bring the parish priests to a sense of their high calling. Two of the members of the Oratory, Gaetano da Thiene and Giovanni Pietro Caraffa, took the first active steps to effect this reformation. Gaetano da Thiene, of an ancient family of Vicenza, was one of the pronotari participanti at the papal Court under Julius II. The life, however, became distasteful to him, and he accordingly resigned his post and took orders. He was one of the earliest members of the Oratory. After a short time he left Rome and worked in Vicenza and Venice, preaching to the people and doing good works. His experience there taught him that the weakness of the Church was largely due to the inefficiency and corruption of the parochial clergy. Accordingly, in 1523, he returned to Rome with the idea of founding a society to remedy this evil. There he again met Caraffa, who at once fell in with his views; and the two worked together to achieve this end. The Canons Regular of St Augustine may have suggested to Gaetano da Thiene the Order which they obtained the permission of Clement VII to found in 1524.
The new society was to consist of ordinary secular clergy bound together by the three monastic vows. They were to be, in short, secular priests with the vows of monks. The reformation of the clergy and a life of contemplation were to be the objects of the society.
The new society is important, not so much on account of its own work among the secular clergy as for the example it set. It always remained small in numbers, and its membership came to be confined to the nobility. Though the original conception was due to Gaetano da Thiene, yet it was from Caraffa that the society took its name. It became known as the Order of Theatines after his see of Chieti (Theate). It was no doubt largely due to his administrative ability and power of organisation that the society was a success. It found many imitators. A similar society of regular clerks was founded at Somasca in the Milanese, 1528, by Girolamo Miani, son of a Venetian senator; and at Milan the Order of Barnabites was established about 1530 by three noble ecclesiastics, Zaccaria, Ferrari, and Morigia. The Barnabites were extremely successful in their labours; and their society carried into practice far and wide the scheme which Gaetano da Thiene had been the first to conceive for the improvement of the secular clergy
Quietly and unostentatiously, with little active assistance from the papal Court, the regeneration of Catholicism in Italy was thus begun, Caraffa was the guiding genius in the work, so far as a movement which was so wide can be connected with a single man; and it was pregnant with importance for the future that he was growing more and more estranged from the liberal Catholic reformers, with whom he had at one time worked in the Oratory of Divine Love. The path which Contarini and his friends were indicating, greater freedom in discipline, reduction of papal prerogative, and a considerable restatement of the
