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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 271.5809032
EAN: 9780802117847
ISBN: 0802117848
Label: Grove/Atlantic
Manufacturer: Grove/Atlantic
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: 2004-08
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic
Sales Rank: 1555705
Studio: Grove/Atlantic
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The Piarist Order of priests has for hundreds of years been known for its history of important contributions to education, science, and culture. Yet in 1646, the Piarist order was abruptly abolished by Pope Innocent X. Fallen Order is the stunning story of how the sexual abuse of children, practiced by some of the leading priests in the order, led to the Piarists' collapse. Karen Liebreich spent several years researching in the order's archives and in the Vatican Secret Archive, and discovered how the founder of the Piarist Order, Father José de Calasanz (later honored as the patron saint of Catholic schools) knew of the scandal and tried to keep it a secret. Cardinals and bishops actively participated in the cover-up in an effort to protect the reputation of an important cleric with influential family connections. A brilliant portrait of seventeenth-century Rome, and the politics, personal rivalries, and Byzantine workings of the Vatican and the Catholic Church, Fallen Order is an explosive account of a history of cover-ups, deception, and shuttling known abuser priests from school to school that is frighteningly similar to the Catholic Church's response to child abuse in the priesthood today.
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Rating: - 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.
Rating: - 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 ... Read More
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