The visitations of the Swiss Italian parishes

Visitation as an instrument of government

The canonical visitation was an old institution. Bishops had always had the duty to inspect the churches of their diocese. The Council of Trent renewed this duty in 1563 by requiring each bishop to visit his diocese personally or through a delegate, if possible every year and at least every two years.¹ What changed under Borromeo was method. A visitation became a procedure with fixed stages. Before the visitor arrived, the parish priest received a questionnaire and had to prepare an inventory of the church, its furnishings and relics, its benefices and foundations, the register of souls and the list of confraternities with their statutes and accounts. On arrival the visitor inspected the building, the altars, the sacristy, the vessels and the vestments. He examined the priest on doctrine, morals and the administration of the sacraments. He heard complaints from the parishioners in private, questioned the lay administrators about the property of the church and called for the account books. At the end he issued decrees: orders to repair a roof, to rebuild an altar according to the norms, to wall up a window in the confessional, to recover alienated property or to dismiss a priest.²

The result of each visitation was a file, kept in the archiepiscopal archive in Milan or in the episcopal archive in Como, that recorded the state of a parish at a given date. The files of later visitations noted whether earlier decrees had been carried out. A sequence of such files over decades is a record of administrative supervision, comparable in its logic to the periodic inspections that a modern supervisory authority carries out at a regulated institution. The comparison should not be pressed too far, since the visitor exercised spiritual and coercive jurisdiction at once. It nevertheless explains why the historians of the Swiss Italian parishes regard the visitation files as their most important serial source for the period between 1560 and 1800.³

The Tre Valli

In the Ambrosian valleys of Leventina, Blenio and Riviera, Borromeo was the ordinary and visited in person. His pastoral visits to the Swiss territories of the archdiocese took place in 1567, soon after his arrival in Milan, and again in 1570, 1571, 1577 and 1582.⁴ The journeys were difficult. The visitor and his small retinue travelled on foot and by mule through valleys where the parishes were spread over many villages and hamlets, some of them reachable only by mountain paths. The archbishop preached, confirmed children and adults by the hundreds, consecrated altars and settled disputes. Contemporaries recorded his insistence on sleeping in poor quarters and eating simply, which became part of his legend in the valleys. More significant for this chapter are the decrees he left behind. They ordered the separation of new parishes from old ones where distances were too great, the creation of benefices sufficient to support a resident priest, the repair and reordering of churches and the reform of confraternities.⁵

The relationship with the rulers of the Tre Valli was cooperative in principle and difficult in detail. Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden supported the fight against heresy, but they defended their right to tax the clergy, to try clerics in criminal matters and to supervise the transfer of church property. Borromeo needed their bailiffs to enforce his decrees, to expel concubines and to arrest suspects. The Catholic cantons in turn needed Borromeo for recruiting priests trained in Milan, for dispensations from Rome and for support in their disputes with the Reformed cantons. The visitations were thus also negotiations between a metropolitan who claimed ecclesiastical liberty and sovereign cantons that regarded the Church in their subject territories as part of their lordship.⁶

Notes

1. Council of Trent, Session XXIV (11 November 1563), Decretum de reformatione, c. 3, as summarized in Wikipedia (consulted as a last resort), "Visita pastorale", https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visita_pastorale ("obbligatorio compiere la visita pastorale ogni anno oppure ogni due anni qualora non fosse possibile"); "Trento, Concilio di", in Enciclopedia Treccani online, https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/concilio-di-trento/ (synods "accompagnati da visite nelle diocesi"). ↩
2. Borromeo's instructions for visitors in the Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis (Milan 1582). ↩
3. Ceschi (ed.), Storia della Svizzera italiana dal Cinquecento al Settecento (above); the comparison with prudential supervision is the author's. ↩
4. Paolo Ostinelli, Pablo Crivelli and Fabrizio Panzera, "Milano (arcidiocesi)", in DSS, version of 29 April 2010, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/007018/ (visits to the Swiss territories of the archdiocese in 1567, 1570, 1571, 1577 and 1582). ↩
5. D'Alessandri (as above); Ceschi (as above). ↩
6. Ceschi (as above). Fransioli and Locarnini, "Leventina" (above), confirms Uri's lordship but says nothing on the disputes over clerical taxation and jurisdiction. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.