state and the absolute prince was underway, and these new national princes found the power of Rome and the Church's taxation system both restrictive and oppressive. There were also present healthy religious movements, which wished to return to a more simple evangelical spirituality with a greater emphasis on the experiential contact with God. And there were the grievous evils in the Renaissance Church: the moral faults, nepotism, the Inquisition, monetary abuses, the absentee bishops, and the juridicism of the Roman Curia. Within seventy-five years half of Europe was lost to the Lutheran faith, and the Church was almost totally destroyed in large regions of Europe. Churches and ecclesiastical properties were either destroyed or confiscated, priests and nuns were either interdicted of force to flee, and the practice of the Catholic religion was forbidden by state decree.
The Carmelite Order fell with the Church in the defecting areas, and in a matter of decades the Order was completely eradicated in the Protestant territories. In England, for instance, the Carmelite province of almost three hundred men just disappeared. During the reign of Henry VIII the monasteries were confiscated, and the men were turned into the streets with no compensation. Many of them signed an Oath of Supremacy, returning to lay ecclesiastics, and many others went underground as "outlaw priests," conferring the sacraments secretly until the time of their death.
The Protestant Reformation thus compounded Carmel's already staggering problems immeasurably. In one gigantic blow almost half the Order suddenly disappeared. Some of the men fled to other provinces in the Catholic countries, some of them defected to the Protestantism in its various forms, and some remained to work as clandestine missionary priests in their own countries. But without the usual slow and agonizing pains of imminent death, the Order was swiftly and astonishingly dead in the Protestant countries. And still the agonizing need for reform remained and still nothing was accomplished.
From 1524, in Venice, when Nicholas Audet was elected, there is a continuing and plaintive plea for reform for the next twenty-five years. There is a call for "universal reform i the Order" and a decree that "the life of all our brothers in the entire Order be reformed for the honor of God and the Blessed Virgin, and the preservation and growth of our holy Order." And again, a command "to use all their energy to introduce and promote, sincerely and honestly a true reformation of the monasteries and the brethren extirpating every impropriety and scandal." And another urging by the priors to maintain religious observance and adherence tot he law, "In all things which pertain to the reformation of our Order and the regular life."
Carmel miserably mutilated by the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation, and still burdened by the weight of it decadence, was looking for the road back to its original vision.
The restoration of the Carmelite spirit, that urgent task which could not be accomplished by Grossi, Soreth, Audet, and the other sincere reformers, was finally achieved by the most improbable of persons: an unschooled Carmelite Nun from the walled city of Avila in Spain.
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