The elevation of a simple friar to the highest place in the Spanish Church was a blow to numerous ambitions that could scarce fail to arouse hostility. Valdés himself was said to have aspirations for the position and to be bitterly disappointed. Pedro de Castro, Bishop of Cuenca, had also cherished hopes and was eager for revenge. Carranza, moreover, was not popular with the hierarchy. He was that unwelcome character, a reformer within the Church and, while everyone acknowledged the necessity of reform, no one looked with favor on a reformer who assailed his profitable abuses. As far back as 1547, while in attendance on the Council of Trent, Carranza had preached a sermon on one of the most crying evils of the time, the non-residence of bishops and beneficiaries, and had embodied his views in a tractate as severe as a Lutheran would have written on this abuse and the kindred one of pluralities, to which possibly the stringent Tridentine provisions on the subject may be attributed.[142] Such an outburst was not calculated to win favor, seeing that the splendor of the curia was largely supported by the prelacies and benefices showered upon its members and that in Spain there was scarce an inquisitor or a fiscal who was not a non-resident beneficiary of some preferment. Carranza had, moreover, a peculiarly dangerous enemy in a brother Dominican, Melchor Cano, perhaps the leading Spanish theologian of the time when Spanish theology was beginning to dominate the Church. Learned, able, keen-witted and not particularly scrupulous, he was in intellect vastly superior to Carranza; there had been early rivalry, when both were professors of theology, and causes of strife in the internal politics of the Order had arisen, so that Cano could scarce view without bitterness the sudden elevation of his brother fraile.[143] His position at the time was somewhat precarious. When, in 1556, Paul IV forced war on Philip II, that pious prince sought the advice of theologians as to the propriety of engaging in hostilities with the Vicegerent of God, and the _parecer_, or opinion which Cano drew up, was an able state paper that attracted wide attention. He defended uncompromisingly the royal prerogatives, he virtually justified the German revolt when the _Centum Gravamina_ of the Diet of Nürnberg, in 1522, were unredressed and he described the corruption of Rome as a disease of such long standing as to be incurable.[144] This hardy defiance irritated Paul in the highest degree. April 21, 1556 he issued a brief summoning that son of perdition, Melchor Cano, to appear before him within sixty days for trial and sentence, but the brief was suppressed by the Royal Council and Cano was ordered not to leave the kingdom. The Spanish Dominicans rallied to his defence; in the chapter of 1558 he was elected provincial and deputy to the general chapter to be held in Rome, but Paul ordered the election to be annulled and Cano to be deprived of his priorate of San Esteban.