OCHINO, BERNARDINO. - Apostate, b. in Siena in the contrada dell'Oca (whence his name O.) in 1487 to a poor family, d. at Slavkov (Moravia) toward the end of 1564.
I. LIFE
Having entered the Observant Friars Minor of Tuscany around 1504, he became provincial of Siena (1523), then vicar general of the cismontane provinces (1533). At the beginning of 1534 he entered the Capuchins and became their vicar general (1538-42). Celebrated as a preacher and for the austerity of his life, he was sought after by the Italian cities, and the most eminent men of the Catholic reform nourished great hopes in him; he, however, could not escape in Naples the influence of Juan Valdés, and drew suspicions upon his orthodoxy; in Sept. 1542, following an internal crisis, having let himself be seduced by the example of Pietro Martire Vermigli, he decided to break with the Catholic Church and betook himself to Geneva, to Calvin, issuing a widely circulated letter in which he intended to justify his step. In Geneva and then in Augsburg (1542-47) O. was minister of the Italian Reformed community.
Meanwhile he had united with a woman native to Lucca, by whom he had four sons and two daughters. Having fled to England (1547), he was appointed by Thomas Cranmer Italian preacher in London and held a canonry at Canterbury. With the accession to the throne of Mary Tudor (1553), he had to resume his wandering life, until he was able to settle in Zurich as a pastor, where, however, his work XXX dialoghi procured his expulsion. After various stages, he ended up in Poland, where through the protection of Prince Nicholas Radziwill he was able to preach to the Italian Reformed of Kraków in Apr.-May 1564. But through the intervention of Card. Hosius (v.) on 7 Aug. a royal edict forbade residence in Poland to all non-Catholics who had come from abroad, and O. found refuge, after having lost three of his sons during the journey, at Slavkov (Austerlitz) in Moravia, with Niccolò Paruta, a Venetian nobleman, antitrinitarian and Anabaptist. There he died of contagion with the last of his sons.
II. WRITINGS AND DOCTRINE
In the Catholic period he printed Dialoghi sette (Venice 1540 and 1542), in which, addressing his interlocutor Caterina Cybo, Duchess of Camerino, he explained the nature and conditions of perfection, and Prediche nove (Venice 1541), in which he attacks Protestant theories and proclaims the theology of Christ as the sole source of truth.
In the Protestant period he wrote a great deal. From 1542 to 1562 he published a series of sermons in five volumes (Basel, Geneva), each of which has its own master idea drawn from Christian doctrine or life as interpreted in his own way; in Geneva (1544-45) he wrote in Italian the Immagine dell'Anticristo, published for the first time in French (1544); Esposizioni sopra le Epistole di s. Paolo ai Romani (1545) and ai Galati (1546). In England he composed in Latin, translated into English and dedicated to Edward VI: A Trogoedia or Dialogue of the injuste usurped primacie of the Bishop of Rome and of all the just abolifying of the same (London 1549), to demonstrate that the Roman Church is an invention of Lucifer. From Geneva he published in 1544 the Apologhi (a collection of 110 satirical anecdotes about the pope, cardinals, priests and friars, which grew in later editions to about 500); in Zurich, in 1556, the Dialogo del Purgatorio (simultaneously in Italian, Latin and German), in which Teoditatto (O.) maintains against five defenders of Catholic doctrine that the only true Purgatory is Jesus, and the Syncerae et verae doctrinae de Coena Domini defensio, in which he described the Supper as the remembrance of the expiatory death of Jesus Christ, without seeing in it a pledge of the forgiveness of sins; in Basel, in 1561, Tractatio de conciliatione controversiae inter reformatas Ecclesias; Disputa intorno alla presenza del Corpo di Gesù Cristo nel sacramento della Cena; Prediche nomate Laberinti del libero o ver servo arbitrio, prescienza, predestinazione e libertà divina e del modo di uscirne; Il Catechismo (in the Disputa he rejects both the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and the Reformed thesis according to which Christ in the Supper communicates himself to the believer per fidem. In the Laberinti, dedicated to Elizabeth of England, O.'s argument on free will constantly wavers between pro and con, finally ending in doubt); also in Basel, in 1536, Dialoghi XXX in duos libros divisi, quorum primus est de Messia continetque Dialogos XVIII, secundus est cum de rebus variis tum potissimum de Trinitate. Written in Italian, they were printed only in Castello's Latin translation. In them O. seriously defends neither the dogma of the Trinity nor monogamy; he presupposes the impotence of reason and the instability of dogma, relies on individual and unlimited freedom (free examination), and finally takes refuge in scepticism. Thus he introduced into the Protestant "reformation" a new ferment of division, hastening its dogmatic and disciplinary disintegration.
Bibliography7 works
(with bibl.); B. Nicolini, Girolamo Muzio e B. O. Storia di una polemica, in Biblion, 1946, pp. 9-45; Melchior a Pobladura, Hist. gener. Ord. Fr. Min., Rome 1947, ch. 1. Preaching Callaey