Scenes of Clerical Life
HITTINGER, RUSSELL
Scenes of Clerical Life The life of a seventeenth-century bishop makes an improbably good book. BY RUSSELL HITTINGER In 1987 Craig Harline and Eddy Put discovered, in an archive in Belgium, the...
...Cathedral chapters, however, were not easily subdued...
...There were no vacations, retirement plans, or rehab clinics for recalcitrant clergy...
...not to mention various and sundry rights of glass makers, fishers, dance teachers, and anyone "fleeing from soldiers...
...By telling this tale from the bishop's point of view, Harline and Put take us into the vicinity of the real story of the counter-reformation, which proves to have had less to do with theological doctrines and polemics than with reform of daily religious practices...
...But as Harline and Put read Hovius's daybook they began to see that the bishop's life, like a Brueghel painting, illuminated an exotic, cluttered, and unfinished world of religion and politics in the Netherlands, which was, in so many ways, the seedbed of modernity for Catholics and Protestants alike...
...And all of this was to be governed with an administrative staff smaller than that of a very small diocese in the United States today...
...Mathias Hovius was born in 1542 in the Spanish Netherlands (which included what is today Belgium, northwestern France, and the southern part of Holland...
...Reform for Hovius never meant destroying the religious culture...
...When the bishop tried to enforce the reforms, he fought "against tradition, against chestfulls of sprawling noble genealogies and papal bulls...
...Rich in commerce, schools, and the arts, the Netherlands as a whole had nineteen cities with more than ten thousand inhabitants (Britain at the time had four...
...Church wardens and magistrates had rights...
...dividing them into a Protestant republic in the north and Catholic provinces, ruled by Spain, in the south...
...Hovius was the shepherd of 450 parishes (400 of them rural), 13 chapters of secular clergy, with 11 rural deans, 75 convents and hospitals, 175 monastic foundations, and some 24 lay confraternities...
...BY RUSSELL HITTINGER In 1987 Craig Harline and Eddy Put discovered, in an archive in Belgium, the daybook of Mathias Hovius, Catholic primate of the Low Countries from 1596 to 1620...
...the right of butchers to make sausage after Vespers on feast days...
...In fact, everyone had rights...
...Archbishop Hovius insisted that the secular arm enforce proper respect for the Sabbath and Holy Days...
...Laity had customary rights to apportion tithes to crop, season, and a myriad of other special circumstances...
...Eventually exposed as a fraud on all counts, he was sentenced to solitary confinement with no visitors "except his lawyer...
...Hovius recognized that religious reform could no longer rely on this armature of the state...
...Certainly not to Protestant authority...
...A Bishop's Tale reminds us that the old religion shaped a culture that would not easily surrender its diverse customs and liberties—good or bad— to "modern" authority...
...That kind of radical revolution wouldn't come until two centuries later, when, in 1789, the French revolutionary armies swept into the Low Lands and sacked the town of Meche-len once again...
...midwives raising stillborn babies from the dead...
...A Bishop's Tale is organized around sixteen dates, beginning in April 1580, when Hovius hid in a wooden wardrobe while the city of Mechelen was plundered by Calvinists, and ending in May 1620 with his death at the age of seventy-eight...
...Only Hovius's dogged persistence would win this one small increment of reform in a single nunnery...
...Nor was it clear which persons and institutions the bishop was entitled to govern...
...In the diocese of Mechelen, nuns of the Abbey of Grand Bigard, a twelfth-century foundation, produced ancient papal seals certifying their exemption from the local ordinary, if not from the walls themselves...
...Harline and Put's A Bishop's Life is the history book of the year—and perhaps simply the book of the year...
...Unlike Italy, Spain, and most of France, the Netherlands was a place where Catholicism had to compete with Protestant churches...
...shall abstain from unlawful hunting, hawking, dancing, taverns, and games...
...Hovius did not hesitate to deploy his diocesan bailiffs or secular police in some cases, but these were used sparingly...
...vagrant mystics and exorcists edifying and fleecing the flock...
...Hovius's town of Mechelen was at the geographical center of the religious wars that had devastated the Low Countries, Russell Hittinger is Warren Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa...
...That is also when the chest containing the heart of Mathias Hovius finally disappeared from the cathedral of Mechelen—along with the rich world in which he had lived...
...Priests, too, had rights—to tithes, to quartering their animals in church during certain seasons...
...but, as the archbishop was reminded every day, not to episcopal authority either...
...But the Sabbath decree of 1598 had to recognize rights of millers to work after five in the afternoon...
...parishes rebelling over tithes...
...In reconstructing the story of Bishop Hovius, the authors have given us a book of actual history that reads like the very best historical fiction...
...When he began his work, Hovius had authority to name pastors in only 67 of his 450 parishes...
...Though the Council of Trent had many characteristics of a "modern" reform movement—above all, in its ambition to make practices conform to documents—A Bishop's Life demonstrates that it was not, in fact, a revolution...
...In its twenty-fifth session, the Council of Trent decreed that bishops, "under pain of eternal malediction," and princes, "under pain of excommunication," must restore walls enclosing convents...
...We are introduced, for example, to the apostolic protonotary Henri Costerius, expert on werewolves, relics, and ecclesiastical law...
...Trent decreed: "They shall . . . at all times wear a becoming dress, both in and out of church...
...Over the course of two decades as bishop, Hovius would ordain more than eight thousand priests, deacons, and sub-deacons...
...Harline and Put conclude that "not even in the control of its pastors was the church of the Catholic Reformation the monolith it was later imagined to be...
...The cast of characters and situations surpasses anything in Trollope's ecclesiastical novels: clerical hens laying their eggs on the altar...
...This was a culture of incessant litigation...
...At the outset, the reader is made aware of the fantastic size and institutional complexity of the archdiocese of Mechelen...
...Jesuits crossing diocesan boundaries to poach upon vocations...
...In twenty-six sessions, drawn out over eighteen years, the Council of Trent (1545-63) initiated quite detailed disciplinary reforms...
...He had to win over the diocese by what must have seemed frus-tratingly small increments of reform: installing semi-public confessionals (the private "reconciliation rooms" were a source of much mischief), erecting a new convent enclosure, or persuading an abbey to cough up its income to support a seminary...
...Neither the Oxf^^d Dictionary of the Christian Church nor the Catholic Encyclopedia deems him worthy of an entry...
...Although that council is usually described as creating Vatican centralization, it in fact made the local bishops chiefly responsible for enforcing its decrees: Rome produced the paperwork, but the bishops had to accomplish the reform...
...At issue for Hovius was not whether the Low Countries would yield to Rome, but whether the archdiocese of Mechelen would yield to its own bishop...
...More than half the convents were similarly exempt...
...The crown had the right to nominate bishops, important abbots, and canonries, as well as the right to make decisions about the administration and disposition of any church properties touched by its patronage...
...One hundred of his monasteries were "exempt," meaning that they came either under Roman jurisdiction or under the patronage of the prince and of various noble families...
...Even as we sympathize with the archbishop, who is thrown from crisis to crisis, we can just as well appreciate the splendid comedy of old-world Catholicism...
...Canonries were the most entrenched, and often corrupt, power in the diocese...
...Scholasters who oversaw education had rights to supervise and approve all schools, and these often conflicted with extra-territorial rights enjoyed by religious orders such as the Jesuits...
...and be distinguished for such integrity of manners, as that they may with justice be called the senate of the Church...
...Given the politics of the era, this was easier said than done...
...They made appeals to the apostolic nuncio in Brussels, appeals to Rome, and appeals to the archduke's privy council...
...Nobles often had rights to tithes, which they had purchased from priests or other ecclesiastics...
...A single convent could come under four different jurisdictions: Rome, the crown, a mother-house in another country, and the bishop...
...Restoration of political order, however, did not solve the problem that consumed Hovius's episcopal career, which was reform of the Church...
...A semblance of order was restored in 1598 when Philip II made his daughter Isabella and her cousin Albert the archduchess and archduke of the Catholic provinces...
...rights of exemption for bakers when there are three feast days in a row...
...Archbishop Hovius often had occasion to be reminded of his episcopal motto, "Patience Conquers the Mighty...
...and every manner of sexual mischief, decorously called "peasant games," between priests and nuns...
...sporting canons abandoning choir for a leisurely life of trout-fishing...
...Each chapter begins with a discrete event—usually a crisis—and then opens like the panels of a triptych, letting us see the circumambient life of the bishop in his diocese...
...As a young man, Hovius had seen his city sacked by English, Dutch, and Spanish armies...
...And they had to do so in the face of a bewildering array of entrenched rights, customs, privileges, and overlapping jurisdictions having the pedigree of centuries...
...The authors were surprised to discover how the "hiring of lawyers was common among even rural folk of modest means...
...Though Archbishop Hovius gave his episcopal blessing to the execution of Anna Utenhove (who in 1597 was buried alive in a field outside Brussels for refusing to recant her membership in an Anabaptist fellowship, the "Family of Love"), it was the last public execution for heresy in the Netherlands...
...For the latter, the bishop often had to resort to locking clergy in bedrooms of his own residence...
...Catholicism would have to win by providing a better product in the religious marketplace...
...In an era of European history replete with great saints and scoundrels, scholars and polemicists, explorers and artists, there is no special reason anyone should remember Archbishop Hovius...
Vol. 6 • January 2001 • No. 17
