TheMotherChurch 51
to the resident cappellano to give the sermon and to exhort the congregation
to pray for success of the meeting. At the close of the service all present
sang psalms together.^228 These spontaneous associations and their activities
evidence a real grassroots longing for priestly spiritual growth and profes-
sionalism. In the association at Verona, clergy who did not live up to the
requirements of their state—by wearing secular garb, for example—were
expelled from membership and denied charitable assistance.^229 Communes
themselves fostered and encouraged their clergy’s projects for professional-
ization in their own ways. At Verona in 1272 , the city fathers promised to
enforce contracts of the Congregationes Intrinsece et Extrinsece, the clerical
association there.^230
These societies were original creations of the lower clergy themselves.
They are a better indicator of priestly discipline, piety, and esprit de corps
than salty tales like that mentioned earlier about the mythical Pievano Por-
cellino. They also hint at the overlap between the spiritual aspirations of the
clergy and those of the laity. Although they restricted full membership to
priests, and sometimes only to rectors of churches, at Ferrara, Padua, Trev-
iso, Verona, Piacenza, Bologna, and Faenza laypeople enrolled, not as mem-
bers of the society admittedly, but as spiritual participants in the prayers and
good works of their clergy.^231 Such groups and activities bound the clergy—
and their congregations—together by a web of prayer. Lay demand for en-
rollment was constant, heavy, and seemingly spontaneous. The Treviso
priestly society’s prayer list for 1300 shows that 1 , 951 out of 2 , 076 participants
were lay affiliates. Clerical members, the rectors of urban cappelle, num-
bered 125. The average, then, was sixteen lay members from each urban
chapel.^232 The high level of enrollment, for both priests and laity, suggests
that in the small neighborhood chapels religious and devotional life was nei-
ther bureaucratic nor formal. Rather, clergy and people sensed a joint own-
ership of buildings, rituals, and piety. This paralleled the sense of ownership
felt by the commune for the Ecclesia Matrix herself. At every level, the city
church was a ‘‘condominium of all the citizens.’’^233
- Ferrara Clergy Const. ( 1278 ), col. 435.
- Verona, Archivio di Stato, Clero intrinseco, Reg. 1 , cap.xiii; quoted and discussed in Rigon,
‘‘Congregazioni,’’ 14 – 15. - Verona Stat.ii( 1276 ), 1. 269 , pp. 209 – 10.
- Rigon, ‘‘Congregazioni,’’ 11. And at Veroli in Lazio: Meersseman,Ordo, 1 : 179 – 80.
- Rigon, ‘‘Congregazioni,’’ 17 – 18.
- The term is that of Vauchez, ‘‘Conclusion,’’La parrocchia nel Medio Evo,ed. Paravicini Bagliani
and Pache, 308 – 9.