SERIPANDO, GIROLAMO.-Troiano S. (in the Order, Girolamo) descends from a noble Neapolitan family, belonging to the seat of Capua. Felice Milensio and other earlier authors give Troia di Puglia as his place of birth; he himself, however, says his homeland was Naples, where he spent his youth (born in 1492 or 1493) and where in 1507 he entered the convent of the Augustinians of S. Giovanni a Carbonara, the principal convent of the Congregation of Observants of the same name.
After having been secretary of the general of the Order, Egidio Canisio of Viterbo, in 1516 he became regent of the Studium of the Order in Bologna, but in 1523 he returned to Naples to direct the Congregation of S. Giovanni a Carbonara. In Naples, spurred on by the members of the Pontanian Academy and by Neapolitan humanism, of which his brother Antonio was also a part, he perfected his Platonism with 109 Quaestiones, but around 1535 he withdrew from the circles close to Italian evangelism, in opposition to Juan Valdés. In his sermons the spirit of Paulinism is by now evident. He intervened in the controversy over Augustinianism which, after the sermons given in Siena by the Augustinian Agostinus Musaeus, had arisen in 1538 among don Timoteo da Verona, Contarini, Lattanzio Tolomei and Marcantonio Flaminio.
Meanwhile Paul III, after the death of the general of the Order Giovanni Antonio Aprutino, appointed S. as vicar general of the Order itself; in 1539, at the general Chapter of Naples, S. was elected general. In order to reform the Order, which was in peril because of the penetration of Lutheranism and other abuses, S. began an inspection which, between 1539 and 1542, took him through almost all of Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and he was in lively epistolary correspondence with the vicar general of the German Augustinians, Giovanni Hoffmeister. He expelled from the Order the masters Giulio della Rovere, Agostino Mainardi, Ambrogio da Milano and Niccolò di Verona, who leaned toward Protestantism.
The first culminating act of his activity was his participation in the Council of Trent-Bologna, 1545-48, of which he left incomplete Commentarii (Conc. Trid., II, 399-488). As a trusted adviser of card. Cervini he took part many times in the drafting of the decrees, and in particular the second draft of the Decree on justification comes from him, which was published in the sixth session, indeed with many changes. S.'s opinions on concupiscence, on the position of Faith in the process of Justification and on the essence of merit, in whose defense he appealed among other things to the doctrine of the Duplex iustitia represented by Gropper and Contarini, were combated especially by Lainez and did not receive the approval of the Council. But this does not diminish his influence, as his numerous votes and treatises demonstrate (in Conc. Trid., V, XII and XIII, 1).
Paul III's plan to name him cardinal failed; shortly afterward an apoplectic stroke, which struck him in 1550 as a result of severe exertions, forced him to renounce the generalate (1551). Once his health had improved, he went in 1553 to the Court of Charles V in the Netherlands, in order to obtain from the Emperor, in his capacity as ambassador of the city of Naples, the restoration of the privileges violated several times by the viceroy Pietro di Toledo. On 30 March 1554, by imperial appointment, he became archbishop of Salerno, where he held an apostolic visitation in the spirit of the Catholic Reformation and gave sermons on the Pater Noster and the Creed.
In the war of the Carafa against Philip II he was on the Spanish side. Pius IV, in view of the imminent continuation of the Council of Trent, on 26 Feb. 1561 named him cardinal, and shortly afterward legate of the Council.
Because of his great experience in questions concerning the Council he was the right hand of the president Ercole Gonzaga, but in May 1562 he fell into disfavor with Pius IV because of his position in the dispute over the ius divinum of the obligation of residence for bishops.
Gonzaga and S. were unable to overcome the major crisis that broke out in the winter of 1562-63 during the debate on the sacrament of Order and on a new form of the decree on residence. The cardinal's energies did not hold up under the debate; and a few days after Gonzaga, S. also died on 17 March 1563 at Trent, and was buried in S. Marco, the church of the Augustinians. Even his adversaries had to acknowledge how upright his personality had been, the refinement of his spirit, his sincere piety and his great learning. He is a representative of the Catholic Reformation, not of the Counter-Reformation, and still less is he a precursor of Jansenism.
Bibliography6 works
Uberto Jedin