Saint Joseph Calasanz (1557-1648)

A Church regenerated by saints

Calasanz was born in the second half of the 16th century, when the Protestant Reformation had torn Latin Christendom apart and the Council of Trent (1545-1563) had just redefined Catholic doctrine and discipline. To the crisis, the Church answered with a flowering of holiness: Saint Ignatius of Loyola and his Jesuits, Saint Teresa of Avila and the reform of Carmel, Saint Charles Borromeo in Milan, Saint Philip Neri in Rome.^[11] Each of these saints took charge of one need of the Church: the mission, contemplation, the episcopate, Roman youth.

Calasanz, for his part, would take charge of a need no one had yet organised on a large scale: the free instruction of poor children. Where others reformed the doctrine or the morals of the clergy, he reformed the Church through the school.

A people without letters

In the Rome of the late 16th century, instruction was a privilege. The existing schools charged fees: only the children of well-off families could attend them. The children of the people — sons of craftsmen, labourers, the poor, orphans — grew up in the streets, unable to read or write, exposed to begging, theft and debauchery.^[12][13] Ignorance was not only an intellectual misfortune: it was, in Calasanz's eyes, a spiritual misery, for a child who knows nothing of God or of good grows up defenceless against evil.

It was this social and spiritual wound that Calasanz would see with his own eyes in the alleys of Trastevere — and that he could never forget.

Birth at Peralta de la Sal

Joseph Calasanz was born at Peralta de la Sal, a small village of the kingdom of Aragon, on family lands.^[14][15] The exact date is debated: the old tradition, taken up by the Catholic Encyclopedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica, gives 11 September 1556; modern studies and the Order itself prefer 1557 — a date consistent with the fourth centenary celebrated by the Piarists in 1957.^[16][17][18] For lack of a baptismal register cited at first hand, honesty requires signalling both dates; this article retains 1557, without settling the question definitively.

His father, Pedro de Calasanz, was an infanzón — a petty nobleman — and mayor of the village; his mother was María Gastón y de Sala.^[19][20] The last of a large family, the child showed a pious temperament very early: tradition reports that he already gathered his schoolfellows to teach them the catechism — the first sign, it is said, of his vocation as an educator.^[21]

The doctor of Lérida

Calasanz did his first studies in letters at Estadilla, with the Trinitarians, then entered the university of Lérida (Lleida), where he studied philosophy and canon law; there he was received doctor of laws with praise.^[22][23] He went on to theology at Valencia and then at Alcalá de Henares, two great intellectual centres of Golden Age Spain. This twofold formation — legal and theological — would later make him a founder able to draft constitutions, administer an order and stand up to the powerful.

A serious illness, in his youth, led him to vow to consecrate himself to God if he recovered: this was one of the inward springs of his decision to embrace the ecclesiastical state.^[24]

Priest and churchman in Aragon

Calasanz was ordained priest on 17 December 1583, by Bishop Hugo Ambrosio de Moncada.^[25][26] His worth was soon recognised: he became theologian and confessor in the diocese of Albarracín, secretary of the chapter of La Seu d'Urgell, and was entrusted with delicate missions — notably accompanying an apostolic visitor in the reform of the famous abbey of Montserrat.^[27][28] His bishop finally named him vicar general of the district of Tremp, in the diocese of Urgell.^[29][30]

At under thirty-five, Calasanz thus already held a prominent position, the promise of an episcopal career. Everything, humanly speaking, invited him to stay in Aragon.

The inward call: leaving all for Rome (1592)

And yet, in 1592, Calasanz did something his contemporaries did not understand: he abandoned everything — offices, dignities, prospects — and left for Rome.^[31][32] Officially, he came to seek a benefice; inwardly, he was obeying a still obscure call. He did not know that he would never return to Spain, nor that the Eternal City held in store the mission of his whole life.

This renunciation is the spiritual key to the man: like so many saints, Calasanz left an assured greatness for an uncertain poverty, and it was in this stripping that God opened to him a work he had never imagined.

The servant of the poor and the plague-stricken

In Rome, Calasanz first led the life of a charitable priest. A tutor in the household of Cardinal Marcantonio Colonna, he above all joined the confraternities that visited the sick, relieved the poor and catechised the people, notably the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine.^[33][34] During the plagues that ravaged the city, he was seen, like Saint Camillus of Lellis, carrying the sick himself and burying the dead — a "holy rivalry of charity" between the two future saints.^[35]

But it was while walking the poor quarters for the catechism that he met the misery that would decide his vocation.

The revelation of Trastevere

In the alleys of Trastevere, Calasanz discovered swarms of children left to themselves, dirty, begging, with no instruction at all. He understood that catechism alone was not enough: a child who can neither read nor write will always remain at the mercy of misery and sin. He first tried to have these children admitted free of charge to the existing fee-paying schools, and to have their masters paid by the City; everywhere he met with refusals.^[36][37]

Faced with the failure of every solution, he took the decision that changed everything: he would open his own school, and it would be free.

1597: the first free popular school in Europe

In November 1597, Joseph Calasanz opened, in two lent rooms near the sacristy of the church of Santa Dorotea^[38], in Trastevere, what historians recognise as the first free public school in Europe.^[39][40][41] The Catholic Encyclopedia writes it without hedging: Calasanz "opened, in November 1597, the first public free school in Europe".^[42] The historian Ludwig von Pastor, in his History of the Popes, sees there the origin of the first free popular school on the continent.^[43]

Success was immediate and overwhelming. Within a few years, the school counted nearly a thousand pupils.^[44] Pope Clement VIII supported the work with a yearly contribution; the school moved several times to welcome the growing crowd of children. Calasanz, who had asked Rome for only a modest benefice, found himself at the head of a nascent institution that would soon take the shape of a religious order.

Pietas et Litterae: a school of a new kind

Calasanz's intuition can be summed up in two words, which would become the motto of his order: Pietas et Litterae — "Piety and Letters".^[45][46] The Calasanctian school does not set instruction and faith against each other: it unites them. There one learns to read, to write, to count, but also to pray, to know the catechism, to live as a Christian. For Calasanz, forming the mind and forming the soul are one and the same work, and it must begin in childhood:

"If, from the tenderest age, the child is carefully imbued with piety and learning, one may confidently hope for a happy course of his whole life." — Saint Joseph Calasanz, Memorial to Cardinal Tonti (1621)^[47]

This principle — early, integral and popular education — is the heart of all his thought.

From congregation to order (1617-1621)

As the work grew, it had to be given a religious structure. Its stages are precise, and they must be careful not to confuse them:^[48][49][50]

In 1617, Pope Paul V approved the work as a religious congregation; Calasanz and his companions took the black habit of the regular clerks.^[51][52] Then, on 18 November 1621, Pope Gregory XV raised the institute to the rank of a religious order with solemn vows, under the Latin name of Ordo Clericorum Regularium Pauperum Matris Dei Scholarum Piarum — the Order of Poor Clerks Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools.^[53][54] The constitutions, drafted by Calasanz, were approved on 31 January 1622, and the founder became its first superior general.^[55] To their three vows, the religious added a fourth, proper to their vocation: to devote themselves to the education of youth.^[56]

The order is known under several names: Piarists, Scolopi, Escolapios in Spanish, Clerks of the Pious Schools. From Rome, it spread rapidly across Italy, then into central Europe — Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, the German lands — where its colleges would become a pillar of Catholic teaching.^[57][58]

A pedagogy centuries ahead of its time

What strikes the historian is the pedagogical modernity of Calasanz. Several of his choices anticipate by two or three centuries the school as we know it:^[59][60]

• Absolute gratuity. The school is open to all children, rich or poor, without distinction: this is the founding principle.
• Graded classes. Pupils are distributed into progressive levels, from ABC up to higher studies, with regular examinations — a rational organisation of collective teaching.
• The vernacular tongue. Calasanz had textbooks composed in the language of the people, and not in Latin alone, to make instruction accessible.
• The sciences. Alongside letters and religion, he gave a large place to mathematics and the sciences — a rare concern for the time.
• The preventive method. He preferred to prevent faults rather than punish them, and asked for punishments as gentle as possible: the master must show himself a father before being a judge.

On this last point, the Aragonese educator was ahead of the great Christian pedagogues of the following centuries:

"Seek to win your pupils by showing yourselves to them more a father than a stern judge." — Saint Joseph Calasanz^[61]

"It greatly pleases me that pupils be punished with kindness and mercy. For, recognising a father's love in his teacher, the pupil suffers correction less and does not so readily abandon school." — Saint Joseph Calasanz^[62]

Galileo and Campanella: the friendship of scholars

This openness to the sciences explains Calasanz's friendship with two of the greatest minds of his time. He was close to Galileo: the Piarists supported his research, and when the scholar lost his sight, Calasanz detached one of his religious to him as secretary, Fr. Clemente Settimi.^[63][64] He was also the friend of the Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella, whom he invited to train his teachers and who wrote an apology of the Pious Schools.^[65][66]

That the founder of schools for the poor should have been the friend of the boldest scholars of his century says enough about his conviction: faith need not fear knowledge, and the Church grows by teaching.

Divisions and attack from within

Calasanz's glory was to be pierced by a heart-rending trial. At the end of his life, the order was undermined from within. An ambitious religious, Fr. Mario Sozzi, sowed discord, intrigued and leaned on the Holy Office (the Roman Inquisition) to seize power; he went so far as to have the old founder arrested and led through the streets of Rome like a criminal.^[67][68] To this was added the scandal of Fr. Stefano Cherubini, accused of grave abuses, whom Calasanz had tried — clumsily, his most critical biographers will say — to neutralise by removing him, but who nevertheless reached positions of responsibility.^[69]

The historian Karen Liebreich, who studied these facts, shows a founder overwhelmed by unscrupulous men who used ecclesiastical institutions against him.

The reduction of the order by Innocent X (1646)

The affair went up to the pope. On 16 March 1646, Innocent X, by a brief, reduced the order of the Pious Schools to a mere secular congregation without vows: each priest now found himself subject to his bishop, and the work of a lifetime seemed dismantled.^[70][71] Calasanz, deposed and set aside, withdrew to the house of San Pantaleo^[72], in Rome.

In the eyes of the world, it was a collapse. The saint saw in it only a trial willed by God.

Suffering in peace

It was in this humiliation that Calasanz revealed all his holiness. Far from revolting, he bore all in peace, convinced that the work, if it came from God, would be reborn after him. Piarist tradition — and his bull of canonisation itself — compared him to Job, the righteous man tried who does not curse God:

"The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord." — Book of Job 1:21, words taken up by Saint Joseph Calasanz in his trial^[73]

The bull of 1767 would call him a "perpetual miracle of fortitude, another Job".^[74] He was then nearly ninety years old, and saw his order destroyed; yet he never ceased either to pray for his persecutors or to hope.

Death (25 August 1648) and the restoration of the order

Joseph Calasanz died at Rome on 25 August 1648, aged about ninety, in the house of San Pantaleo where he is buried.^[75][76][77] Artistic posterity would remember that last hour: Francisco de Goya would paint, more than a century and a half later, The Last Communion of Saint Joseph Calasanz.^[78] He died without seeing the rehabilitation of his work — faithful to the end to Job's abandonment.

But history proved him right. The order, reduced in 1646, was restored in stages: in 1656, Pope Alexander VII restored it as a congregation with simple vows; in 1669, Clement IX gave it back its rank as an order of religious.^[79] The Pious Schools then resumed their expansion, and the name of their founder, for a time covered with opprobrium, was restored to the glory of the altars.

"The worthiest ministry"

All of Calasanz's spirituality lies in the dignity he recognised in the education of children. For him, instructing a poor child was not a subordinate task: it was the highest of ministries, because it touches the soul at its root. In his famous Memorial to Cardinal Tonti (1621), he wrote this page, which has remained foundational:

"The good education of children is, in truth, the worthiest ministry, the noblest, the most meritorious, the most beneficial, the most useful, the most necessary, the most natural, the most reasonable, the most pleasing and the most glorious." — Saint Joseph Calasanz, Memorial to Cardinal Tonti (1621)^[80]

In his eyes, whoever reforms childhood reforms everything: the family, the Church, the city. That is why he saw in the free school not a social service, but a work of redemption.

The poor at the heart of the vocation

Calasanz did not only want schools: he wanted schools for the poor. Serving destitute children was not, for him, one activity among others, but the very vocation of his order — to the point that he made it a criterion of discernment:

"Whoever has not the heart to teach the poor does not have the vocation of our Institute." — Saint Joseph Calasanz^[81]

This preferential love of little ones, joined to his own poverty of life, makes him one of the great witnesses of educational charity in the history of the Church.

Patience, humility, abandonment

The great lesson of his life remains nevertheless his abandonment in trial. A rich heir become poor, an Aragonese prelate become servant of street children, an applauded founder then stripped of his work, Calasanz went through all without bitterness. As a young priest, he had left all for Rome; as an old man, he accepted losing all again, trusting that God would complete what men had undone. It was this constancy — this fortitude of the "new Job" — that struck the Church and hastened his canonisation.

Beatification (1748) and canonisation (1767)

Calasanz's reputation for holiness only grew after his death. He was beatified on 7 August 1748 by Pope Benedict XIV, then canonised on 16 July 1767 by Pope Clement XIII.^[82][83] That same day, Clement XIII raised to the altars a company of saints of the Catholic Reformation — among them Jerome Emiliani, another apostle of orphans, and Joseph of Cupertino — as if to celebrate together that Church of the works of mercy of which Calasanz was a major figure.^[84]

Patron of Christian popular schools (Pius XII, 1948)

Three centuries after his death, the Church crowned his intuition. On 13 August 1948, on the third centenary of his death, Pope Pius XII proclaimed Saint Joseph Calasanz "heavenly patron of all Christian popular schools" of the whole world (Caelestis Patronus omnium scholarum popularium christianarum).^[85][86] The gesture officially recognised what history had shown: the poor priest of Trastevere was indeed the father of the Christian popular school.

"Piety and Letters" — motto of the Pious Schools, which sums up his life's work.^[87]

Heritage

Four centuries after the humble school of Santa Dorotea, the Piarists continue to teach on several continents, and the feast of Saint Joseph Calasanz, on 25 August, is that of all Christian teachers and their pupils. His influence far exceeds his order: by laying down the principle of free and popular instruction in the name of the Gospel, he opened a path that the Church, and then modern societies, have never ceased to widen.

Celebrated on 25 August, the founder of the Pious Schools remains the saint who proved that one can change the world through a classroom — and that, for God, the poorest child is worth the greatest of care.

• The Catholic Reformation — the great movement of regeneration of the Church of which he was a major figure.
• The Council of Trent (1545-1563) — the council that redefined the Catholic faith in the days of his youth.
• Saint Philip Neri (1515-1595) — the "Apostle of Rome", another holy educator of Roman youth.
• Saint Camillus of Lellis (1550-1614) — his contemporary, another heroic servant of the sick and the plague-stricken.
• Saint Vincent de Paul (1581-1660) — another great apostle of organised charity in the 17th century.
• Pope Clement XIII — who canonised him on 16 July 1767.
• Pope Gregory XV — who erected the Pious Schools as a religious order in 1621.