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As racy and full of machinations as The Name of the Rose... meticulously researched and beautifully written
'Fallen Order focuses on sexual abuse within a religious order in 17th-century Italy, and the attempts to cover it up.... 'The story that Liebreich can now unravel is as racy and full of machinations as The Name of the Rose....
Fallen Order is meticulously researched and beautifully written, with some splendid vignettes of life in 17th-century Italy, at the time of the plague, and of Galileo's discoveries.'
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Miranda France, The Guardian, 22 May 2004 | Read more |
This compelling work...
'Karen Liebreich's accessible, lively writing style synthesizes the pace and form of a detective story with the archival underpinning of a historical monograph..'
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Christopher Carlsmith, H-Net Reviews, May 2009 | Read more |
Saint who covered up for child abusers:
‘The Roman Catholic church's mishandling of paedophile scandals among its clergy is not a modern phenomenon but has been going on for hundreds of years, a new book, published today, reveals. It describes how the priest who is the patron saint of Catholic schools covered up sex abuse.’
A very Catholic cover-up:
‘Karen Liebreich has spent several years poring over documents in the
archives of the Piarist Order and the Vatican, and has traced the shameful
story of how an idealistic enterprise was torn apart by administrative
incompetence and what she calls “a destablising secret at the heart of the
order”…
‘One reads Liebreich’s vigorous account of the order’s downward spiral with
mounting disbelief, though with immense admiration for her calm sense of
perspective.’
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Christopher Sylvester, Sunday Times, 18 April 2004 | Read more |
The 350-year cover-up:
‘This is the astonishing story of the suppression of a Catholic teaching order – the Piarists – in the 17th century. It has never been told properly before, because many of the documents containing the juiciest information were heavily classified by the Vatican until six years ago. In the process of extracting the juice, Karen Liebreich has resisted the temptation to sensationalise, though it would have been easy to do so…
Liebreich’s sources are as rich in incriminating detail as the Watergate tapes…
‘Karen Liebreich has pulled off a difficult trick with this engrossing book… [her] conclusion is the more powerful for its restraint.’
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Damian Thompson, Sunday Telegraph, 18 April 2004 | Read more |
Priest who developed the art of cover-up
‘Liebreich, in a compelling investigation, unearths letters and records that prove how a number of Piarists were accused by schoolboys' parents and even by local authorities of molesting their charges... Karen Liebreich believes that if the patron saint of free Christian education had been more honest, his successors would have been better equipped to deal with the cases of child abuse that emerged in the 1990s among Catholic orders in America, Ireland, Britain and elsewhere.’
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Christina Odone, Evening Standard & Scotsman, 19 & 20 April 2004 | | Read more |
‘This scholarly yet brilliantly accessible book could not be more timely…relentless in its search for the truth’
Saint in the dock
'The particular quality that makes it a compulsive page turner is its overwhelming reliance on primary sources in creating the narrative... These testimonies, written in literate and vivid language, build a wonderful patchwork picture of the order and its times.
'Dr Liebreich has organized this into a compelling gothic tale in which evil triumphs over virtue.
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Septimus Waugh, Catholic Herald, 28 May 2004 | Read more |
This book is sexy
'Liebreich is a superb story-teller; yet the way in which her narrative
expands to provide contextual details and historical analysis marks this as
a serious work of scholarship.'
Four-hundred-year-old travesty
'The work painfully establishes the inability of the Roman Catholic Church to put its children before itself; even today, the reforms of the Church are hardly impressive.'
Misguided clerics and their cover ups
'Liebreich’s landmark study is very well-written... This is an important and cautionary account of the disasters that befell a well-meaning but misguided religious order'
Travails of the Scolopi
'Amid the murk, and to the delight of the media, [Liebreich] has uncovered sexual abuse of their pupils by a handful of the early Piarist fathers, and Joseph Calasanz's efforts to cover up the abuse and avoid scandal by moving offenders to other posts.'
Scandal in the Piarist Order
'"Paedophile priest protected by Catholic hierarchy." It is the oldest story, and the newest. Why is this?
'Karen Liebreich has waded though boxes of previously unavailable archives to tell the story of the Piarist Order, founded in Rome in 1622 by a Spaniard, Father José de Calasanz, who had opened one school in a Roman slum and was eager to open more. By 1646, when the order was suppressed by Pope Innocent X, there were 40 Piarist schools all over Europe.'
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Claudia FitzHerbert, Saturday Telegraph Arts Supplement, 5 May 2004 | Read more |
Church cover-up of sexual abuse
'What Liebreich has done is uncover the story - sedulously concealed by such ostensibly reliable sources as the Catholic Encylopaedia - of how priests preyed on their vulnerable young victims more than three centuries ago. Liebreich concludes with a demand for "the modern Catholic Church" to take "a closer look at the history of the Order of the Clerics Regular of the Pious Schools."
Good call. But is she going far enough?
'Is there not, on the evidence of the last few years, good reason for the Church to take a hard look at the whole self-satisfied, secretive structure? Let such an examination also consider the absurdity of selecting the most intelligent, motivated, vigorous youngsters of all classes (those whom Nature has programmed most strongly to procreate), removing them from their community's gene pool by condemning them to unnatural celibacy… and then wondering why "scandals of the flesh" happen. A policy change here may not stop abuse, but it might just curb it.'
A Catholic cover-up
‘After the initial success of the [Piarist] order... it was banned by order of Pope Innocent X in 1646. The given reason was internal dissent but, as Liebreich carefully unravels, underpinning the dissent was the activity of paedophile priests in its ranks. [Jose de Calasanz, the order's founder] summed up his method in a note sent to a lieutenant who feared one of the abused boy's fathers would cause a scandal: "One should first assure oneself of the truth with all secrecy, which in such cases should be dissimulated and covered up, so it does not appear true even if it is." These, remember, are the words of the saint to whom Catholicism has entrusted the care of schoolchildren.
‘Liebreich tells her story well and for the most part leaves readers to draw their own modern-day comparisons’
The strange case of the Catholic order that fell from grace:
‘The first widespread system of free schools in Europe was the creation of a Seventeenth-Century Spanish priest who later became the Patron Saint of Catholic schools. His Order, the Piarists, educated, among others, Goya, Mozart and Victor Hugo. But it was suddenly and secretively closed down by the Pope some twenty years after it started. Why?
‘The historian, Karen Liebreich, has uncovered a hidden story of sex abuse, church politics and cover-up.’
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Start the Week, with Andrew Marr, BBC Radio 4, 19 April 2004 | |
A superb work of historical detection
‘Karen Liebreich brings alive one of the darkest episodes in Catholic history. The parallels between the story she has uncovered and modernchild-abuse scandals in the Church are powerful, but Liebreich does not descend to polemic.’
A Must for any Protestant bookeshelf
‘Her exposé Fallen Order is a must for any Protestant bookshelf.’
‘Fallen Order is great history, as compelling as a detective story’
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Anthony Pagden, Professor of History and Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles |
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