Vigils: St. Charles Borromeo

THE LEGACY OF
ST CHARLES BORROMEO
From a homily by Fr Ronald Knox 3
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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.

3
from Occasional Sermons of Ronald Knox, ed. by Philip Caraman, S.J., New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960, pp. 79-82.