Sins of the fathers describes the rise and fall of the Piarists:
The Piarists began as a religious order dedicated to teaching poor children. A Spaniard, Jose Calasanz, founded the first Pious school in 1597, in Rome, at a time when free education barely existed. The order exists to this day, although now its schools are more exclusive. Past pupils include Mozart, Goya, Haydn, Victor Hugo — and Egon Ronay.In marked contrast to the Jesuits, Piarists taught in the vernacular, not Latin, and over philosophical mathematics they favoured “abbaco”, or mercantile arithmetic. Children learned how to calculate the interest on loans, exchange rate mechanisms and geometry. Calasanz hoped that these skills would help them to find jobs “in banks, in warehouses, in counting houses and in other trades”.
Not only were his teaching methods innovative, but Calasanz’s staff included some of the great men of the time, including Ventura Sarafellini, the calligrapher who created the inscription “Tu Es Petrus” around the inner ring of the cupola of St Paul’s. Calasanz also knew Pope Gregory’s barber and doctor, and found them useful intermediaries.
Even Galileo became involved with the Piarists when a group of scientifically minded priests was sent to start a Pious school in Florence. Their espousal of his heliocentric theory, at a time when Galileo was falling foul of the Inquisition, was to prove very dangerous for the order.
Alongside their modern teaching methods, Piarist brothers practised an austere Christianity. They wore horse-hair habits and were expected to eat little and badly. Calasanz was so dedicated to discomfort that he ate his meals with one foot lifted in the air, “to suffer even while eating”, or lay on the floor and made the other brothers trample him on their way to the refectory. Piarists were not allowed to swim, play the guitar or kiss their mothers. They were never supposed to be alone with a pupil.
Its austerity notwithstanding, the movement grew quickly, with schools opening across Italy (including one at the summit of Vesuvius, which was promptly swallowed up by the volcano). By the 1630s the expansion was so rapid that Calasanz wished he had another 10,000 teachers to meet the demand for new schools. Yet by 1646 the order was discredited, and banned by Pope Innocent X. What had happened, in one decade, to quash such a flourishing movement? (It was only restarted at the end of the 17th century.)
What did lead to the fall?
The reason given at the time was “internal dissent”, but Karen Liebreich stumbled on what she felt to be the real answer while researching a doctorate on public education in a musty Florentine archive. Calasanz is the patron saint of Catholic schools, and Liebriech had been dutifully wading through his 4,869 letters – not a joke among them, she notes grimly – when she came across the telling euphemism: il vitio pessimo — “the worst sin”.
Liebreich’s Fallen Order: A History explains:
We learn about the sinister Father Gavotti, who wore gold-trimmed stockings under his habit, and whose paedophile tendencies, said a contemporary, caused “a terrible stench to everyone nearby”. There is nasty Mario Sozzi, who shopped his enemies to the Inquisition, and was struck down by a kind of leprosy. His treatment involved being wrapped naked in the still pulsating body of a recently slaughtered ox. Sozzi died anyway – but his colleagues enjoyed eating the ox.The real villain of the piece is Stefano Cherubini, headmaster of the Naples school, who threatened to destroy the order if allegations of his abuse of children were made public. Cherubini was the son and brother of powerful papal lawyers, so Calasanz pandered to him, promoting Cherubini away from the scene of his crime. “Your reverence’s sole aim,” he wrote to a colleague, “is to cover up this great shame in order that it does not come to the notice of our superiors.”
The more things change…