"A compelling gothic tale in which evil triumphs over virtue."
"Fallen Order is meticulously researched and beautifully written" |
Times of Acadiana in Lafayette, Louisiana Child Abuse By Priests, 17th Century Style 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. The 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. Liebreich has written a strong yet detached and unemotional account of the events, with a broad look to political and religious forces of the times. She knows that 21st century horror about how priests abuse children is not going to be the same as supposed 17th century sensitivity about it, but she also shows that this does not really matter. The church had clear teachings on the subject at the time, but concentrated more on how pedophilia endangered the souls of the priests who engaged in it; throughout the correspondence in the book, Calasanz and other priests fretted about public scandal first, and offense to God second, with no mention at all to the wrong done to the victims of the abuse. In one of the parallels that Liebreich effortlessly draws to our own times in her final chapter, Pope John Paul II issued a quiet papal directive in January 2002 to say that priests were afflicted by these sins of their brethren and that such scandals made other fine priests look bad; the victims are still being ignored. The question of whether the church could have made a difference if it had learned from the Piarist scandal may be argued back and forth, but that it did not learn and that it continued to shield priests who habitually victimized their young charges is sadly beyond dispute. |
