For It Stands To Reason That A
Carmelite Pope Would Prefer A Carmelite Saint To One Of The Jesuits, And
So Forth.
And over all throned the Inquisition in Rome, alert, ever-suspicious;
testing the "irregularities" of the various orders and harassing their
respective saints with Olympic impartiality.
I know that mystics such as Orsola Benincasa are supposed to have
another side to their character, an eminently practical side. It is
perfectly true - and we need not go out of England to learn it - that
piety is not necessarily inconsistent with nimbleness in worldly
affairs. But the mundane achievements, the monasteries and churches, of
nine-tenths of these southern ecstatics are the work of the confessor
and not of the saint. Trainers of performing animals are aware how these
differ in plasticity of disposition and amenability to discipline; the
spiritual adviser, who knows his business, must be quick to detect these
various qualities in the minds of his penitents and to utilize them to
the best advantage. It is inconceivable, for instance, that the
convent-foundress Orsola was other than a neuropathic nonentity - a blind
instrument in the hands of what we should call her backers, chiefest of
whom (in Naples) were two Spanish priests, Borii and Navarro, whose
local efforts were supported, at head-quarters, by the saintly Filippo
Neri and the learned Cardinal Baronius.
This is noticeable. The earlier of these godly biographies are written
in Latin, and these are more restrained in their language; they were
composed, one imagines, for the priests and educated classes who could
dispense to a certain degree with prodigies.
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