The Growth of the Secular Clergy and the Development of Educational Institutions in the Diocese of Novara (1563–1772)

Abstract

The Counter-Reformation initiated a long period of growth in the numbers of the secular and religious clergy of Catholic Europe. Mario Rosa has observed that in Italy the clerical population reached its peak in the first half of the eighteenth century, when Montesquieu described the peninsula as a ‘monk's paradise’, and that it declined thereafter as reformist governments attempted to curb the religious orders and restrict new ordinations to the priesthood. According to Rosa, in the early eighteenth century the Italian Church had a ‘plethora’ of poorly trained priests who lived on the meagre sums provided by their patrimony and sought to improve their lot by obtaining benefices and endowments. In spite of the efforts of the hierarchy to improve clerical education, Rosa continues, Italian seminaries lacked adequate resources to train the great numbers of clerics.Rosa's observations about the expanding ecclesiastical population before the mid-eighteenth century are borne out by statistical evidence to be found in the archive of the northern diocese of Novara, where numbers of secular or diocesan priests tripled between the early seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the composition of the Novarese priests and to test the applicability of Rosa's observations about the economic status and education of the Italian clergy to the diocese of Novara.