The Piarists were suppressed during the lifetime of the founder because of pederasty by the head of the order. It is the closest parallel I know of in Church history to the Legion. Joseph Calasanctius founded the Piarists, and made a fatal and culpable error of tolerating a child abuser who had high political connections.
Until recently, the difficulties that the Piarists had were explained in this fashion:
Calasanz’s success, however, continued to bother the local parish schoolmasters, as well as other rivals within the Church. It has also been suggested that the wealthy classes were alarmed by free education for the poor, fearing that their own superior positions in society would be threatened. Thus, a Fr. Mario Sozzi, who had entered the order in Naples in 1630, contrived to take power away from Calasanz. In 1639, he used his connections at the Vatican to become head of the order in Tuscany. He used this position to slander Calasanz and stain his reputation, denouncing him as too old and doddering to run the order. Legal battles, involving Calasanz’s defender Cardinal Cesarini, resulted in Sozzi having Calasanz arrested and carried through the streets as a felon. Intervention by Cesarini saved the 82-year-old from prison, but Sozzi was unpunished. Sozzi was finally successful, having Calasanz suspended from the generalate and taking control of the order later that same year.
Calasanz was subjected to humiliating and insulting treatment during Sozzi’s reign. In 1643, Sozzi died and was succeeded by Fr. Cherubini, who continued this policy. Calasanz bore this treatment with patience and meekness, urging the order to obey his persecutors as the authority, and one time protecting Cherubini from an angry mob of young priests, who were enraged by his behavior. The Vatican, meanwhile, was investigating the matter, and in 1645, at age 88, Calasanz was reinstated as general of the order. This victory was short-lived, however. In 1646, Calasanz’s enemies, with the help of a relative of the Pope, convinced Pope Innocent X to turn the control of the order over to local bishops. In effect, the order was dissolved. Calasanz was reported to have said, upon hearing this news, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
The job of reorganizing the schools fell to Fr. Cherubini, but his maladministration in other jobs resulted in his removal and disgrace. Calasanz was reconciled to him on Cherubini’s death bed in 1648. A few months later, Calasanz himself died a few days before his 92nd birthday. His order was reconstitued in 1656, and restored as a religious order in 1669.
This was the officially propagated story.
On 13 August 1948, Pius XII proclaimed Saint Joseph Calasanctius “Heavenly patron of. all Christian working-class schools in the world.”
Here is the review of Karen Liebreich’s Fallen Order from the Times of Acadiana in Lafayette, Louisiana (26 August 2004) (for other reviews):
It is a story drearily familiar from the headlines: priests abuse children, the bishops and cardinals in charge of the priests know it and “solve” the problem by moving the priests around to other locations, and finally the story breaks and causes embarrassment and disruption within the church. It is news, but it is not new; the same thing was happening in the seventeenth century. In Fallen Order: Intrigue, Heresy, and Scandal in the Rome of Galileo and Caravaggio (Grove Press), Karen Liebreich has found a scandal of priestly pedophilia that ruined and eventually closed a Catholic teaching order, the Piarists. The order was eventually restarted, and still exists. It is justifiably proud of making contributions to education (Mozart, Mendel, and Goya, to name just a few, were products of Piarist schools). It is proud of its founder, Father José de Calasanz, who was eventually beatified and became the patron saint of Catholic schools. It is quiet about the scandal that caused the suppression of the order, however, and Liebreich only stumbled upon the story in an ancient Florentine archive when she was doing a doctorate on public education. Looking through the thousands of letters from Calasanz (she grimly notes that there are no jokes and no lightness within them), she came across a euphemism: il vitio pessimo, “the worst sin.” Her curiosity up, she went through difficult searches at the Vatican Secret Archive; the Inquisition Archive only opened six years ago, and she thereupon hunted there, too. There is much more to the story than pedophilic priests and a cover up, but sadly, the patron saint of Catholic schools quite clearly performed the same sort of cover-up that has brought disgrace to his contemporary equivalents.
St. Joseph Calasanz had wanted to be a priest since his youth. Ordained in Spain in 1575, he left for Rome in 1592, trying to network and make a place for himself. For years, he had little success, and he may have been offended at the luxurious way in which his peers lived. He saw a particular need for education of the poor; the rich had no problems educating their children, and orders such as the Jesuits offered catechism and higher education, but the poor had trouble getting a start. He began teaching children from poverty himself, and founded a school supported by grants from the city and the Pope. He founded the Piarist Order in 1592, and there was an immediate contrast to the way the Jesuits taught. Piarists taught boys for free. They taught in the vernacular, not Latin. They taught arithmetic that merchants might use, not philosophical mathematics. Calasanz was preparing them to work in banks, warehouses, and shops. Although there is no evidence that he knew Galileo, his priests in the Piarist school in Florence espoused Galilean teachings; when Galileo was persecuted for such teachings as the Earth going around the Sun, this was an eventual liability for the order. Calasanz favored discomfort for himself, the sort of hair-shirt masochism that seems exceedingly strange to us today. He would eat his meals with one foot in the air, so that he could suffer even as he ate, or he would lie in the corridor leading to the refectory and make the other members of the order walk on him as they went in. He ruled that his Piarists had to live austere lives, dressing simply, wearing sandals in the winter, eating bad food and little of it. The rules included that they could not swim, play games, play guitar, or kiss even their mothers. Despite the austerity, the movement rapidly grew into new schools all through Italy.
The rules were broken with zeal by Father Stefano Cherubini, originally headmaster of the school in Naples. He is the main villain in the book, because he liked eating well, he wore a specially cut clerical jacket that was indecently short, he wore shoes against the cold, and even socks, instead of sandals, he didn’t get to all the mandatory prayer sessions, he traveled in a carriage and he sang in a falsetto voice. He also enjoyed sodomizing the pupils. Father Stefano made no secret about at least some of his transgressions, and Calasanz came to know of them. Unfortunately for Calasanz as administrator of the order, Father Stefano was the son and the brother of powerful papal lawyers; no one wanted to offend the Cherubini family. Father Stefano pointed out that if allegations of his abuse of his boys became public, actions would be taken to destroy the Piarists. Calasanz therefore promoted Father Stefano, to get him away from the scene of the crime, citing only his luxurious diet and failure to attend prayers. However, he knew what Cherubini had really been up to, and he wrote that the sole aim of the plan “… is to cover up this great shame in order that it does not come to the notice of our superiors.”
Superiors in Rome found out, of course, but bowed to the same family ties that had bound Calasanz. Cherubini became visitor-general for the Piarists, able to conduct himself just as he wanted in any school he visited. The Piarists became entangled in church politics, and partially because they were associated with Galileo, were opposed by the Jesuits, who were more orthodox in astronomy. (Galileo’s views also involved atomism, and were thought to be heretical regarding transubstantiation.) The support for Cherubini was broad enough that in 1643, he was made head of the order and the elderly Calasanz was pushed aside. Upon this appointment, Calasanz publicly documented Cherubini’s long pattern of child molestation, a pattern that he had known about for years. Even this did not block Cherubini’s appointment, but other members of the order were indignant about it, although they may have objected to Cherubini’s more overt shortcomings. With such dissention, the Vatican took the easy course of suppressing the order.
It is obvious that Maciel was a sociopath, a particular type of individual that is not so much immoral as he is amoral. He had no code. He was not capable of having a code. I am no friend of the Legion because their “Council of Trent Catholicism” hurts more than it helps in my opinion. The world is hurting very badly and needs a practical, hands-on, gritty, down in the mud answer to salve the pain of a Godless existence. The Legion provides a Catholicism that was extant about 1900. Why would anyone support that? It serves no useful purpose.
Now, although Maciel was almost certainly not completely culpable for his own moral failings, neither is any sociopath. Frankly I make him look like a piker and an amateur in many ways. I am in no position to throw stones at this guy. But he certainly does not qualify to be seen as a bona fide teacher of Christian morals and the Catholic religion. He was a con man. A lot of good came out of what he started, but that success should be assigned to the Almighty and not to the Amoral.
Let the man rest in peace, but it is pretty clear that the very foundations of the Legion of Christ were set on sand. Business as usual is not going to get it. The Legion needs to do some serious thinking about bringing itself into the modern day needs of the Catholic people.
http://www.themcgurk.vpweb.com
Gentlemen, This isn’t about hierarchry and hocus pocus. It is about eternal salvation. You go to church to fellowship with other Christians, {iron sharpens iron} and to deepen your understanding of the word of God. To get caught up in idol worship, false teaching, {where is purgatory or infant baptism in the bible?} or any other ritual that your leaders would have you do. Why not just accept Christ as your lord and savior and throw “holy mother church” on the junk pile of history,where she so rightly deserves to be? By the way, how much are marriage annulments going for now? Kurt Gladsky, Towson Maryland, Delray Beach Florida
After just a few days reading at http://www.bishop-accountability.org/abusetracker of verified & vetted repoting on the USCCB (Unremoved Sexual Crimianl Cabal Bishops) & the Roman “La Cosa Nostra” Curia, whose motto remains ISAIAH 28:15, there is but ONE Solution: “STOP DONATING LAITY!” as St Peter Damien correctly asserted.
Until many thousands of overtly guilty curia are each removed from office, each canonically censored, and each placed under life time house arrest in some real Gulag, it is a MORTAL SIN to be donating any monies for any reason to the Church, and Kurt Gladsky has a pretty good grasp of reality!
Edmund Burke reminds each of us: “The only condition for the triumph of evil is for good men (or women) to do nothing!”
Fiat Lux & Veritas!
Albino Luciani
MURDERED POPE
Not Smiling, From Heaven
Is the order legitimate notwithstanding the founder’s sins? That is the key question. Did Holy Mother Church approve her charism as inspired by the Holy Spirit? And why did the Vicar of Christ very recently approve the statutes of Regnum Christi knowing clearly and fully the facts about the fallen founder?
The Piarists says this about themselves:
“Who are the Piarists?
We are a Clerical Religious Order founded in the XVII century by St. Joseph Calasanz (1557-1648), and dedicated to the apostolate of educating children and youth, ‘especially the poor, to which we consacrate ourselves with a fourth special vow.
St. Joseph Calasanz was declared “Universal Patron of all the Christian popular schools in the world” by Pope Pius XII, in 1948. He had the glory of opening “the first free tuition, popular, public school in Europe” (Von Pastor). He proclaimed the right to education of all children and he fought for it, and he was persecuted because of this. But at the same time, he had a marvellous success in asnwering the challenges and expectations of his time.
In 1617, he founded the Pauline Congregation of Poor Cleric Regulars of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools (the name “Pauline” comes from the Pope Paul V who approved it). Pope Gregory XV elevated the Congregation to Religious Order in 1621, as the actual name is. The Order soon was spread throughout the whole of Italy and Central Europe. It is currently present in 4 Continents (Europe, Asia, Africa and America) and in 32 countries.
It has 1421 Religious.
— from their website http://www.scolopi.org
Greetings from Dublin IRELAND
In the friday edition of THE TIMES (London) Easter Commentary. by writer Diarmuid MacCulloch, (2nd april 2010) He roots the present worldwide Child Abuse Scandal in the Roman Catholic Church in the first great child abuse scandal ,in the Piarist Order, in the 17th century, and comments that The Church reaction then was:Cover it up.
He asks readers to ” Please draw the lesson”
As a parishioner in the Catholic Church in Ireland I never heard this scandal mentioned/discussed by Clerics or linked to today’s Child Abuse Scandal in Ireland,
Indeed if it is a historical fact then Celibacy for Priests may be a mitigating factor to be debated as a non runner in the “new structures required to save the ‘Catholic Church in receivership’ in my country?
PACEBENE,
Beannachtai na Casca
Frank O’Neill
St. Peter Damian in his classic work “Book of Gomorrah” wrote about the problems of pederasty and homosexuality in religious orders and among members of the hierarchy in the Catholic Church in the 11th century. Sexual seduction using the confessional, the sexual abuse of young deacons by predatory bishops or religious superiors. There is indeed nothing new under the sun. Randy Engel, author, The Rite of Sodomy.
PS Pederasty, that is sexual relations between young boys and adult males, is the most universal and pervasive form of homosexuality since Ancient Greece.
Karen Liebreich’s Fallen Order sounds like the making of a black legend to me. I do not believe it.
What does Maciel and the Legion have to do with the Piarists? You suggest that the Piarists were suppressed due to actively homosexual religious within the order, but the excerpts you have provided do not state that there was any form homosexual abuse occurring. You seem to be implying that 17th century clergy used the phrase “the worst sin” as a codeword reference for homosexual abuse. Your presumption, as well as that of many others, is probably a result of your poor understanding of the Catholic faith. The worst sin is not homosexuality, it is vainglory, or pride, for that is the root of all sins. Unlike most of the laity today, the majority of 17th century society would have understood that. Please provide concrete facts and theology in your work. Do not just weave lies into history like the rest of modern society. Your lies are sickening and there is a price to be had for blasphemy.