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 Oratory of Divine Love, 11 to work and pray for the purification of the Church. Their leaders were Giovanni Pietro Caraffa, afterwards Pope Paul IV, and the Count Gaetano da Thiene, who was subsequently canonised. The society consisted of fifty or sixty distinguished men, including amongst others Jacopo Sadoleto, Giammatteo Giberti, Latino Giovenale, Girolamo and Luigi Lippomano, and Giuliano Dati. They held their spiritual exercises in the Church of Santi Silvestro e Dorotea, of which Dati was curate, and consulted together on the evils of the day. In 1524 Gaetano withdrew to form a new Order of Clerks Regular, who were presently joined by Caraffa, and came to be known as Theatines from his see of Theate (Chieti in the Abruzzi); but the original society still continued to meet until it was dispersed by the Sack of Rome in 1527. Many of its former members, including Caraffa and Giberti, met again at Venice, where they came under the influence of the senator Gasparo Contarini. By degrees others were admitted to their consultations, including Gregorio Cortese, the Abbot of San Giorgio Maggiore, Pietro Bembo, and Luigi Priuli, and subsequently Brucioli, the Florentine exile, the learned scholar Marcantonio Flaminio, and the Englishman Reginald Pole. Contarini, still a layman, became from this time forward the leading spirit amongst them.

When the enlightened Alessandro Farnese became Pope as Paul III (1534), he found this group of zealous men ready to his hand. Contarini was made a Cardinal at his first creation, and Sadoleto, Caraffa, and Pole received the purple in the following year. In 1537, when he appointed a commission to suggest measures for the reform of the Church, most of its members were chosen from this quarter, the names being those of Contarini, Caraffa, Sadoleto, Pole, Fregoso, Aleander, Giberti, Cortese, and Tommaso Badia. The fruit of their labours, the famous Consilium de emendanda Ecclesia, was unsparing in reprobation of abuses and rich in practical suggestions. But although a few efforts were made to simplify the procedure of the Curia, the forces of inertia proved too strong, and the Consilium was little more than a dead letter. In after years it fell into bad odour, partly owing to its damaging admissions, partly because the Lutherans had taken it up. Moreover Caraffa came in time to suspect many of his former associates of heresy; and after he became Pope the work was placed on the Index Llbrorum Prohibitorum of 1559. But, even had it been otherwise received, it could not have stayed the tide. The revolt against abuses had already opened the way to movements of a more destructive character; the new opinions were already making their appearance south of the Alps.

Italy, always a land of popular movements, was in many ways predisposed to welcome the new opinions. Some of them had been foreshadowed there, and revolt against the Papacy was to its peoples no new thing. The Cathari of the north, with their Manichean and anti-trinitarian tendencies, had long died out; but the Waldenses, although