He wasn’t overly impressed by the Monte Cassino. He wasn’t overly impressed just because he could attend the conclave that promised to become the most important council of the Church since the Conclave of Constance. He was much more proud and haughty than that. Indeed, Bishop Joan Cavajé, known as Jean Chevalier to Frenchmen and as Giovanni Cavaliere to Italians, was not any less arrogant than the most disdainful aristocrat; his behaviour was so aristocratic that many rumoured that he was a bastard of someone “of the highest nobility” -- while in reality, being the third son of a baron’s fifth son, he was only barely noble by birth. But he was proud, very proud, often irrationally so. He was proud of his virtues, he was proud of his education, he was proud of his rather lowly lineage, he was proud of his homeland, the Piedmont, he was proud even of that he couldn’t speak Italian perfectly -- in fact this only hindered his progress in the Church hierarchy.
While there had been many people to think that Cavaliere would get the cardinal’s hat before his fortieth birthday! The old Jean Gerson had praised his wits and perspicacity truly highly; he had been carrying a correspondence of a very cordial tone with Nicolas de Clamanges; he had been appointed Bishop of Ivrea as early as at age twenty-six… Twenty-two years before.
His swift progress had stopped then. Rome seemed to hate him like the plague, probably because of his always critical approach: like Gerson, de Clamanges, and the other well-learned humanists of Gaul, he claimed that the Church must be cleansed of corruption, that the faith must be cleansed of superstition, that the dogmas must be revised. Idealist of the worst kind, he aimed the inward perfection of the Church that would eventually result in the supremacy of the Church over the temporal rule. And he was not only idealist, he was also the archetype of the active bishop, of the kind so easy to imagine in armour, of the kind with a piercing glance and all that, and -- quite obviously -- the hedonist Rome wanted the presence of such a menacing shadow of criticism the least.
Cavajé was notoriously tolerant. He was tolerant toward the Waldenses, these heretics who denied the Church, the mass, the priesthood, the private property. “
While they are heretics, certainly, I cannot disagree with their anguish about the corruption of the Church,” Cavaliere had written to de Clamanges. “
What is more, they are virtuous people by all possible means, and they are free of the Greed, root of all sins, and that is something I could not say about many of our brothers in the service of God.” And thus, as Bishop of Ivrea, he pursued the very same startegy as his predecessors: he let the hereitcs be, and in exchange the priests he sent to the Waldens villages as missionaries were left unharmed. He made many enemies in Rome with this subtle approach, and also with the contact he maintained with the Muslim University of Tangiers. It was well-known he preferred a peaceful solution in the current war.
But not even his enemies could not dispute his asceticism: he drank only water, never ate meat nor fish, and even though he had a weakness for fine clothes, everybody knew that he wore a mortification belt studded with nails under his cassock of black velvet.
Bishop Joan Cavajé of Ivrea, known only to the most experienced players of the inner politics of the Church, but to those well-known, was amongst the first bishops of the Church to arrive in Monte Cassino. He had left a Piedmont behind that was just beginning to recover from the anarchy caused by the disappearance of the Duke and his regent; it was a very poor year for the farmers, and there were also the alarming news about those devilish glaciers that were approaching; and there was the Lotharingian civil war, and there was the Interregnum in the Empire…
As Bishop Joan Cavajé concluded to an acquaintance of his: “We’re living rather interesting times.”
