Tough bishop fights curia & Calvin. - Review - book review

Commonweal, Dec 15, 2000 by Eamon Duffy

A Bishop's Tale
Mathias Hovius among His Flock in Seventeenth-Century Flanders
Craig E. Harline and Eddy Put
Yale University Press, $27.95, 384 pp.

Mathias Hovius was the bishop responsible for the reimposition of Catholicism in the Archdiocese of Mechelen in the Spanish Netherlands between 1596 and 1620. The cathedral and the diocese had been devastated by Calvinist revolution in April 1580, its shrines and images destroyed, its clergy exiled or butchered. Hovius himself, then a mere canon, had fled the region after an ignominious spell of hiding in a capacious wardrobe. But he survived, and as archbishop under the restored rule of Archdukes Albert and Isabella, he had the task of repelling Protestantism, renewing discipline among priests and religious, regulating popular piety, ensuring the decent performance of the liturgy, the recruitment of seminarians, the funding of new ministries, the disciplining of backsliders among laity and clergy, and, not least, of strengthening the resolve of foot-dragging state officials to enforce the practice and profession of Catholicism in the region.

A methodical man, Hovius kept a journal in which he made brief entries of all his doings. It survives, amidst mountains of other documentation, in the diocesan archives. These documents were coaxed out of the bulldog vigilance of the formidable archdiocesan archivist of Mechelen, Father Constant Van de Wiel, by Craig Harline, an American, and Eddy Put, a Belgian, over a period of more than ten years, and this delightful book is the result.

A Bishop's Tale is not, it must be said, for the overprecise. Harline and Put want to reach a nonacademic audience, and their book often reads more like popular fiction than sober church history. Every chapter opens with the colorful evocation of a particular scene, with plenty of contemporary detail to flesh out the text. Where the sources do not provide enough detail, they speculate or invent: professional historians will wince at some of the breezy inferences made on small evidence. Many of the chapters focus on a single issue, but some have only an artificial unity, as a ragbag of disparate items are tossed together for lack of anywhere better to put them (for example, the chapter headed "Table-talk"). The style is racy, larded with slang: troublesome councils of priests are "pesky," guests, "belly up" to the archbishop's table. Yet when all that has been said, I know of no other book which conveys so vividly and, in the end, so reliably, the sheer range and rigor of the Northern European Counter-Reformation in its most militant phase.

In his long episcopate, Hovius had to contend with almost every problem confronting the bishops of post-Tridentine Europe, and Harline and Put, for all their populist approach, have a sure historical instinct which enables them to throw a flood of light on those problems. The see was badly endowed and impoverished by Calvinist confiscations and destructions (on this issue the authors are unfair, incidentally, to one of Hovius's nominated predecessors, the Englishman Cardinal William Allen, whom they portray as playing hard-to-get over his appointment: Allen very much wanted the see, but was simply too poor in the end to accept it). Hovius had to finance himself from the revenues of the Abbey of Affligen, annexed to the see for the purpose. Predictably, the monks fought him tooth and nail; ruthlessly, the archbishop, who was their titular abbot, exiled them and broke their resistance.

But finance was the least of his troubles. The canons of the thirteen collegiate churches of his diocese were idle, or quarrelsome, or ignorant, or drunken, or lecherous, or all of the above; in his struggles to reform them, he had to invoke the help of the papal nuncio. But there is no such thing as a free nuncio. The Baroque-era curia was morbidly suspicious of the powers of local bishops (so unlike, in this regard, its modern-day successor), and Hovius found himself facing two ways, preserving his authority against local rebels and fighting off the attempted interference of an overweening papacy. A key figure here was the unscrupulous careerist Henri Costerius, a protonotary apostolic eager for a bishopric, who as a Borghese client, had powerful friends in Rome. Monsignor Costerius presented himself as the voice and eyes of Rome within the diocese, maligning the archbishop to eager ears, locally or in the Vatican, and parading bogus miracles worked by the relics he had brought from the catacombs. In the end, the archbishop had him clapped in jail.

Many of the issues confronting Hovius concerned the religion of the people: regulating the popular pilgrimage to Our Lady of the Sharp, strategically and symbolically sited on the front line between the Catholic and Calvinist forces. The archbishop chopped down the sacred oak tree which was a dubious focus of local cult, and had the wood made into edifying statues. We watch him enforcing Sabbatarianism on a population half paganized by years of religious disorder, or turning a blind eye to the dubious observances at the heart-wrenching Marian shrine where bereaved mothers brought still-born babies in the hope that they would be resurrected long enough to be baptized. We see Hovius trying to lock up wandering nuns behind convent walls, resolving claims of financial sharp practice by death-bed nurses, trying to recover a promising seminarian from the Jesuit novitiate, sorting out the maladministration of a hospital, coercing his clergy into reform synods.