St Jose de Calasanz: The Tainted Saint
From John Cornwell's book The Pope in Winter
"We find the saintly founder of the Piarists [St Jose] writing to a colleague, advising that he 'cover up this great shame in order that it does not come to the notice of our superiors".
"Pope Innocent X appointed a man known to be an inveterate paedophile to take charge of the order".
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The Deep Roots of Rome’s Institutionalised Child Abuse
Dr Clive Gillis Had Karen Liebreich not arrived in Florence as ‘a
naïve 21 year old student’ to study at the European University
Institute – before the European ideal went sour – this story would
be unknown.
Marooned in the crumbling local archive of the Scolopi (literally
‘Pious Schools’) also known as the Piarists, she stumbled across the
secret papal suppression of the order in 1646. Resisting the crafty
archivist’s diversionary tactics, her quest for truth took her all
the way into the Secret Archive of Rome’s Inquisition. She
discovered that incriminating documents had been destroyed by guilty
parties and that the order’s historians had since covered up the
truth. Her expose Fallen Order is a must for any Protestant
bookshelf.
The late Pope’s eulogy
In 1997 Pope John Paul II wrote to the head of the Piarists who
governs 1,500 priests in nineteen provinces particularly in Spain,
Italy, Mexico and Argentina. The Pope praised the order’s founder
known in Spanish as San Jose Calasanz or in Italian as San Giuseppe
Calasanzio. The Pope recalled how in 1948 ‘my venerable Predecessor
Pius XII,’ in the Brief Providentissimus Deus proclaimed Calasanz to
be the ‘heavenly patron of all Christian schools in the world.’
Following Calasanz’s canonisation by Pope Clement XIII in 1767, his
statue was placed in the right transept of St. Peter's in Rome.
Sadly, Calasanz’s schools were hotbeds of abuse. Worse, Calasanz
personally and repeatedly protected two senior priests who led the
paedophile ring in a 20 year reign of terror. This fact was known to
the Inquisition and the Roman Curia. Even the pope eventually came
to know of it, and did nothing.
Romish paedophilia scandals always follow a certain patter, whether
it be the Ferns Report in the Irish Republic, or the Cardinal Law
affair in Boston, or any other. Guilty priests continue unreported
to the police. They are quietly moved to new posts where inevitably
they offend again. Parents and families of the abused children are
ignored, disbelieved, pressurised and bribed into silence. The child
victim is of no concern.
Though these things are dubbed ‘a scandal of our age’ none of this
is new. Calasanz was guilty of all of these strategies and that on a
huge scale. His pious schools teemed with poor children for priests
to prey upon.
Readers will know that the success of the Jesuits was based on
education. But in Europe the Jesuits provided only for the nobility.
Educational opportunities for poor children in Italy were few at the
dawn of the seventeenth century.
500 children within days
Calasanz had come to Rome from Spain hoping to wheedle his way into
a sinecure. Disappointed, he visited by chance a solitary poor
school across the Tiber. Even here the priest charged a fee.
Calasanz determined to create an order of teaching priests where any
child with a certificate of poverty would be accepted. He opened his
first school in Rome in 1600, and within days he had 500 poor
children.
His syllabus was a winner. The children were taught reading, writing
and arithmetic, with paper, quills and ink provided free. This
opened up careers in trade, secretarial work, bank clerking or
warehouse factoring.
The Jesuits, although innovators, insisted upon classical methods.
To their horror the Piarists successfully employed new techniques.
Naturally there was a stampede of aspiring poor parents applying for
places. New pious schools opened every few months across Italy.
Beating the Jesuits at their own game, the two orders became bitter
enemies.
Alas, this avalanche of demand was a paedophile’s dream. Teenagers
entered the Piarist novitiate at 15, hopefully for five years of
training, but in practice it seems that this did not necessarily
follow. Calasanz once boasted that if he had 10,000 priests he could
place them all in a month. Standards were jettisoned. Those wanting
a meal ticket, those escaping jurisdiction of civil courts, and
those rejected by other orders, were recruited and sent out barely
trained. Some teachers were almost illiterate.
A subordinate of Calasanz soon blew the whistle on this excessive
recruiting. The matter reached the pope but Calasanz simply ignored
an ensuing papal ban. As reports of flagrant child abuse filtered
through to Calasanz, his response was always the same. ‘See that
this business does not become public but is covered up …. Your
Reverence must cover up everything … from the public.’ At the dame
time he urged that the parents be pacified and the offending priest
moved on. If in the south of Italy he was moved north and vice
versa. There was never any thought for the pupil victim.
Fr Alacchi
Two of Calasanz’s senior priests emerged as ringleaders, fostering
likeminded subordinates, thus institutionalising the abuse. Father
Alacchi was also a sadistic man.
What did Calasanz do? Alacchi had a genius for chatting up the rich
to endow the Piarists with money and buildings, so Calasanz promoted
him to roving ‘visitor general’. When more scandal emerged Calasanz
sent him on pilgrimage until the heat died down. Then later he
brought him back in the same role, whence more allegations arose. So
he was further promoted to supremely powerful ‘consultor general and
procurator’ thus side stepping scandal but renewing Alacchi’s access
to the young. The paedophile ring was sustained by positively
sheltering the culprits whilst negatively discrediting their
accusers.
Stefano Cherubini
Worse was the case of Stefano Cherubini whose father and brother
were both successful papal lawyers and whose family was at once
noble and very wealthy. There was only one thing that could have
made young Cherubini, for whom the world was his oyster, dash to
join the Piarists at an early age. And with the poise and arrogance
of breeding he took little care to conceal his activities. Evidence
against him was all too abundant. The Cherubini lawyers simply
closed ranks, intimidated accusers, and stole incriminating
evidence. On one occasion they managed to lift a whole, carefully
compiled, incriminating dossier from right under Calasanz’s inept
nose to destroy it. Yet weak Calasanz allowed himself to be totally
reliant upon Cherubini financially and for getting preference for
the order’s affairs. So when it came to promoting Cherubini out of
tricky situations the deal had to befit his rank, and despite
showers of protests from accusing priests, Calasanz let him become
his right hand man. This policy was even given Latin formality
promoveature ut amoveatur – loosely promoted to avoid scandal.
Jesuits vs Piarists
When the Jesuits turned on the heretic astronomer Galileo, their
rivals, the Piarists of Florence, who had now grown rich, fielded
several suitable fathers to befriend Galileo. This provided the
Jesuits with an opportunity to injure the Piarists, In the course of
the inquisition proceedings that followed, Calasanz was deposed, and
Cherubini, by exploiting his connections, assumed leadership of the
order.
The outcry against Cherubini took undoubted proof of his rampant
abuse right into the Inquisition and thence to the Roman curia and
pope. Nevertheless Cherubini remained Superior until unbridled
scandal of every sort became open. Even then the pope’s inspector,
although a rival Jesuit, because of Cherubini’s social rank,
produced a report exonerating him.
The order was suppressed in 1646 – but it was suppressed for
countenancing the heretical views of Galilean views, not for their
abuse. When the Piarists resurfaced, decades later, all this was
buried. Cherubini was the first to leave and having private means he
was the least hurt. Later historians simply perpetuated the cover
up.
The present writer found a 1917 copy of the widely reprinted
standard history of Calasanz in an old Italian bookstore. Urbano
Tosetti’s history (see illustration) commemorated Calasanz’s 1767
canonisation. Constantly reprinted it comprises 222 pages of sheer
adulation. On page 173 is Rome’s bare faced lie concerning
paedophile Cherubini, ascribing his belated demotion from Superior
to ‘administrative incompetence’ (see illustration).
Liebreich proves conclusively that Cherubini had been caught ‘red
handed’ with a pupil. Further, a July 1646 letter from another
priest, whilst freely admitting a ten year knowledge of Cherubini’s
child abuse (roguery), actually goes on to expose the Cherubini
deposition due to maladministration as a lie, as something ‘invented
by the illustrious Auditors … to cover up his (Cherubini’s)
roguery.’ Cherubini did not of course go to prison but simply on to
another pious school in Frascati.
There is in Tosetti, as with every Romanist ‘saint’, a large section
glorifying Calasanz’s death. His heart, tongue, liver, spleen and
cranium still reside in San Pantaleo, the order’s church fronting
the Corso in Rome today. Romanists place great stress on potential
‘saints’ being incorrupt in death. To rapidly decay is a sign of
questionable sanctity. So Tosetti stresses Calasanz’s body smelt of
‘fresh roses’, a crippled arm touching his feet was made whole and
an apron torn in the crush to see him was miraculously repaired. Al
this stuff is standard hagiography cliché. But Tosetti stresses one
curious, unprintable ‘miracle’ (with a perfectly natural
explanation) which was supposed to prove Calasanz’s modesty and
chastity. This was clearly a concocted ‘miracle’ contrived by men
who knew their order had a foul secret to bury and urgently needed
pious propaganda to aid them.
It will be interesting to see how Rome rehabilitates the clerics and
saints like Calasanz that it has today when their time comes and
things come to light.