The Church south of the Alps before Trent

Two dioceses and a frontier of rites

When Carlo Borromeo arrived in Milan in 1565, the parishes of the later Canton of Ticino belonged to two dioceses whose cathedrals lay outside the Confederation. The southern and western part of the territory, with Lugano, Mendrisio, Locarno, the Vallemaggia and Bellinzona, formed part of the diocese of Como, which by the nineteenth century counted about 180 parishes in its six Ticinese pievi. Since the early seventh century, Como had belonged to the ecclesiastical province of the patriarch of Aquileia, and it remained an Aquileian suffragan until 1751. Its bishop was therefore not subject to the archbishop of Milan.¹ The three northern valleys of the Leventina, Blenio and the Riviera, together with the pieve of Capriasca north of Lugano and the parish of Brissago on Lake Maggiore, belonged directly to the archdiocese of Milan. These were the Tre Valli ambrosiane, in which the Ambrosian rite of Milan was celebrated in place of the Roman rite.² Chapter A.I describes the medieval origins of this division. For the purposes of this chapter, three consequences matter. The territory had no bishop of its own and, until the Catholic reform established a seminary for the Tre Valli in the former Humiliati house of Pollegio, no seminary either. Its clergy were trained, appointed and supervised from Como and Milan. Its political rulers, the Confederate cantons that governed the bailiwicks after 1500 and 1512–1513, were themselves divided by confession after 1529, so that the Church in the south depended on the agreement of masters who did not agree among themselves.³

The Ambrosian rite expresses the specific relationship of the northern valleys with the metropolitan see of Milan. The archbishop was their direct ordinary, the canons and officials of the Milanese curia administered their benefices, while the provincial councils of Milan legislated for them without the mediation of a suffragan bishop. When Borromeo reformed the Ambrosian liturgy and the Milanese church after 1565, his decrees applied in Faido, Biasca and Olivone as directly as in Milan. The Tre Valli thus became one of the first testing grounds of the Tridentine reform outside Italy proper. The rite survives there today: the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland attributes its preservation in the Three Valleys to the long dominion of the Milanese canons, whose officials had once administered both the spiritual and the temporal affairs of the valleys.⁴

Rulers of two confessions

The political map overlapped the ecclesiastical one without matching it. The Leventina had been ruled by Uri since the fifteenth century. The Riviera, Blenio and Bellinzona were governed jointly by Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden. All three were Catholic cantons. In the Tre Valli Borromeo therefore dealt with Catholic sovereigns who shared his interest in a reformed and loyal clergy, although they guarded their own rights over church property and appointments jealously. The four bailiwicks of Lugano, Locarno, Mendrisio and the Vallemaggia were governed by twelve cantons, among them Reformed Zurich, Bern, Basel and Schaffhausen. In these baliaggi comuni every ecclesiastical measure touched the confessional balance among the rulers, as the expulsion of the Reformed Locarnese in 1555 had shown.⁵ The Second Peace of Kappel of 20 November 1531 had favoured the Catholic confession in the common lordships: individuals and groups received a right to return to the Catholic faith but no right to adopt the Reformation, and communities that became mixed in this way had to divide the church property between the confessions. The Locarnese case had tested the limits of that guarantee. After 1555 the Catholic majority in the Diet regarded the Italian bailiwicks as Catholic territory, while the Reformed cantons insisted on their share of sovereignty.⁶

This structure explains why Borromeo's work in the region had a diplomatic side from the beginning. In the Ambrosian valleys he could visit parishes, depose priests and order the repair of churches as their ordinary. Any step that touched temporal jurisdiction, such as the trial of laymen, the punishment of clergy by secular courts, the seizure of property or the expulsion of suspected heretics, needed the consent of the landfogto and, behind him, of the cantons. Conflicts over ecclesiastical immunity, over the right of the bailiffs to tax clergy and over appeals from church courts accompanied the whole period.⁷

Notes

1. Paolo Ostinelli, Pablo Crivelli and Fabrizio Panzera, "Como (diocesi)", in DSS, version of 21 April 2005, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/007015/ (province of Aquileia from about 606–608 until 1751, then Gorizia; about 180 parishes in the six Comasque pievi; bishops Volpi 1559–1588 and Ninguarda 1588–1595; numerous visitations, in particular by Borromeo). ↩
2. Paolo Ostinelli, Pablo Crivelli and Fabrizio Panzera, "Milano (arcidiocesi)", in DSS, version of 29 April 2010, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/007018/ (Ambrosian rite; the pievi of Capriasca, the Tre Valli and Brissago among the Milanese territories; Locarno and Bellinzona passed to Como in 1002/1004). See also Chapter A.I. On the province of Aquileia, to which Como belonged until 1751, and the antagonism between Como and Milan, see Ostinelli, Crivelli and Panzera, "Como (diocesi)" (below). ↩
3. André Holenstein, "Baliaggi comuni", in DSS, version of 21 September 2021, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/009817/2021-09-21/ (Lugano, Mendrisio, Locarno and Vallemaggia conquered in 1512; Bellinzona, Blenio and Riviera governed by Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden). On the Pollegio seminary see Mario Fransioli and Tiziano Locarnini, "Leventina", in DSS, version of 14 March 2017, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/008543/2017-03-14/, and "Tre Valli ambrosiane", in DSS, version of 5 April 2017, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/008551/2017-04-05/, which date the foundation differently (1571 and 1622). See also Chapter A.II. ↩
4. Fransioli and Locarnini, "Leventina" (as above), which attributes the survival of the Ambrosian rite in the Three Valleys to the dominion of the Milanese canons; "Tre Valli ambrosiane" (as above), on the canons' spiritual and temporal jurisdiction. ↩
5. Holenstein, "Baliaggi comuni" (as above): the cantons that joined the Confederation between 1481 and 1501 (Fribourg, Solothurn, Basel and Schaffhausen) took part only in the government of the four Italian bailiwicks; Fransioli and Locarnini, "Leventina" (as above), on Uri's rule from 1439/1441 (confirmed after Giornico, 1478) until 1798; Giuseppe Chiesi, "Riviera", in DSS, version of 5 April 2017, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/008547/2017-04-05/ (common bailiwick of Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden from 1499–1500 to 1798). See also Chapter B.I. ↩
6. Hans Ulrich Bächtold, "Landfriedensbünde", in HLS, version of 20 November 2014, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/009807/2014-11-20/ (Second Peace of 20 November 1531: a right of return to Catholicism without a corresponding right to adopt the Reformation; division of church property in mixed communities); "Kappelerkriege", in HLS, version of 12 November 2009, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/008903/2009-11-12/ (the peace "begünstigte jedoch in den gemeinen Herrschaften den Katholizismus"). ↩
7. Ceschi (as above); Paolo D'Alessandri, Atti di S. Carlo riguardanti la Svizzera e i suoi territorii (1909), passim. ↩

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