Spirituali

The Spirituali were members of a reform movement within the Roman Catholic Church, which existed from the 1510s to the 1560s. The movement is sometimes also called evangelism.

The ranks of the Spirituali included Cardinal Gasparo Contarini (1483–1542), Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto (1477–1547), Cardinal Reginald Pole (1500–1558), Italian poet Vittoria Colonna, and her friend, the artist Michelangelo (1475–1564), who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the very controversial Last Judgement. These "Italian evangelicals" proposed to reform the Church through a spiritual renewal and internalization of faith by each individual, viewing the intense study of scripture and justification by faith as means to that end. "Central [to the Spirituali] was a renewed emphasis on the grace which God sent through faith," writes Church Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, "together with a consistent urge to reveal the Holy Spirit as the force conveying this grace – to that associates of the movement were soon characterized as Spirituali."

The Spirituali took many of their ideas from older Catholic texts, but certainly found inspiration in the Protestant Reformation, especially Calvinism, although they wanted peaceful internal reform, not a split. Had the movement become successful, the face of Europe would have changed, avoiding the excesses of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation and perhaps changing the political and social reasons leading to the Thirty Years war. Benedictine monk wrote the first version of the most notable expression of Spirituali doctrine, the Beneficio di Cristo (The Benefit of Christ's Death), in 1543, attempting to prove that salvation comes through Sola fide, or 'faith [in Christ] alone' (as Protestants insisted on), not through works or the Church; later the poet and humanist Marcantonio Flaminio revised it. The group printed forty thousand copies of the book, which was soon declared heretical and placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

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