The Career of Cardinal Giovanni Morone (1509-1580): Between Council and Inquisition by Adam Patrick Robinson (review)

An unusual combination of intellectual, administrator, and saint, Giovanni Morone was surely the best pope the Counter-Reformation Church never had. Yet, at the same time, he spent much of his life tainted by suspicions of heresy and shunned by a considerable proportion of his fellow cardinals. In this book Adam Patrick Robinson tries to reconcile this apparent contradiction, charting the progress of Morone's extraordinary career from twenty-something bishop of Modena through his successive roles as leading Catholic reformer; the Inquisition's most prominent victim; the presiding legate at Trent; and, finally, in the twilight of his life, the grayest of graybeards advising Pope Gregory XIII. The work draws extensively on the research and editions of the Italian historians Massimo Firpo and Dario Marcatto but offers an interesting new synthesis that targets the problem of how to reconcile the two images of Morone's life and what it reveals about the state of the Church during this crucial phase in its history.

Robinson's main thesis is that overemphasis on Morone the victim has led to a serious misrepresentation of his impact. Rejecting Firpo and Marcatto's view that Morone was a radical who found himself at odds with his times, he instead makes a case for the essential pragmatism of his approach. Caught between such intractable problems as the struggle between conciliarism and papalism and the theological and praxeological controversies raised by Martin Luther, Morone, in Robinson's view, tried to steer a middle path. Although he supported granting the chalice to the laity and was willing to discuss the troublesome issue of clerical marriage, he nevertheless expressed consistent mistrust of the papacy's more vocal critics and enemies and—in spite of his travails—maintained a lifelong commitment to established hierarchies of authority. For Robinson, Morone's most interesting accomplishment was thus not his martyr-like suffering at the hands of the Inquisitor popes Paul IV and Pius V, but his willingness and ability to get things done in spite of their hostility.

In so far as it goes, Robinson's thesis about Morone's importance is persuasive. At the very least, his contribution to the Counter-Reformation should be as a foil not to his implacable enemies but to more constructive figures like his lifelong friend Pope Pius IV (whose regime he did so much to support). The understated nature of Robinson's conclusions, however, means that many questions about the broader implications of his argument go unanswered. If Morone and his associates were not the radical figures that Firpo would like them to have been, what does that signify about the nature of Catholic Reform? Throughout the book Robinson teases with passages hinting at the essentially reactionary motivations of all those who implemented the reforms of these years, yet that sits uneasily with his general optimistic view that those reforms were on balance a good thing. A different observer perhaps might have taken a less charitable view of Morone's role in the regulation of religious expression and the restoration of papal autocracy. That, however, would require a very different reading of the Counter-Reformation as a whole than the one Robinson is prepared to present here.