CONGREGATION OF ST PAUL (BARNABITES)
Founded in 1530 in ZACCARIA, SANTO (v.) together with Giacomo Morigia and Bartolomeo Ferrari, Milanese patricians. Their first dwelling was near the church of St Augustine, and they were approved by Clement VII on 18 February 1533; there too the first Angelicas of St Paul (v.) gathered. From September 1533 they were at St Catherine of the Smiths at Porta Ticinese, whence, after three years, they moved to St Ambrose, into the house left free by the Angelicas, who had settled in their convent of St Paul. The true mother-house, however, remained St Barnabas, where they definitively established themselves in 1545 and from which they took the name Barnabites. Strengthened in spirit by their “spiritual conferences”, they went out into the streets of Milan to preach, more by the example of rigorous and even public mortifications than by deliberately unadorned words. Then came the “missions” outside Milan.
Soon difficulties arose: famous was the first, in 1534, provoked by the mortifications, which were denounced as hypocritical novelties and heretical before the Senate and the archiepiscopal Curia; but the bull of Paul III of 14 March 1535, confirming and extending the concessions of Clement VII, placed them