A Life, for his feast on the twenty-seventh day of August — III classis
Sinite parvulos venire ad me, et ne prohibueritis eos: talium est enim regnum cælorum. “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” — Communion antiphon of the Mass, from Mark 10:14
I. The house of Calasanza
He was born on the eleventh day of September, in the year of Our Lord 1557, at Peralta de la Sal in Aragon, the last of the eight children of Don Pedro de Calasanz and Doña María Gastón. (The older Roman accounts, followed by the Catholic Encyclopedia, give 1556; the Piarist archives and modern historians settle on 1557. The difference of a year does not touch the substance of the life.) His father was lord of the place, a man of arms and of the forge, and the family was of that lesser Aragonese nobility which had more honour than money and knew the value of both.
The stories told of his boyhood are of the kind that hagiographers love and historians distrust, and one of them deserves to be repeated because it is so exactly in character. Hearing in his catechism lesson that the devil is the enemy of mankind and the ruin of souls, the boy took down a sword and set out from the house to kill him. He was brought back. The instinct was not corrected but only redirected: he spent the remaining eighty years of his life doing precisely what he had set out to do that afternoon, by other means.
He was sent for his first letters to Peralta and then to the school of the Trinitarians at Estadilla, where he took his grammar and rhetoric. Already there the pattern appears: he gathered the smaller boys and taught them their prayers, and was mocked for it.
II. The vow of a dying man
At Lérida he studied philosophy and jurisprudence and took the doctorate in both laws cum laude; at Valencia and at Alcalá de Henares he read theology. He was a serious student and, by every account, a handsome and personable young man, so that his years at Valencia had their temptation and he fled it.
Then came the hinge of his life. His elder brother died, and his father — now without an heir — pressed him to abandon the clerical state, marry, and continue the house of Calasanz. Joseph refused; the father insisted; and in the midst of that contest the son fell into a mortal illness. Given up by the physicians, he vowed that if God spared him he would be a priest. He recovered. His father, who had prayed for that recovery, could not honourably resist the terms on which it had been granted, and gave way.
He was ordained on the seventeenth of December, 1583, by Don Hugo Ambrosio de Moncada, Bishop of Urgel. He was twenty-six.
III. A career renounced
What followed in Spain was a decade of exactly the sort of ecclesiastical advancement that ruins men. He was theologian and confessor to the Bishop of Albarracín, then his synodal examiner and procurator; he passed to Lérida, and then to the diocese of Urgel, where he was made vicar-general of the district of Trempe — a hard mountain jurisdiction of neglected parishes, which he visited on foot and reformed with an energy that made him respected and disliked in the usual proportions.
He had a benefice, a reputation, and a bishopric within reach. In 1592 he renounced his patrimony in favour of his sisters and went to Rome — by his own later admission, still half in search of preferment. He was thirty-five. He would not see Spain again.
IV. Rome, and what he found there
At Rome he was received into the household of Cardinal Marcantonio Colonna as theologian and tutor to the Cardinal’s nephew, and there he might comfortably have stayed. Instead he enrolled in the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, which taught catechism to the poor on Sundays, and in the Confraternity of the Twelve Apostles, whose members visited the sick and the destitute in their houses. He made the pilgrimage of the Seven Churches on foot, often at night. When the plague came upon the city in 1595 he was found in the worst quarters carrying the sick and burying the dead, in company — the tradition is constant — with St. Camillus de Lellis.
It was this work that showed him the thing he had come to Rome without knowing he was looking for. In the alleys of Trastevere and the Ponte quarter he found the children of the poor: unlettered, uncatechized, employed in nothing, formed by the street. He observed that the free schools the city was supposed to maintain did not in fact receive them, that the guild schoolmasters would not teach a boy who could not pay, and that the charitable institutions passed the responsibility from hand to hand. He petitioned the Roman senate; he applied to the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine; he went to the university. Every door was civil and every door was closed.
Then he said the sentence that is the seed of everything after: he would do it himself.
V. Santa Dorotea, November 1597
With the parish priest of Santa Dorotea in Trastevere, Don Antonio Brendani, and two other priests, he opened in November of 1597 two rooms beside the sacristy and began to teach. The instruction was reading, writing, arithmetic, and the catechism. The pupils were the poor. Nothing whatever was charged.
This is commonly called the first free public school in Europe, and the claim, properly understood, holds: not the first charitable school, and not the first school with poor scholars on its benches, but the first school opened to all comers without fee, without patron, and without condition, and organized as a permanent institution rather than an almsdeed. Within two years he had some seven hundred children. Clement VIII, informed of the work, gave it an annual subsidy.
He moved the school as it grew — to the Palazzo Vestri near Sant’Andrea della Valle in 1602, where a community life began among the masters, and at last in 1612 to the Palazzo Torres beside San Pantaleo, which became the mother house of the Order and is so still.
His pedagogy was not an afterthought to his piety but its instrument. He taught in the vernacular before Latin; he graded the school into successive classes with a fixed programme, which was then an innovation; he employed the abler pupils as monitors of the younger; he forbade the masters to strike a child in anger and restricted correction to a designated corrector; he required that the children be taught a trade or prepared for further study, so that the school should end in a livelihood and not in a vagrancy with letters. Above all he joined the two things that his age was content to keep apart, and gave the Order its motto: Pietas et Litterae — piety and letters. He held that the two rise or fall together, and that to give a poor child the second without the first is to arm him, and the first without the second is to leave him defenceless.
He was, in this, a man of remarkable intellectual freedom. He kept a friendship with Galileo; he sent his young religious to study under him; and when the astronomer was in disgrace and, from 1637, blind, Calasanz assigned him one of his own subjects, Clemente Settimi, as reader and secretary. It cost him something later.
VI. The Order of the Pious Schools
On the twenty-fifth of March, 1617, Paul V erected the little band into a religious congregation, and Calasanz and his companions received the habit. He laid down his family name and took another: Joseph of the Mother of God — inaugurating, the historians of religious life note, the practice of dropping the surname on entering religion.
On the eighteenth of November, 1621, Gregory XV raised the congregation to a religious order with solemn vows, under the title Congregatio Paulina Clericorum Regularium Pauperum Matris Dei Scholarum Piarum — the Clerks Regular of the Poor of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools. The Constitutions were approved on the thirty-first of January following. To the three vows Calasanz added a fourth: to devote themselves to the instruction of youth. He was made Superior General for life.
The work spread with the speed of a thing the world had been waiting for: through the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples, then over the Alps into Moravia, Bohemia, Poland, Germany and Hungary. At his death there were some five hundred religious in thirty-seven houses across six provinces.
VII. Descendit cum illo in foveam
And then it was all taken away from him, and the manner of the taking is the reason the Church reads over his Mass that passage of the Book of Wisdom in which Wisdom goes down into the pit with the just man who has been sold.
The enmity came first from outside and was of the ordinary sort. Free schools for the poor were not universally admired. The paid schoolmasters of Rome saw their livelihood undercut; men of position argued, in so many words, that to teach a poor boy letters was to spoil him for the plough and the workshop and to unsettle the order of society. Calasanz answered such objections all his life and never conceded a syllable of them.
The ruin, when it came, came from within, and honesty requires that it be told plainly, because the Church does not canonize impeccability but heroic virtue, and the difference is instructive.
In 1629 the rector of the Piarist house at Naples, Father Stefano Cherubini — the son of a family with powerful curial connections — was found to have committed grave crimes against the boys in his charge. Calasanz knew. He removed him from Naples, but he neither expelled him nor exposed him; he sought to contain the scandal, and in the years following, under pressure and in the hope of purchasing peace for the Order, he permitted the man to rise, so that Cherubini eventually stood among its superiors. It was the gravest misjudgment of his life, and it did not purchase peace. It armed his enemies.
Beside Cherubini came Father Mario Sozzi, a Piarist of Florence, ambitious, unstable, and dangerous because he had obtained a position as an agent of the Holy Office and could clothe a private quarrel in the authority of the Inquisition. Sozzi denounced his founder. He seized the Order’s papers; he had the aged General’s own correspondence taken; he represented the house at Rome as a nest of suspect novelties — and here Calasanz’s protection of Galileo’s disciples was turned against him.
In the summer of 1642 — he was eighty-five years old — officers of the Holy Office came to San Pantaleo and led Joseph Calasanz on foot through the streets of Rome, past the Piazza Navona, in the sight of the city and of his own schoolboys, to be examined. Nothing was proved against him. But he was suspended, and in 1643, on the authority of Urban VIII, he was deposed from the government of the Order he had founded and Sozzi was set over him. He obeyed. He asked his sons to obey. When Sozzi died the persecution was continued by Cherubini, who was appointed in his place; the old man knelt and kissed the hand of the successor.
The last blow fell on the sixteenth of March, 1646, when Innocent X, informed by a commission of cardinals that the Order was ungovernable, issued the brief that stripped it of its vows and its exemptions and reduced it to a loose federation of independent houses — dissolved in everything but name. Calasanz was ninety.
It is related that he received the brief on his knees and said only what Job said: Dominus dedit, Dominus abstulit; sit nomen Domini benedictum. He cursed no one. He is not recorded to have said a bitter word of Sozzi or of Cherubini, and he continued to the end to speak of the Order as of a thing that would live. To those who wept, he said that the work was God’s, that God had permitted its destruction, and that God would raise it again in His time.
VIII. Beatus vir qui suffert tentationem
He died at San Pantaleo on the twenty-fifth of August, 1648, in his ninety-first year, in the room where he had governed and been deposed. He asked to be carried once more to the school, and to the chapel; and he blessed his sons, who were now, canonically speaking, no longer his.
His body rests at San Pantaleo in Rome, where it is venerated, and where the heart and tongue are preserved separately as relics.
IX. The vindication
Wisdom did not leave him in the pit.
In 1656 Alexander VII restored the Piarists as a congregation with simple vows. In 1669 Clement IX gave them back the rank and the solemn vows of a religious order, and what had been dissolved stood again, and stands today across some three dozen countries, still teaching the poor.
He was beatified by Benedict XIV on the seventh of August, 1748, and canonized by Clement XIII on the sixteenth of July, 1767. On the thirteenth of August, 1948 — the third centenary of his death — Pius XII declared him the heavenly patron before God of all Christian popular schools in the world.
His feast is kept in the traditional Roman calendar on the twenty-seventh of August, with the Mass Venite, filii; the reformed calendar transfers it to the twenty-fifth, his dies natalis.
X. What the life teaches
Three things, chiefly.
That the least work is the greatest. A doctor of both laws, a vicar-general, a man who might have died a bishop in Spain, spent fifty years teaching the alphabet to boys who could not pay for the paper. The Gospel of his Mass says that whoever receives one such little child in Christ’s name receives Christ. Calasanz took the sentence literally and built an institution on it, and the Church has told him, by his canonization, that he read it correctly.
That a saint is not an impeccable man. He erred, and gravely, in the Cherubini affair, and the erring cost him and his Order nearly everything. Sanctity did not consist in his never having failed but in what he did when the consequences of failure and of malice descended on him together: he did not defend himself by accusing others, he did not break communion, he did not curse, and he did not stop. A hagiography that suppressed the fault would make him useless to us; it is precisely because he was ruined in part by his own misjudgment that his patience is worth imitating.
That vindication is God’s business and is often posthumous. He was told, in effect, by the highest authority on earth that his life’s work was over, and he accepted the judgment without ceasing to believe in the work. Eight years after his death it began to be undone; twenty-one years after, it was undone entirely; ninety-nine years after, the Church declared him blessed. Providence keeps a longer calendar than we do, and the just man’s business is fidelity, not schedule.
Practice
Examine. Where has an injustice been done to you that you are still administering — rehearsing, defending against, waiting to have acknowledged? Calasanz’s example is not that the wound did not matter, but that he refused to let it interrupt the work.
Do. Teach one person one thing they need and cannot repay, this week: a child their prayers, a slow learner their letters, a new colleague what you know. Pietas et litterae.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Deus, qui per sanctum Ioseph Confessorem tuum, ad erudiendam iuventutem spiritu intelligentiae ac pietatis, novum Ecclesiae tuae subsidium providere dignatus es: praesta, quaesumus; ut eius exemplo et intercessione ita agamus et doceamus, ut praemia consequamur aeterna.
“O God, who through Thy holy Confessor Joseph didst vouchsafe to provide a new help to Thy Church for the instruction of youth in the spirit of understanding and of piety: grant, we beseech Thee, that by his example and intercession we may so act and so teach that we may attain the everlasting reward.”
Devote. The Joyful Mysteries, with attention to the Finding in the Temple; or, for those who carry an injury, the Third Sorrowful Mystery, and Job’s sentence said slowly.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path continues with the founders — Ignatius, Camillus, Vincent de Paul, Jean-Baptiste de la Salle — and with those, like Calasanctius, whose vindication came only after death. The Church History path treats the Catholic Reform of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which his schools belong, and the tangle of curial politics that broke him.
Sancte Ioseph Calasanctii, patrone scholarum popularium christianarum, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.v. “St. Joseph Calasanctius” and “Clerks Regular of the Pious Schools”; the New Catholic Encyclopedia; the Encyclopædia Britannica; and the historical materials of the Order of the Pious Schools (scolopi.org). Dates of the persecution and of the Cherubini affair follow the documentary record of the Piarist archives as summarized in modern scholarship.