Fallen Order : Intrigue, Heresy, and Scandal in the Rome of Galileo and Caravaggio

by Karen Liebreich

Book Overview

For hundreds of years the Piarist Order of priests has been known for its history of important contributions to education, science, and culture. Throughout Italy, Spain, and central Europe, the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1843540746
• ISBN13: 9781843540748
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 1.0" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

The More Things Change...

I selected this book based on the title, and sub-title. I thought it was about arts and science and their controversial role in the 17th century Catholic Church ... silly me. Actually, this is to the credit of the publisher. This could have been marketed as a Grove Press sensational something. This is an early history of the Piarist Order which was the first provider of public education. Unfortunately it's also a story of a pedophile who is connected to a powerful family who was essentially kicked upstairs. There is a lot more to the story than this, but this action wormed its way through the system such that at an advanced age the founder who made this personnel decision saw the almost total demise of his schools. The story is told without sensation and provides lessons for today. By an incomplete browse through the cover jacket I stumbled upon it. If you read it, look for just a mention of Caravaggio and a tiny cameo for Galileo. I recommend it for church historians who are interested in this topic.

An eye-opening, revealing social analysis

Intrigue, heresy and scandal in Galileo's Rome is a suitable topic for fiction but Karen Liebreich provides all the trappings of action and high drama in her nonfiction Fallen Order: Intrigue, Heresy, And Scandal In The Rome Of Galileo And Caravaggio. This portrait of 17th century Roman politics and Church issues provides many surprises; from the story of how sexual abuse of children (practiced by some of the leading priests in the Piarist Order) led to its collapse to how bishops and cardinals participated in the cover-up in an effort to protect the church. An eye-opening, revealing social analysis.

Child Abuse By Priests, 17th Century Style

It is a story drearily familiar from the headlines: priests abuse children, the bishops and cardinals in charge of the priests know it and "solve" the problem by moving the priests around to other locations, and finally the story breaks and causes embarrassment and disruption within the church. It is news, but it is not new; the same thing was happening in the seventeenth century. In _Fallen Order: Intrigue, Heresy, and Scandal in the Rome of Galileo and Caravaggio_ (Grove Press), Karen Liebreich has found a scandal of priestly pedophilia that ruined and eventually closed a Catholic teaching order, the Piarists. The order was eventually restarted, and still exists. It is justifiably proud of making contributions to education (Mozart, Mendel, and Goya, to name just a few, were products of Piarist schools). It is proud of its founder, Father José de Calasanz, who was eventually beatified and became the patron saint of Catholic schools. It is quiet about the scandal that caused the suppression of the order, however, and Liebreich only stumbled upon the story in an ancient Florentine archive when she was doing a doctorate on public education. Looking through the thousands of letters from Calasanz (she grimly notes that there are no jokes and no lightness within them), she came across a euphemism: _il vitio pessimo_, "the worst sin." Her curiosity up, she went through difficult searches at the Vatican Secret Archive; the Inquisition Archive only opened six years ago, and she thereupon hunted there, too. There is much more to the story than pedophilic priests and a cover up, but sadly, the patron saint of Catholic schools quite clearly performed the same sort of cover-up that has brought disgrace to his contemporary equivalents. St. Joseph Calasanz had seen the need for schools for poor children. He founded the Piarist Order in 1592, insisting that his Piarists had to live austere lives, dressing simply, wearing sandals in the winter, eating bad food and little of it. The rules included that they could not swim, play games, play guitar, or kiss even their mothers. The rules were broken with zeal by Father Stefano Cherubini, originally headmaster of the school in Naples. Father Stefano enjoyed sodomizing the pupils, and this became known to Calasanz, who could do little since Father Stefano came from a powerful family of lawyers. Calasanz therefore promoted Father Stefano, to get him away from the scene of the crime, citing only his luxurious diet and failure to attend prayers. However, he knew what Cherubini had really been up to, and he wrote that the sole aim of the plan "... is to cover up this great shame in order that it does not come to the notice of our superiors." Cherubini was even made head of the order in 1643 and the elderly Calasanz was pushed aside. Upon this appointment, Calasanz publicly documented Cherubini's long pattern of child molestation, a pattern that he had known about for years. Even this did not block Cheru