Saint Joseph Calasanz

Saint Joseph Calasanz was a Spanish priest who opened free schools for poor children in Rome and founded the Order of Poor Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools, known as the Piarists. The Church commemorates him on August 25, the anniversary of his death.

He was born in 1557 in Peralta de la Sal in Aragon. He studied law and theology in Lleida, Valencia, and Alcalá, and in 1583 he was ordained a priest. He served bishops as secretary and visitor, and in the diocese of Urgell he was vicar general.

In 1592 he came to Rome and became theologian to Cardinal Marcantonio Colonna. He taught catechism and saw in the streets many children without care and without schooling. In 1597 the pastor of the church of Santa Dorotea in Trastevere, Antonio Brendani, gave him the use of two rooms. There Joseph opened a school that John Paul II called the first free public popular school in Europe. The pupils received books, pens, and paper free of charge. He himself said that in Rome he had found his way of serving God: helping poor children.

In 1617 Pope Paul V approved the community of his teachers as a congregation, and in 1621 Gregory XV raised it to the rank of a religious order, with Joseph as superior general. Piarists take a fourth vow: dedication to the education of children, especially the poor. In 1642, while the founder was still alive, King Władysław IV brought the Piarists to Poland. Joseph encouraged the study of mathematics, and in 1639 he allowed the Piarist Clemente Settimi to assist Galileo, who was by then blind.

Toward the end of his life, disputes grew within the order, and the work also had opponents outside it. The case of Father Stefano Cherubini contributed to the crisis: the head of the school in Naples, he sexually abused pupils and was protected by his influential family. Joseph removed him from the school by giving him a post in the order’s leadership, and some historians today charge that in this way he concealed the harm done to the children. At over eighty years of age, the founder was detained by the Holy Office and removed from the government of the order. In 1646 Pope Innocent X reduced the order to an association of houses subject to the bishops.

Joseph bore these trials patiently and trusted that his work would endure. He died in Rome on August 25, 1648, at about ninety years of age, and rests in the church of San Pantaleo. In 1656 Alexander VII restored the Piarists’ earlier legal form, and in 1669 Clement IX recognized them again as an order. Saint Stanislaus Papczyński was a Piarist for more than ten years before he founded the Marians, and in 1740 the Piarist Stanisław Konarski founded the Collegium Nobilium in Warsaw.

Benedict XIV beatified Joseph in 1748, and Clement XIII canonized him in 1767. In 1948 Pius XII proclaimed him patron of all Christian popular schools.