John Christopoulos
In October 1588, Pope Sixtus V Peretti (r. 1585–90) issued a papal bull making abortion, for the first time in the Catholic Church’s history, officially homicide. Sixtus decreed that anyone who sought to terminate pregnancy, by whatever means, was to be tried as a murderer and also was ipso facto excommunicated. In order to ensure that his decrees would be followed to the letter, Sixtus revoked the power of secular and ecclesiastical authorities to handle cases of abortion otherwise. Absolution from this “sin/crime” was now reserved to the papacy alone.1 Before the promulgation of this bull, cases of abortion were within the purview of bishops and largely resolved in the privacy of the confessional. Now, the pope held a monopoly over forgiveness for abortion and the rehabilitation of those who procured it.
Sixtus’s bull against abortion was radical for several reasons. First, while most theologians and canonists agreed that abortion was mortal sin, beyond this, there was no consensus as to what type of sin it was. Neither clergy nor secular authorities unequivocally held the voluntary termination of pregnancy and the expulsion of an unborn to be homicide, that is, the murder of a human being. Second, Sixtus’s bull was an explicit challenge to episcopal authority over issues of moral discipline as established at the Council of Trent. Affirmed at the fourteenth session (November 1551), bishops had the authority and the obligation to personally handle cases [111] that arose in their diocese that were deemed “atrocious and grave.”2 In the last three decades of the sixteenth century, numerous Italian bishops, from north and south, attempted to control the practice of abortion within their diocese by prohibiting confessors from absolving this sin and forcing the penitent to go directly to the bishop. It was thought that the episcopal reservation of cases like procured abortion would make laity and clergy understand the gravity of this sin, and the practice of abortion would eventually be eradicated. And yet, the promulgation of Sixtus’s bull against abortion in 1588 suggests that episcopal management of this case of sin was, according to the pontiff, insufficient and ineffective. This paper seeks to investigate these issues. It will explore the complex mix of assertions of power and the negotiated practices that characterized the reforming church as reflected in episcopal and papal regulations of abortion. What did the late sixteenth-century Italian bishop think about abortion? How did he try to regulate its practice within his diocese? How did the realities of parish life factor into the reforming church’s centralizing strategies?
The post-Tridentine bishop was expected to do a lot. Charged with the tasks of establishing orthodoxy in his diocese and keeping heresy at bay, the bishop was directly responsible for his flock’s and clergy’s behaviors, practices, and beliefs, and therefore had to be directly involved, through various channels, in their lives. The bishop had to reside in his diocese; had to visit all the diocesan institutions of his land; had to ensure that his priests were properly educated, that they were conducting themselves honorably and caring for souls adequately and competently; and had to celebrate diocesan synods and provincial councils regularly in order to make sure all curati in his diocese were on the same page and working toward the same goals of moral reform and discipline. The bishop’s direct and intimate involvement in the administration of religion would produce competent and dedicated priests who would then educate and take better care of the souls of parishioners: “The model bishop would see to it that his model pastors created model parishioners.” While some bishops were more determined to implement the reforms promulgated at the Council of Trent than others, all bishops were officially charged with these tasks.3
One aspect of morality that was deemed in need of reform and that apparently required direct episcopal attention was the practice of abortion. As part of campaigns against immoral, transgressive, and sinful behavior, in the 1570s and [112] ’80s, several Italian bishops took an interest in their flock’s practice of voluntarily terminating pregnancies. Along with such sexual transgressions as incest, defloration, sodomy, bestiality, and some types of love magic, bishops sought to regulate the practice of abortion within their diocese by personally dealing with these transgressors.
Throughout the sixteenth century, ecclesiastical authorities believed that the confessor, due to his unique and intimate access to the laity, was best placed to discover cases of abortion and illicit sexuality in general, and also to communicate theological teachings regarding its practice to his community. However, by the time of the Council of Trent, more and more bishops had realized and accepted the limitations of their confessors in this task. It was commonplace that confessors were uninspired, poorly educated in Catholic doctrine, and inadequately caring for souls. Many confessors could not read Latin and therefore could not study cases of conscience or moral theology. How could they celebrate the sacrament of confession properly? Many sins, it was believed, were easily absolved because the confessor did not know how to handle them. This was to the detriment of the penitent’s soul.4
In terms of abortion, many confessors did not necessarily know that the voluntary termination of pregnancy was in fact a mortal sin or how to properly evaluate this case of sin. There was no shortage of theological literature this subject, much of which was written with the intent of instructing confessors. Indeed, bishops demanded that their confessors read the authoritative works on cases of conscience, the Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), and manuals of confession in order to be able to question their penitents and competently assess their sins in the confessional.5 The famous work of the Dominican preacher and inquisitor of Piacenza Bartolomeo Fumi (Summa aurea armilla [1547])6 and the very popular Manuale de confessori et penitenti (1569) of the Spanish Augustinian Martin Azpilcueta were required readings for many confessors. These contained detailed and authoritative analyses of various cases of sexual sin, including abortion.7 On a more popular level, in the second half of the sixteenth century a multitude of vernacular works on [113] confession and the sacrament of penance appeared instructing both clerics and the laity on sin and the fundamentals of Catholic living; many of these works included discussions on the morality of abortion.8 Nevertheless, it appears that confessors were not doing their readings. As historians have increasingly argued, by the end of the sixteenth century, a large majority of priests received little if any of the seminary education that was required by Tridentine decree. A lack of interest on the part of the priest (and often on the part of the bishop) coupled with the financial difficulties of establishing seminaries and enforcing educational reforms, meant that few priests were better educated than their pre-Trent predecessors. Given the socioeconomic realities of the late sixteenth-century parish, there was little incentive to remedy this.9
According to reformers, this lacuna in clerical knowledge resulted in the laity’s own poor practices and behaviors. Many bishops would have agreed that “the ignorance of the faithful was a consequence of the inadequacies of the clergy in its pastoral mission,” a statement made by the Vicar General Guido Serguidi at the 1569 Synod of Florence.10 In the case of abortion, laymen and women did not necessarily know what “abortion” meant or that it was a mortal sin that harmed their soul. Or to put it in another way, laymen and women, and some clergy, did not conceive of the practice of abortion in the same way as the theologians and the official ecclesiastical culture did. This appears to have troubled some bishops and ecclesiastical authorities.
In early modern Italy, the voluntary termination of pregnancy in order to conceal an illicit sexual relationship, or simply to avoid another mouth to feed, was officially a mortal sin as defined by theologians and canon law. However, it was not unequivocally held to be the sin of homicide. According to canon law, homicide was defined as the murder of a homo. Before the unborn received its rational soul from God, it was not considered to be a human being. Abortion before the unborn was animated with a rational soul was, therefore, not considered homicide. The presence of the God-given immortal soul (believed to be infused in male fetuses around forty days from conception, eighty days for female fetuses) made all the difference. Aborting an animated fetus meant depriving the unborn of its place in heaven, for, in the words of the Dominican Girolamo Mercurio, stained with original sin and not having received the holy [114] waters of baptism, it would be “deprived forever of the vision of God.”11 An inanimatus—an unborn before animation—however, did not have a soul and therefore was not yet included in the corpus christianum. It was a composite of seed, blood, and flesh in formation, moving towards the state where the soul might be infused—but it was not yet human.12 While not as grave, the abortion of an inanimatus was still a mortal sin, an act for which the procurer, and anyone who participated in the practice, had to confess and do penance. Ignorance that this practice put one’s soul in jeopardy was a terrible danger, and the onus fell on the confessor not only to elicit a confession of such sins from his penitent, but also to teach him or her that abortion was a mortal sin that harmed the soul. In the secret space of the confessional, the confessor was supposed to instil in his penitent a confessional attitude, to turn “social transgressions” into “matters of conscience.”13 If the confessor did not know the definition of abortion or how to adjudicate it, what chance was there for the penitent to start seeing this method of avoiding another mouth to feed or hiding the consequences of illicit sexuality “as a matter of conscience”?
Attempting to rectify this situation, more and more bishops tried to insert themselves into the confessional, the work of their clerics, and the lives of their flock by limiting the confessor’s powers of absolution. In the last three decades of the sixteenth century, several Italian bishops reserved the case of abortion to their offices and prohibited their [115] confessors from absolving its procurers. “Atrocious and grave crimes,” as the fathers of the Council of Trent labelled them, sins that cause scandalo and notoriety in the public sphere, and that influence others to commit similar sins, were to be “reserved” for “the highest priests.”14 In the 1570s and 80s, abortion was increasingly deemed a sin that ought to be handled exclusively by bishops.
The reservation of abortion to the episcopacy was intended to impress the laity with the gravity of this sin, but was also meant to ensure that abortion would not be easily dismissed or leniently handled by the confessor. For the parish priest, this was a demotion.15 In Milan, Archbishop Carlo Borromeo (1560–84) forbade his confessors from absolving “procurers of abortion” from his first synod in 1565.16 Cardinal Paolo Burali d’Arezzo did the same while he was bishop of Piacenza in 1570 and archbishop of Naples in 1577,17 as did Christophoro Boncompagni, archbishop of Ravenna (1578–1603), in 1580, publishing his proclamation in Italian lest anyone misunderstand.18 They were joined in 1584 by the bishop of Viterbo, Carlo Montigli (1576–94),19 and in 1587 by the bishop of Camerino, Girolamo Bovio (1580–96).20 All priests and confessors in these dioceses were required to know these proclamations and communicate them to their penitents. Confessors were supposed to inquire into reserved cases every year and ascertain what changes had been made, lest they absolve someone from a sin without having the authority to do so.21 Lists of reserved cases were printed and widely distributed, often on display in churches for parishioners to see, and were also included within the proceedings of synods, which priests were required to possess, sometimes on pain of a fine.
In their proclamations, these bishops did not specify what abortion was; the understanding of its meaning was taken for granted, as was the case with other reserved sins such as incest and defloration, which certainly had varying definitions and numerous meanings. Nevertheless, in the 1570s and 80s penitents in Milan, Piacenza, Ravenna, Viterbo, and Camerino who admitted to procuring abortion within the secrecy of the confessional could not receive absolution within this same space. The confessor was instructed to get his penitent to confess this sin and then send the sinner to the bishop for the benefit of absolution.22
Making the penitent go to the bishop for reconciliation with the church and with God increased the sinner’s shame and made him or her realize the magnitude of their sin. Bishops saw the system of reservation as a weapon in establishing moral conduct, effectuating reform, and asserting their authority over the [116] laity and their priests. Every new case that bishops reserved expanded episcopal power. The reservation of abortion was meant to teach confessor, layman, and laywoman that the practice of abortion was a horrendous sin that could only be forgiven by a high priest and authority of the reforming church. Such a realization was meant to make the penitent think twice about their sexual activity and about trying to avoid the consequences of their sins.
However, the enforcement of this reservation proved problematic. Abortion was hidden, difficult to uncover, and ambiguous. Wilfully terminating pregnancy was considered a sin, but the category or gravity of the sin depended on the state of the unborn at the time of abortion. It was unanimously agreed that the abortion of an animated or ensouled fetus was graver than that of an inanimate one. When Carlo Montigli reserved abortion in Viterbo, he explicitly distinguished the abortion of an ensouled and a pre-ensouled fetus; in Viterbo, only the abortion of a fetus with a soul was a case reserved to the bishop.23 The Neapolitan penitentiary and renowned canonist Giacomo de Graffi argued that the abortion of an animatus was rightly included in the archbishop of Capua’s reservation of homicide; however the abortion of an inanimate unborn was not because this was not the murder of a human being.24 While the bishops of Milan, Piacenza, Ravenna, and Camerino did not explicitly make such a distinction, it is likely that they shared the belief.
While canonists and theologians neatly defined an animatus as a fetus of forty-days-old or older, it was widely admitted by physicians and anatomists that it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to determine with certainty the state of the unborn at a specific moment. Authors of learned Latin works on the reservation of cases discussed this as a difficulty in reserving abortion. It was widely held that quickening, or “first motion,” was the defining sign of the transition from inanimatus to animatus, but quickening was extremely subjective; some women felt it sooner, others later. Physicians, by and large, concluded that the animation and motion of fetuses (male and female) were always relative. Bartolomeo Gittio, apostolic protonotary and archpriest of Benevento, listed the following signs to help confessors identify whether or not an unborn was animated: if the fetus was ensouled, the carrying woman would have headaches, vertigo, nausea, stomach pains, and other bodily disturbances. But, of course, these signs [117] were not conclusive—it was not only pregnant women who suffered headaches and nausea. Complicating matters further was the fact that women often read the signs of their bodies “incorrectly”; for example, they might interpret the cessation of menstruation during pregnancy as “menstrual suppression,” a dangerous disease that required therapy, or they might confuse the motions of an animated fetus with a bout of gas or indigestion. Moreover, nothing prevented a woman from outright lying about what was transpiring inside her body. No one could prove whether or not a woman truly carried a forty-day-old fetus or truly felt one move. Gittio offered another suggestion: inspecting the body of the aborted unborn. If the fetus was not perfectly formed in all its parts, it was not animated; formation was necessary for the infusion of the immortal soul.25 However, this too was problematic. In the early stages of pregnancy, no one could prove that a woman truly knew whether or not she was pregnant. No one could prove with certainty that a woman did not abort accidentally (i.e., miscarry) from labor (such as working the fields or household chores) or as a result of a stern beating from her husband, father, mother, or brother. Was the accidental abortion of a formed unborn a mortal sin reserved to the bishop? Could such a woman be forgiven in the confessional, or would she have to go to the diocesan center and plead her case before a Carlo Borromeo or a Cardinal Paolo Burali?
There were other more pressing difficulties with the reservation of abortion. By reserving a case of sin to his office, the bishop could in fact make a secret sin public knowledge. Young women caught in reserved cases of carnal sin could not go to a bishop without attracting the attention of kin and community; such a trip, from the periphery to the diocesan center, could result in the loss of a woman’s honor, a scandal for her family, and strained political and financial relationships, and could even result in violence toward the woman or her impregnator. Could a woman go the bishop and expose her seducer, rapist, deflowerer, or incestor without any repercussions to her own or her family’s honor? What if the man responsible for the pregnancy was a priest or a married man, or someone else with whom marriage was an impossibility? What if he was a man of some fame or of high status? Admitting to abortion before one’s confessor in complete secrecy was one thing; travelling to the bishop and reporting the details of such elicit sexuality was quite another. Reserving such cases moved scandal-causing sins from the secrecy of the confessional into a much more public forum.
Bishops were well aware of the dangers inherent in bringing a procurer of abortion to light—public knowledge of an illicit sexual relationship, be it [118] defloration, rape, adultery, or incest, would likely cause scandal and social disruption. Indeed, the threat of exposure was supposed to influence conduct: do not commit the sin if you cannot face the consequences. And yet while in some dioceses the official rhetoric and law demanded that procurers of abortion be brought before the bishop for rehabilitation and reconciliation with God and the church, it was widely accepted that, for the common good, such cases might be better absolved locally and in secret by a parish priest. Even under as strict a regime as Carlo Borromeo’s was in Milan, the very confessors who were officially prohibited from doing so, often absolved reserved cases locally in order to avoid scandal. Paolo Burali, who was an avid proponent of the reservation of cases, allowed his confessors in Naples to absolve women “from all carnal sins,” including those reserved.26 If the sin was deemed “secret,” known only to the sinners and the confessor (i.e., not public knowledge within the community), bishops generally allowed their confessors to absolve it. In most dioceses, bishops empowered their vicars, who then gave permission to confessors to absolve reserved cases. The danger of revelation was judged to be greater than the good done by forcing the penitent to go before the bishop.27 Bishops could not directly enforce their authority over sensitive and ambiguous cases such as abortion without causing scandal.
To a certain extent, then, the reservation of abortion was largely held to be impractical. Some bishops, such as Antonio Altoviti of Florence (1548–73), Filippo Sega of Ripatrasone (near Macerata) (1575–78), and Fantino Petrignano (1577–85) of Cosenza, appeared to have acknowledged the futility and did not reserve cases of abortion at their provincial and diocesan synods of 1574, 1576, and 1579, respectively.28 Abortion, therefore, was not unanimously held to be a “grave and atrocious” sin that required a bishop’s intrusion into the confessional.
That abortion was not universally held to be a reserved case created other spiritual and jurisdictional problems. What if a priest moved from one diocese where abortion was reserved into another where it was not? Surely this would have been confusing for the priest charged with the care of souls. What if he, not knowing that their sin was reserved, absolved someone, or conversely, refused absolution in ignorance that, in his current location, abortion was not reserved for the bishop? What did this mean for the penitent? Theologians thought that [119] a penitent who experienced faulty or incomplete absolution was not fully rehabilitated; an improper confession was invalid. The confessor was obliged to make this right. Upon learning of his error, the confessor would have to admit to the penitent that his or her confession was invalid and either send him or her to the bishop or request the bishop’s permission to properly absolve the penitent from the reserved sin. However, the spectre of scandal loomed large over such situations: the penitent would have to undergo another confession, which might alert the community to his or her secrets, especially if he or she was accustomed to only confessing once a year during Lent, as most people did. Moreover, the confessor himself would appear ignorant in front of his bishop and might also lose the respect of his parish. Tommaso Zerola, bishop of Minori (near Salerno), concluded that if there was danger of such scandal, the absolution of a reserved case should be given in absentia without troubling the penitent. Martin Azpilcueta, the authority on all things related to confession, agreed.29 But this also meant that the penitent would not grasp the alleged gravity of their sin. A thornier circumstance, and one which did not have an easy answer or practical solution, was the fate of a penitent who committed a sin in one diocese where it was reserved and then travelled to another where it was not. Could he or she confess it in the place where the least amount of punishment would have been meted out? Would the absolution stand?
All these questions and uncertainties regarding reserved cases suggest that cases of illicit sexuality and of ambiguous classification—such as abortion—would continue to be handled primarily by confessors and would most likely be dealt with practically and leniently so as to avoid scandal and social disruption. Not content with this situation, in October 1588 Pope Sixtus V took an unprecedented stand on abortion. Believing that bishops were impotent in curbing this practice, Sixtus issued a papal bull Against those Who Procure Abortion, which made its practice unequivocally homicide and the procurer of abortion and any accomplice murderers as defined by criminal law, and also excommunicate ipso facto and laetae sententiae (that is, automatically imposed by God from the very moment the sin was committed).30 The bull was particularly harsh on procurers of abortion, but it was also a direct challenge to episcopal authority. Sixtus revoked the bishop’s jurisdiction over this sin by reserving its absolution to the Holy See alone. As of 29 October 1588, a procurer of abortion could no longer [120] seek absolution from their confessor or from their bishop; these ecclesiastical authorities could no longer offer absolution and would have to convince the sinner to go Rome to plead his case in front of the pope himself. By making the procurer of abortion go to Rome for forgiveness, Sixtus asserted emphatically that the practice of abortion was no longer to be taken lightly. Aside from imposing his spiritual and pastoral priorities onto laymen and clerics, Sixtus was consciously amplifying Roman centralization by limiting the authority of the episcopate.31
Sixtus’s legislation was not well received. Bishops resented their demotion in these matters. Being unable to absolve a penitent who confessed their sin was not only an affront to episcopal authority and a challenge to the decrees of the Council of Trent, but the bull could also cause social and spiritual problems within their diocese. Travelling to Rome to have the pope deliberate over the matter was a dangerous and expensive trip that most penitents could not and would not take. If going to a diocesan center to be absolved by the bishop was not a viable option in most cases, going to Rome to plead the pope was, most likely, an impossibility. The soul of the remorseful sinner who could not or would not take the trip to Rome would linger in limbo, excommunicated from the faith, excluded from the “sacral community,” and apparently, regarded as a murderer. While bishops appeared to have obeyed the pope’s ruling,32 many bishops were not prepared to close their doors, relinquish their authority over their flock’s spiritual life, and send their penitents to Rome.
Letters from bishops, archbishops, and suffragans from all over Italy were sent to the cardinals of the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars seeking permission to absolve their penitents who confessed to procuring abortion. Bishops, from north to south, informed Sixtus and his curia that they had many and various sinners (mostly women) who confessed to procuring abortion in order to “avoid dishonor and infamy.” In 1590, the apostolic vicar of Aversa had twenty such sinners. The archbishop of Milan and bishops and suffragans of Isernia, Lodi, Potenza, Trani, and Siena all wrote claiming that they had penitents who confessed to procuring abortion, but refused to travel to Rome. It is impossible, the bishop of Lodi stressed, to convince these sinners to go to Rome. Because of “honor, shame and poverty, they cannot and will not travel to Rome and thus have no way to regain grace and re-enter the church.” In order to save their souls [121] and avoid scandal and social unrest in their diocese, these bishops requested from the pope, via the cardinals, the authority—from which they had recently been divested—to absolve these penitents locally.33
Sixtus gave in to these requests. Replying to these bishops and suffragans through the cardinals of the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, Sixtus allowed all these procurers of abortion to be absolved locally. He did not, as he forcefully stated in his bull, demand that their bishops and confessors send them to Rome in order that he may personally hear their stories and deliberate on their punishment. Sixtus, it seems, recognized the dangers involved with such a policy. He allowed for their absolution locally, but stipulated that the absolution was to be granted not by the requesting bishops but from the very confessors who heard the confession. “Proceed with prudence” and “with appropriate confidentiality,” the pope warned, in order to avoid any “inconveniences.”34 Bishops realized that sending procurers of abortion to Rome was not an option and so appealed to the pope on the sinners’ behalf. While it appears that Sixtus accepted this reality, he was not prepared to give up the authority that his bull set out to acquire. These confessors were allowed to absolve procurers of abortion because the pope, and not their bishops, said so. This was a special permission granted on a case-by-case basis by the pope.
The curia of Pope Gregory XIV Sfondrati (r. 1590–91), Sixtus’s second successor, therefore, dealt with similar requests from bishops. One specific letter sent to the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars from the archpriest of Altamura (Giangiacomo de Mansi) seems to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. De Mansi requested permission to absolve a physician who had administered an abortion to a pregnant woman who was suffering from complications, which he believed could prove fatal. Inducing abortion was, in this case, a method of therapy; delivering the unborn prematurely in order to avoid any complications that may otherwise arise. Because of Sixtus’s bull, confessors would not absolve this physician. Altamura judged this situation unfair and sought permission from the new pope to absolve the physician himself.35
[122] Gregory XIV responded to this request by revoking Sixtus’s bull.36 As the letters of bishops and suffragans began to pile up, it became increasingly clear that Sixtus’s bull was an ineffective strategy against the practice of abortion—it was not implementable and was too radical and severe. In everyday life, the voluntary termination of pregnancy was not unequivocally held to be the mortal sin that Sixtus’s bull pretended. Abortion was much more complicated. Gregory found it necessary, then, to modify Sixtus’s bull because he believed that it “block[ed] the way of salvation.” With the advice of the cardinals of the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, Gregory XIV retracted the bull and reaffirmed the previous canonical consensus on abortion. Gregory thought it “more useful” to return to the less harsh penalties of the holy canons and profane laws: those who abort an inanimatus will not be guilty of true homicide because they have not killed a homo in actuality. Gregory reinstated bishops’ authority over this domain, but he also gave confessors permission to freely absolve procurers of such abortion. However, regarding the abortion of an animated unborn, Gregory believed that Sixtus’s bull ought to “endure entirely in its own strength.” He did not state how the nature and state of the unborn was to be assessed. Gregory concluded that, confronted with cases of abortion, clerics were to act “as if [Sixtus’s] constitution had never been published.”37
The papal incursion into the handling of cases of abortion was in force for less than three years. By the summer of 1591, abortion was again no longer unequivocally homicide and confessors could freely give absolution. But this, again, was a challenge to episcopal prerogatives. Almost immediately after Gregory’s moderation of Sixtus’s bull, Italian bishops began to re-reserve cases of abortion to their office. The bishop of Lodi, Luigi Taverna (1579–1616), reserved abortion at his 1591 synod,38 as did Gabriele Paleotti, archbishop of Bologna (1566–97) in 1594, Giulio Cesare Riccardi of Bari (1592–1602) in 1594, Giovanni Fontana in Ferrara (1590–1611) in 1599, and Napoleone Comitoli in Perugia (1591–1624) in 1600.39 While bishops returned it to their list of reserved cases, it is [123] highly likely that confessors continued to absolve procurers of abortion, perhaps with the permission of their superiors, most likely during Lent and with secret penance so as to avoid scandal. Young and unmarried women probably received absolution with relative ease to avoid harming their honor and exposing the men who impregnated them—their lovers, deflowers, seducers, or rapists; men of high standing would likely have enjoyed the same privilege. Even if reforming bishops resisted such accommodations, by 1601, their hands were once again officially tied; the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, under Pope Clement VIII Aldobrandini (r. 1592–1605), directed bishops to empower their confessors to absolve penitents caught in secret carnal sins in order to avoid scandal rather than force them to the diocesan center.40 Once again, Rome undermined Tridentine decrees and challenged episcopal authority. Bishops seeking to reform the sexual morality of their dioceses were limited by the spectre of scandal and the long arm of Rome. The “counter-reformation” bishop was perpetually caught between a rock and a hard place.
The episcopal and papal reservations of abortion in the last three decades of the sixteenth century appear to have been easily circumvented. In fact, the system of reservation as applied to the practice of abortion appears to have been more a rhetorical claim than an actual practice; that is, ecclesiastical authorities propagated the threat of exposure without really wanting to expose. Since abortion was so closely tied to notions of honor and shame, and because it was ambiguous, contentious, difficult to classify as a sin, and largely impossible to prove, ecclesiastical authorities likely allowed procurers of abortion to be absolved in secrecy by their confessors. Bishops and popes did not want to face the social consequences of bringing certain procurers of abortion to light. The risk of notoriety appears to have led to discreet and practical solutions, and left bishops to rely on the confessional to reform this aspect of morality.
The attempted policing of the practice of abortion provides an opportunity to observe post-Tridentine ecclesiastical politics. The bishops discussed in this study sought to control the practice of abortion by inserting themselves into the confessional and by demanding that transgressors be brought to the diocesan center. The presence of the bishop in the confessional through lists of reserved cases was, in theory, an attempt at reform through discipline and centralization. Sixtus V’s incursion into this matter should be understood in similar terms. While the post-Tridentine “church” was certainly not unified as a single body or in its [124] commitment to reform, its definition of reform, or its methods for achieving said reform; in the case of abortion, some bishops and popes did combine spiritual and pastoral priorities with centralizing schemes in order to influence behavior. The intrusion into the confessional by bishops and popes by means of the reservation of cases appears to have been another attempt of ecclesiastical “penetration into society.” The reservation of abortion to the episcopacy, to the papacy, and again to the episcopacy was certainly an attempt to turn this transgression, stemming from illicit sexuality, into a matter of conscience. The harsh penalties that, in theory, were to be imposed on those who procured abortion were meant to deter men and women from its practice by realizing its gravity. Yet it was almost immediately clear that these penalties were impossible to enforce. It is questionable whether they were in fact intended to be. Indeed, the episcopal strategies for handling the case of abortion appear to affirm what historians have increasingly come to believe regarding the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church: that ecclesiastical authorities considered rhetoric, persuasion, and instruction to be more effective reforming strategies than force and punishment.41
Works Cited
Archives
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