Fallen Order

The Piarists and the cover-up of child sexual abuse in 17th century Italy

Fallen Order is Dr Karen Liebreich’s scholarly book about the early history of an international order of priests devoted to education and that has never had any presence in Ireland or Britain. Its founder, Saint Joseph Calasanz, as I have written elsewhere, is the patron saint of schools and, in effect, the patron saint of sexual abuse cover-ups.

Although out of print, it is a valuable book, meticulously researched and, at times, almost too detailed; admittedly, it could have done with better editing, a proper index and without the author’s confusing tendency to switch between individuals’ surnames and Christian names. Liebreich’s account of seventeenth century Rome and the opulence of the Popes (all of whom seem to have made their male relatives cardinals), the corruption of the Papal Court and the menacing shadow of the Inquisition, had me yearning for the Protestant Reformation.

Calasanz was a long-lived and hard-working man whose concern for the education of children - sorry, boys - was sincere. However, his approach to handling cases where his priests sexually abused young boys, was both scandalously inadequate and looks like a template for the Roman Catholic Church’s policy in such matters right down to the present day.

In the contemporary chronicles of the Piarists we read - thanks to Liebreich’s painstaking work with their archives - that “vicious men, of which the world is full, were bold enough to tempt the Piarist schoolboys as they left the school and take them away to do hideous and unspeakable things…” In order to protect the children, the Piarists began to accompany them on the way to and from school.

“This is one of the earliest acknowledgements in the [archival] documents that undesirable things could happen between men and boys if an opportunity presented itself, “ writes Liebreich. Calasanz didn’t want his priests to emphasise this danger, or even to refer to it, but rather enjoined them to draw attention to the dangers of Rome’s traffic. This was typical of the man. He knew what could - and did happen - but he preferred neither to think about it nor to mention it.

This attitude extended to what appears to have been homosexuality within the Order. A novice master, Father Melchiorre Albacchi appeared to be obsessed with his charges’ sexual fantasies and made them perform exercises naked; when these and other suspected improprieties became apparent, there was near-unanimous clamour to have the offending priest expelled as “an infection”. But Calasanz demurred and sent him on a long pilgrimage, after which he was welcomed back with open arms.

Calasanz, we are told, was disgusted by the proximity of women and was obsessed with the sins of the flesh. At the time, heterosexual relations, outside marriage, were the worst while sodomy was considered to be simply the wasting of semen - covering masurbation, intercrural and anal sex. Liebreich quotes social historian David F Greenberg as saying that before the Counter-Reformation, sodomy was considered to be a mere peccadillo. In any case, the Church took a much more lenient view of homosexual acts than the civil authorities, doubtless because it was so common amongst clergy.

However, Calasanz regarded homosexual acts as “the worst vice”, although it is far from clear if he included the molestation of boys under this heading. Liebreich cites one Reformation era historian as saying that “the sin lay less with the victim than with the damage done to the soul of the perpetrator.” Thus was the abuser prioritised over the abused.

Father Stefano Cherubini was a member of a very well-connected and wealthy Roman family and seems to have displayed commensurate arrogance. He was reproved for eating luxurious foods and for ostentatious dress while headmaster of the Piarist school in Naples and lacked discipline from the time he joined the Order. He appears to have been a throughly bad egg.

Documents referring to the Cherubini scandal are few and far between in the Piarsist archives which have clearly been cleansed. (There was a notorious bonfire of records during Calasanz’s lifetime but other records have been removed over the centuries). One of the early historians of the Piarists, Father Pietro Paolo Berro wrote “the Devil persecuted the headmaster in Naples with all his force and made him seek out impure friendships with schoolboys.” Yes, Cherubini was forced into the sexual abuse of children.

Liebreich comments that in his notes “Father Berro, like many modern priests faced with evidence of paedophilia, mentioned the public scandal before the offence to God… And as for any potential damage to the victims - this was never mentioned”.

Cherubini denied everything but also pointed out to Calasanz that any suggestion of such a scandal would be damaging to the Piarists and Calasanz responded, concluding “The Lord make everything disappear as I wish and pray to his Divine Majesty.”

Not long afterwards, with reports of Cherubini’s persistent misbehaviour, Calasanz decided to promote him to Visitor of all the Piarist schools, presumably in the hope that the constant travel involved would afford him less opportunity to sexually assault young boys. Calasanz promoted Albacchi when he wanted to remove him from the scene of his misdemeanours. This saint appears to have invented the policy of moving paedophile priests from place to place.

Having removed Cherubini from Naples, Calasanz sent Father Giovanni Garzia Castigilia to the school there with instructions to interview the staff and pupils about Cherubini. He wrote to him “I want you to know that Your Reverence’s sole aim is to cover up this great shame in order that it does not come to the notice of our superiors, otherwise our organisation… would lose greatly.”

Calasanz wrote to Castiglia a few days later “I want this business to be kept quiet, which will benefit both the party under investigation and our Order… it seems best to me that if we are to be the judges of this case, we will not permit it to come into the hands of outsiders.” He followed this with another letter, ordering that any paperwork be burned.

In 1639, Calasanz received a letter from the father of a boy who had “been provoked to evil” by a Piarist brother in the school lavatories in Naples. He wanted the man to be “stopped” but also for his younger son also to be admitted to the school. Calasanz wrote to Father Fedele, the provincial of Naples, telling him to admit the child and to “See that this business does not become public, but is covered up as much as possible…and write to tell me how you have dealt with it.” The brother in question was moved to another school.

A Piarist archivist and editor of this correspondence, writing in the 1950s, says that this letter shows Calasanz to be “full of truly saintly zeal.”

While Fedele’s leniency towards sexual offenders was not unusual, he himself was not above suspicion. A Piarist in Naples wrote to Calasanz the following year, saying that Fedele “not once but many times told me to look at the beautiful boy students who were allowed to stay over for lunch at the school… and the problems that can come of it,” saying that they should be removed. However, they never were. Liebreich comments “Fedele’s appreciation of the temptations and his reluctance to remove them may account for his sympathy for colleagues who succumbed.”

Sifting through the evidence presented by Liebreich, it’s hard not to conclude that the Piarists at this time hosted a paedophile ring or rings, or, at best, had a strong paedophile culture.

In 1643, Calasanz was effectively deposed as head of the Order by Father Mario Sozzi, a great friend - almost certainly more - of Cherubini. He soon appointed Father Nicolo Maria Gavotti as visitor, a curious choice as he had been the subject of numerous complaints to Calsanz and he had been constantly moved from school to school. There are telling if cryptic comments in archivedcorrespondence, such as “it was a pity the boy took it so badly”. Calasanz responded to such complaints by writing “Let us proceed with subtlety and charity so that no one says or suspects anything.”

In 1641, Father Giuseppe Fedele, the Neapolitan provincial had written to Calasanz that he had had “discovered a very serious matter which, when it is revealed, will result in great disturbance to the whole Order…” He refused to go into details for fear that they might be seen by “laymen”.

In January 1642, Gavotti and his brother, were forced to leave Naples in a great but unexplained hurry. According to Liebreich, given their reputations, it is reasonable to suppose that they were habitual abusers of boys and had sexual relations with males outside the Order. After his promotion by Sozzi, Nicolo Maria Gavotti’s behaviour became even more flagrant. It was reported that, contrary to all the rules, there would be four of five “friends” in Gavotti’s room “and always a boy.” According to a contemporary, Gavotti and Cherubini were “individual companions”, something that was outlawed in the Order. Calasanz was of the opinion that there was nothing religious about Gavotti “except his habit” Embarking on a long sea voyage he was said to have brought with him a flamboyant young male who appears to have been his catamite. Years later, in 1662, the pope banished Gavotti from Rome on account of his “secular intrigues” that had caused “a terrible stench.”

In 1643 the newly appointed provincial in Naples discovered that the headmaster of the school at Bisignano, Father Giaochino Gallo, was accused of “wicked practices with a youth”. Later he wrote, that Gallo had an improper relationship with a beardless youth called Timoteo.” Poor Timoteo was still beardless when referred to two years later, so he must have been very young indeed when he fell into the clutches of Gallo. The case against Gallo was quietly shelved by Sozzi.

After Sozzi’s death, Cherubini was appointed head of the Order, to the outrage of most of its members. A full fifteen years later, Calasanz finally denounced Cherubini and his “wicked practices” with pupils. Nevertheless Cherubini remained the universal superior as the Order began to fall apart.

Cherubini’s revised Constiutions of the Piarists were described by one of his most distinguished critics, Father Vicenzo Berro, as a call to “give oneself over to the eating well, drinking well and messing around with boys.”

His revised curriculum for the schools involved theatrical productions, something that had been expressly banned by Calasanz who referred to performances “of such extravagance and so little shame for those poor boys…” Father Berro did not mince his words, accusing Cherubini and his acolytes of “blackening the purity and the candour of the Order and of so many pure and holy souls with their fetid and infamous filth.”

On 17 March 1646, the Piarists were demoted, the Order reduced to a congregation without solemn vows, the priests left free to join other orders if they could find any to welcome them.

But Cherubini remained in charge of the young seminarians at the Piarist’s elite Nazarene College where he, once again, succumbed to temptation. As Liebreich notes, the usual Piarist students were between the ages of seven and fifteen. The Nazarene boys were older, presenting a “selection of attractive adolescents that simply proved too much for his fragile self-control.” His latest victim complained of sexual assault and the details were soon widely known. Even his powerful family felt unable to defend Cherubini and he was known now as the destroyer of the Piarist schools.

Soon he was diagnosed with leprosy - not uncommon in Italy at the time - and, thanks to Calasanz, he was allowed to live at the Nazarene College. The inappropriateness of this move is striking.

Liebreich concludes that “It can only be that [the superiors and the Papacy] did not consider the abuse of a child by a priest to be a matter of enough gravity to prevent that priest from becoming the universal superior of a teaching order.”

By the end of the seventeenth century, the Piarist Order was re-established and no doubt many sexual abusers of children continued to operate within its ranks.

Anyone who is familiar with the story of Joseph Marmion SJ, of which I have written length, will be struck by certain parallels. Like Cherubini, he was entirely unsuited to life as a Jesuit, especially as someone with access to children. Like Cherubini, Marmion was identified very early as someone who should have been expelled from the Order. Like Cherubini, he was protected because of family connections (to his great-uncle, Blessed Columba Marmion OSB). And Marmion, like Cherubini, enjoyed dressing up boys as women for theatrical performances.

As for the cover-up of the Marmion scandal orchestrated by John Dardis SJ in 2004, well, it just shows that the Jesuits were using Calasanz’s playbook, to the letter, hundreds of years after his death and subsequent canonisation. And, of course, they were not alone. The Roman Catholic Church has always seen the sexual abuse of children as a peccadillo and is still constitutionally programmed to cover it up. To be fair, the Church of England, too, has a sorry history of cover-up, but on nothing like the same scale). It was only in 2021 that the Roman Catholic Church categorised child sexual abuse as a crime against human dignity rather than a crime against chastity, putting it on a par with murder. One wonders if they really believe that it is.