| Fallen Order - Karen Liebreich |
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This is my sister's new book. It got great reviews in the Sunday Times, Telegraph, Evening Standard and the Guardian. And she was on the radio on Start the Week with Andrew Marr and Sir Bob Geldof...
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Fallen Order | Read this book! |
Father Joseph (José) de Calasanz was born in 1557 in a small village in Aragon. As one of eight children of the local blacksmith, nothing in his background would indicate that he would go on to found one of the great Catholic teaching orders, or that his memory would be hit by scandal some 350 years after his death. From the age of 13 Calasanz wanted to become a priest. He was ordained at the age of 22 in 1575, and led an uneventful life as a priest until leaving Spain for Rome in 1592, at the age of 35, becoming in-house theologian to the Cardinal Colonna. But then his life took a major turn - noting the squalor and chaos in which Rome's poor children lived, he decided to begin teaching them, for free. This was something that had never been done before, all other schools such as those run by the Jesuits charged a fee. In addition to religious education, Calasanz's schools taught reading, writing and arithmetic, giving their poor pupils a unique shot at a better life. Not surprisingly, Calasanz's schools proved a huge hit, at one point up to 50 were operating across Europe. The Piarist order, which he founded in order to recruit teachers, grew very rapidly, and therein lie the seeds of all the troubles that came back to haunt him. Despite Calasanz's prolific letter-writing (over 4000 letters to and from him survived attempts by his successor to avoid scandal by burning large parts of the order's archive) his poor choice of deputies, and his unwillingness to expell unsuitable priests, Calasanz was unable to keep control of his movement. One of his recruits in particular, Father Stephano Cherubini, was to prove a disaster. Cherubini was dogged throughout his career by allegations of inappropriate behaviour with pupils, but his powerful family ties and connections with the Inquisition made Calasanz wary of expelling him. Instead, he invented that staple of the Catholic church in subsequent centuries when faced with paedophile priests - he promoted him, writing to the priest he charged with clearing this up: "I want you to know that your reverence's sole aim is to cover up this great shame in order that it does not come to the notice of our superiors, otherwise our organisation, which has enjoyed a good reputation until now, would lose greatly". If Calasanz hoped to supress the scandal and get Cherubini into a position with less access to children. He failed on both counts. The order was riven with discord, many of the priests incredulous at the tolerance shown to Cherubini and others. Incredibly, when the Vatican stepped in to resolve matters, the man they chose to replace Calasanz was Cherubini. This led to open warfare among the priests, and in 1646 Pope Innocent decided enough was enough, and supressed the order. Two years later Calasanz was dead, at the advanced age of ninetyone having outlived Cherubini and others who had brought ruin upon his beloved order. Over the following decades, intense lobbying and the obvious educational needs in Europe led to the re-establishment of the order. The resurgent order went through something of a golden age in teh eighteenth and nineteenth century, pupils included Goya, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Bruckner and Victor Hugo. The reasons for the order's earlier supression became clouded. It was known that the Piarists had always been controversial: their Florence school was closely connected with the heretic Galileo, providing his last secretary and biographer; the powerful Jesuits saw the Piarists as rivals for funds to open schools; some were worried that educating the poor would dry up the supply of cheap domestic labour. Was there a cover-up? The Vatican and the Inquisition had little incentive to wash the order's dirty linen in public, and the order's own archivists and historians even less so. In 1767 Calasanz was canonised by Pope Clement XIII. His entry in the Catholic Encyclopaedia says "he lived and died a faithful son of the church, a true friend of forsaken children." Even today he is patron saint of Roman Catholic schools. Karen went to Italy to study for her history PhD without ever having heard of Calasanz or the Piarists (they never opened schools in the UK, since England had broken with Rome before their founding). She was intrigued by these early educational pioneers, and wanted to study their methods. It was only gradually that she uncovered snippets of information about the order's traumatic past. A few years ago, more than a decade after completing her PhD, the Inquisition archive de-classified a new batch of documents, and she went back to follow up these snippets. She also went through all of Calasanz's 4000 surviving letters with a fine tooth-comb, building up for the first time an intimate picture of events back in seventeenth-century Rome. The result - the first of my sister's books that I have actually read - and a book I thoroughly recommend. | |||
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