Reformation Italy--The Italian Reformation: A Lost Opportunity?

The name Italy may suggest images of good food, gorgeous art, and romance more than thoughts of religious reformation. With its large, imposing cathedrals, frequent processions, and well-advertised pilgrimages, that “fair land” still looks like a stronghold of Roman Catholicism. That first impression seems confirmed by statistics. Out of over 60,000,000 Italian citizens, almost 58,500,000 are baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. Still, long before the XVI century, the desire for a reformation of the church had been especially fervent and vocal in that historical and celebrated peninsula, as a natural reaction to the imposing and all-permeating presence of the papacy.

Before Luther

The importance of Italy in the context of the Protestant Reformation, largely underplayed by the Roman Catholic Church, has been underestimated by scholars until the last century. In reality, voices of protest accompanied even the earliest abuses of power and doctrine. Already in the eighth century, Bishop Claudius of Turin publicly destroyed all images of God, Jesus, and the saints in his city as an act of protest against idolatrous Roman Catholic practices. The Augustinians in general upheld their founder’s doctrine of grace. Other orders, such as the Franciscans and the Capuchins, were established in answer to the clergy’s excesses and abuses.

Especially in Florence, neoplatonist philosophers promoted a return to the spiritual, against the weighty apparatus of images, rites, and vestures the church had accumulated throughout time. Humanists everywhere advocated a return to the classics, including the original biblical sources.

The common people, on their part, reacted to the corruption of the church with a mixture of anger, disappointment, amusement, and resignation. A sample of this attitude can be found in Giovanni Boccaccio’s crudely realistic Decameron. Before launching into a series of comical portraits of this corruption, Boccaccio tells the story of a Jew who, appalled by what he sees in Rome, surprisingly converts to Christianity, concluding that, if the Christian faith can keep growing in spite of all the church’s abuses, it must be the true religion.

There was much that papal authorities were willing to tolerate. They even encouraged monastic orders who emphasized poverty and simplicity of life, enforcing their authority only in cases of perceived heresy, such as that of 12th century Waldensians, who coupled their desire for simplicity with a denial of the existence of purgatory and the authority of the Pope. Girolamo Savonarola’s was a case on its own merits, as his preaching in Florence carried along so many civil repercussions on daily life, limiting personal freedom, that the citizens themselves rose up in riots against him.

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