Vigils Reading – St Charles Borromeo

THE LEGACY OF

ST CHARLES BORROMEO

From a homily by Fr Ronald Knox2

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When our Lord’s apostles came to look back upon that terrible night in the

Lake of Galilee, when they strained every nerve against the tempest while their

Master lay sleeping in the boat, they found in it an allegory of their own

situation, as they launched out the frail bark of his Church upon waves so

troubled, with prospects so uncertain. And in every age the Church has looked

back to that picture and taken comfort from it in times of adversity. [With great

confidence], the Church of God, which is Peter’s boat, has breasted the waves all

through her troubled history. It is not upon the captain’s judgment or the pilot’s

experience, not human wisdom or human prudence, that she depends for her

safe voyage: she rests secure in the presence of her inviolable passenger.

Yet we should do ill if we grudged recognition and gratitude to those

servants of his who at various times have steered our course for us through

difficult waters, and especially to the saints of the Counter-Reformation — that

remarkable group of saints whom God raised up at the time of Europe’s

apostasy, by whose influence, humanly speaking, the faith survived that terrible

ordeal. And not the least, nor the least prominent, of these is [St. Charles

Borromeo], who ruled the Church of Milan in the latter part of the sixteenth

century…

Whatever be the rights and wrongs of all the controversies we hear about

the medieval Church, this at least is clear, that in the days of the Council of Trent

its organization needed reform. And reform needs more than mere legislation to

decree it; it needs administration to execute it. That is St. Charles’s

characteristic legacy to the Church: it was the influence of his example, in great

measure, that molded her organization on the new model which Trent had

decreed. The bishop has got to be the center of everything in his diocese, and the

clergy of the diocese are to be his clergy — a family of which he is to be the father,

a guild of which he is to be the master.

See how fond St. Charles was of synods: the whole of his comparatively

short episcopate is a long record of the synods he gathered amongst his clergy.

See how enthusiastic he is for the seminary idea; the bishop, henceforth, is not

merely to ordain people, he is to know whom he is ordaining. And above all what

was characteristic of St. Charles was the institute which he left behind him — a

body of secular priests, putting themselves at the disposal of the bishop as

absolutely as the religious puts himself at the disposal of his superior. Yes, there

is much about St. Charles’s life which is more exciting, and much which is more

attractive, than all this; his boundless generosity to the poor, the relentless

mortification that regulated his busy, competent life. But what makes him stand

out among the saints more than either is his intense devotion even to the most

uninspiring details of diocesan routine.