I beati del papa: Santità, Inquisizione e obbedienza in età moderna (review)

This book offers a dense and scholarly examination of the politics and process of "making saints" in Counter-Reformation Rome. Miguel Gotor draws on old and new archival sources, including the recently opened Inquisition Archive in Rome, to present a richly detailed study of the institutions and personnel involved in the "reformed" and highly bureaucratized procedures of beatification and canonization. The book is chronologically structured around three crucial events: the foundation of the Congregation of Sacred Rites and Ceremonies in 1588, given authority over all aspects of the cult of the saints by Sixtus V; the creation of a separate Congregation of the Beati in 1602 by Clement VIII; and the comprehensive decrees on beatification and canonization issued by Urban VIII between 1625–34 (which still define the process used by the modern Catholic Church). The title of "beato" or "beata" had been traditionally used more freely, often on a local level or within a given religious order, to honor holy people who had "died in the odor of sanctity." But after 1602, this title, along with the right to the kind of ritual attention owed to the body of a presumptive saint, could only be bestowed by the formal action of the pope and the cardinals of the Congregation of the Beati. The result was a series of repressive actions, usually undertaken by the Inquisition, to keep spontaneous devotional cults from arising, whether in the case of "living saints," who developed a following even before their death, or their recently deceased counterparts.

In a series of fascinating case studies, Gotor compares the candidates considered by the Congregation of the Beati in the early 1600s, dividing them into "winners," beati vincenti, and "losers," beati perdenti. Prominent figures such as Filippo Neri, Ignatius Loyola, and Carlo Borromeo survived the process, but it remains surprising to see the contests and contingencies behind outcomes often taken for granted. Gotor effectively sorts out the factors leading to beatification, such as the organized support of an order (Neri, Loyola) or the civic and political support given to Borromeo by the Milanese. The men and women who didn't make the cut are even more interesting, because they are otherwise lost to history, and tended to have some flaw, such as being a lay person, performing the wrong kind of miracles, or criticizing clerical corruption too energetically. The prelates of the Roman curia feared "simulation" or "feigned sanctity," especially among ecstatic or visionary women, and also "superstition," here referring to the popular tendency to give "undue worship" to the unapproved holy dead. Gotor begins his case studies with Savonarola, the most famous of all "failed saints," whose support had been kept alive throughout the sixteenth century. Hopes fanned by the election of the Florentine Clement VIII Aldobrandini were dashed by an alliance of the Inquisition and the Medici Dukes, for whom Savonarola remained a subversive republican revolutionary and overly strident critic of the papacy. (But note that Fra Girolamo's case was reopened in the 1990s; the piagnoni have not given up.)

It is difficult in a brief review to do justice to the complexity of the themes and arguments raised by this excellent work, which will be important to all historians of sanctity and of the Counter-Reformation. Gotor identifies a central tension between supporters of the Tridentine decrees, who saw bishops as the agents of religious reform, taking Carlo Borromeo as their model, and the hard line, centralizing influence of the Holy Office and other Roman Congregations, for whom local initiatives, local saints and even some bishops represented the danger of innovation, "superstition," and error. Among the personalities whose distinctive styles emerge with clarity are Robert Bellarmine and Cesare Baronio, the political theorist whose seminal post-Machiavellian work, Ragion di stato (1589), provides the basis for the author's analysis of the Counter-Reformation alliance of Roman...