Active in Florence, Italy, Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498) was a Dominican friar who called the medieval Roman Catholic Church to account for its moral corruption. There have been plenty of virtuous popes in church history, but Pope Alexander VI wasn’t one of them. He bought his way into the papacy and had several mistresses, by whom he fathered four children. Girolamo denounced the pope’s hypocrisy in no uncertain terms and demanded moral reform. The pope tried to appease him by offering him the position of cardinal. He refused, and the pope ordered him to come to Rome. Girolamo knew it was a ploy, so he replied that he wasn’t feeling well. No more preaching, the pope ordered. Girolamo obliged for a time yet started preaching again. The pope promptly excommunicated him. In pre-Reformation times, if a priest was excommunicated, it meant he couldn’t administer the Lord’s Supper. And if you couldn’t receive Holy Communion, you were unlikely to go to heaven. The people turned on Girolamo, resulting in his arrest and eventual execution.
In 1498, while in prison, he composed a meditation in prison on Psalm 51 titled Infelix ego (Alas, wretched man that I am). Psalm 51 is David’s penitential prayer after coming to terms with his own adultery and murder. Girolamo had just been tortured on the rack and, unable to withstand, had recanted his prophecies of divine judgment. Devastated by his personal weakness, he prayed earnestly for forgiveness and petitioned God for a clean heart.
While we might regard him as too hard on himself, his meditation endures as a model of contrition. The Reformer Martin Luther found inspiration in “that godly man of Florence” and published Girolamo’s Prison Meditation on Psalm 51 in which is included the following prayer: