Puritan in Florence

One morning in 1498, a Dominican monk named Girolamo Savonarola said a last "Mass in the chapel of Florence's Palazzo Vecchio. Then he and two fellow Dominicans were dragged outside to a cross-shaped scaffold. As thousands of Florentines jeered, they were stripped of their white habits. The last of the three, Savonarola silently received the hangman's noose. As he died, a pyre was lit at the bottom of his scaffold.

Last week, Florentines flocked to the scene of Savonarola's execution to celebrate the sooth anniversary of his birth. A children's choir sang. Nuns convoyed little girls in white dresses who sprinkled flowers where the scaffold once stood. At night, drummers in medieval costume led processions of torch-bearing students past the flower-decked plaque. Orated Mayor Giorgio la Pira, a Christian Democrat: "Fra Girolamo Savonarola characterized Florence . . . as a firm guardian of the spirit of political liberty and as an eternal expression of fraternity and loving-kindness between man and man."

Martyr's Red. Girolamo Savonarola was a reformer with imposing forensic powers, and the bottomless, concentrated piety of St. John of the Cross. He came to the Dominican monastery of San Marco at a time when Florence lay wrapped in the captive luxury of the Medici tyranny. The church and the papacy were sadly corrupt, suffering from the rule, successively, of two immoral Popes. Innocent VIII and Alexander VI.*

Savonarola jumped into the life of Florence with the zest of a Puritan unloosed in Babylon. A man of deep and solitary faith, he believed he was God's instrument for purifying both church and city, and said so. His fervor turned out the Medici dictatorship, temporarily turned Florence into a theocracy. He fed the starving, reduced taxes for the poor, and protected the city from French invaders. He also burned books, ruthlessly condemned heresy, recruited armies of children to spy on their elders.

From his puritanized city the monk denounced Alexander VI as a usurper. Alexander at first tried to bribe him with a cardinal's hat. Savonarola replied: "No [red] hat will I have but that of a martyr reddened with my own blood." After he defied a papal excommunication, his political enemies, assisted by the Pope's political friends, stormed San Marco, had him tortured and executed.

A Sad Episode. Savonarola was in the tradition of the great Medieval ascetics, an anachronistic protest against Renaissance humanism. Discussing the newly revived ancient classics, he wrote: "The only good thing which we owe to Plato and Aristotle is that they brought forward many arguments which we can use against the heretics. Yet they and other philosophers are now in hell." No Protestant, he remained to the last rigidly faithful to Roman Catholic doctrine.

Despite this orthodoxy, the Dominicans have had little luck getting him canonized as a saint of the church, although they have been trying for two centuries. These days, said a Vatican 'spokesman last week, "The case of Savonarola is considered by the church a sad episode . . . Saints are to be admired and imitated by the faithful for possession of the seven virtues--faith, hope, charity, justice, fortitude, prudence and temperance. Savonarola can hardly be said to have possessed the last two."

* According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Pope Alexander VI had at least four illegitimate children.

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