St. Charles Borromeo

Charles Borromeo was born on October 2, 1538, into the noble Borromeo family of Arona in northern Italy. He was the son of Count Gilberto Borromeo and Margherita Medici, and the family counted cardinals and statesmen among its members. When Charles was still a boy, his uncle Giulio Cesare Borromeo was elevated to the cardinalate, and the young Charles was groomed for an ecclesiastical career from an early age. He received a humanistic and legal education, studying at the University of Pavia, where he earned a doctorate in civil and canon law by the time he was twenty-one.

At the age of twenty-two, Charles was summoned to Rome when his uncle died, and Pope Pius IV, who was his uncle's friend and relative, made him a cardinal in 1560 almost immediately. Though he was still technically a layman at that point, the new cardinal was soon drawn into the central work of the Church. Pius IV appointed him his principal secretary of state, charged with administering the Papal States and overseeing the reform program that would lead to the closing of the Council of Trent. Charles played a decisive role in the practical work of reconvening and concluding the Council, and he was ordained a priest in 1563 and consecrated a bishop (Archbishop of Milan) shortly afterward.

The Council of Trent closed in December 1563, but the reform agenda it had laid out was just beginning. Charles Borromeo spent the next two decades in Milan working to put those decrees into practice. He established seminaries for the training of priests, reorganized diocesan governance, insisted on the residential obligations of the clergy, visited parishes, and held provincial synods. He was a principal author of the Roman Catechism, the systematic catechetical text issued in response to the Protestant Reformation, and worked to bring religious orders in his province back to their original observance. He also founded the Oblates of St. Charles, a society of secular priests dedicated to pastoral ministry.

The decade of the 1570s brought serious trials. There was armed resistance to his reforms from some members of the nobility, and at one point a priest of the Humiliati order attempted to assassinate him, wounding him with a gunshot. Charles recovered, and the order was eventually suppressed. More famously, in 1576 and again in 1578, plague struck Milan, and Charles remained in the city throughout the epidemic, organizing relief, ministering to the sick and dying, and personally assisting in hospitals and processions. His example of pastoral presence during these outbreaks became one of the most celebrated aspects of his memory.

Charles Borromeo died on November 3, 1584, at the age of forty-six. He was beatified by Pope Paul V in 1602 and canonized by the same pope in 1610. He is remembered as one of the principal architects of the Counter-Reformation, and his feast day is November 4. He is the patron saint of seminarians, bishops, catechists, and apple orchards. The traditional connection to apple orchards is sometimes explained by the French word "Bonromeo" being echoed in the dialect word for a kind of apple, and a relic of his arm is said to be kept at the seminary in Milan he founded.

Charles left a lasting institutional legacy. The seminaries he established became models throughout the Catholic world, and the emphasis on thorough priestly formation that emerged from Trent owes much to his example. He is often invoked as a model for bishops, and his maxim that one should first preach by the way one lives is a common touchstone in Catholic discussions of clerical formation. He is buried in Milan Cathedral, where a major chapel is dedicated to him.