Pope Adrian VI
Adriaan Floriszoon Boeyens was born at Utrecht in 1459, the son of a shipwright. He studied at Louvain, taught theology there, and was appointed tutor to the boy who would become the Emperor Charles V. He went on to be bishop of Tortosa, inquisitor-general of Spain, and regent of Castile.
When the conclave of January 1522 deadlocked after Leo X’s death, the cardinals settled on the absent Dutchman almost in desperation. He was not present, had not sought it, and did not arrive in Rome until August. He was the last non-Italian pope until the election of John Paul II in 1978.
Adrian was a genuinely devout and frugal man who understood that the German revolt had causes nearer home than Wittenberg. In the autumn of 1522 he sent his legate Francesco Chieregati to the Diet of Nuremberg with an instruction to be read before the German estates. It contains an admission without parallel in the sixteenth century — the Roman see confessing, in its own voice, the charge the Reformers were making:
We know that for some time many abominations, abuses in ecclesiastical affairs, and violations of rights have taken place in the holy see; and that all things have been perverted into bad. From the head the corruption has passed to the limbs, from the Pope to the prelates: we have all departed; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.1 Adrian VIInstruction to the Diet of Nuremberg, 1522
He added that the curia, “from which all this evil perhaps proceeded,” must be reformed first.2 It is worth pausing over the fact that a Protestant could not have put the indictment more strongly, and that the man saying it was the pope.
Yet in the same instruction he required the German princes to enforce the Edict of Worms against Luther. Adrian saw the corruption clearly and diagnosed it as moral rather than doctrinal. He proposed to clean the house without reconsidering what was taught in it — and the Reformers’ complaint was never chiefly about the morals of the clergy but about justification, the authority of Scripture, and the Mass.
The Roman court detested him. He cut expenses, refused the usual patronage, and spoke Latin with a Dutch accent. He died on September 14, 1523, after a pontificate of twenty months. A contemporary hung a wreath on his physician’s door inscribed to “the deliverer of his country.” Reform of the kind he wanted would wait another twenty years, and come with a council attached.
