Laski (a Lasco), Jan

LASKI (a Lasco), JAN. - Polish reformer, b. at Lask (eastern Poland) in 1499 and d. at Pinczów on 8 Jan. 1560. A nephew of the famous archbishop and politician Jan the Elder, he was in his youth in Italy, at Bologna, at Rome, cultivating humanistic studies, then most dear to Erasmus, whose library he acquired, and then at Paris. During this long stay he came to know many of the future leaders of the "reformation." A priest in 1521, he obtained, through his uncle's influence, offices and benefices. In the period 1524-26, being on a diplomatic mission, he intensified his contacts with the Reformed. In 1530, again through his uncle's influence, he received from the king of Hungary, John Sigismund Zápolya, the bishopric of Veszprém: this appointment, however, was not confirmed by the Pope. Meanwhile suspicions about his orthodoxy grew, so many were the manifestations to the contrary that he offered and the contacts, by now continuous, with Protestant leaders. Already in 1538, moreover, he was in fact a Protestant. Passing through Frankfurt, Louvain, Emden, he was even charged with governing the Reformed Churches of the region. In 1544, in his homeland, he still swore adherence to Catholicism, but very soon he withdrew again and returned to Emden to organize there the Reformed community on humanistic-Calvinist principles, decidedly anti-Lutheran.

Meanwhile in England, while Edward VI was a minor and power was in the hands of the Lord Protector, Somerset, and of the primate of the English Church, Archbishop Cranmer, the latter, who was diligently attending to the organization of the Anglican Church, called L. to collaborate in it. L. arrived in England in 1550 and, while he was a counselor of Cranmer, he devoted himself particularly to that colony of Protestant exiles resulting from the interim of Augsburg of 1548, known under the name of Ecclesia peregrinorum. A Calvinist on the question of the Supper, radical in worship, he favored the introduction of laymen into the direction of ecclesiastical affairs. On the death of Edward VI (1553) and the succession of Mary the Catholic, L. left England. Hated most bitterly by the Lutherans, who drove him out, in the depths of winter, together with his Reformed community, from Denmark, Mecklenburg, Lübeck and Hamburg, he finally took refuge in 1556 in Poland, welcomed there by King Sigismund Augustus, with whom he had long pressed for support in the attempts to unite the Polish Protestant Churches, bitterly divided among themselves over the sacramental question. His last efforts were in fact devoted to trying to unite Calvinists, Lutherans and Moravian Brethren in a single confession. He obtained some successes in "Little Poland," where he fought bitterly against Catholicism, but his efforts at union, as Farel declared to Calvin, seemed destined always to produce the opposite effect. The agreement came later (1572), twelve years after L.'s death, at Sandomierz, when the virulence of the sacramental question was beginning to decline.

Franco Bolgiani