calasanz – the audacity of the inventor - The Piarist Fathers

THE AUDACITY OF THE INVENTOR
(St. Joseph Calasanz)
To say Francis of Assisi is to fix the attention on the Middle Ages, in Italy, and to match
him with the Franciscan Order he founded. To say Ignatius of Loyola is to go back to the end
of the XVI the first half of the XVII century in Spain, and to think of him as the founder of the
Company of Jesus. To say Joseph Calasanz in the context of USA does not mean much. But
he was nothing less than the founder of the first popular Christian education in the world.
St. Joseph Calasanz was an outstanding figure between the XVI-XVII Centuries in
Europe. When the Catholic Church was living amidst the reforms urged by the Council of
Trent, God sent him, born on September 11, 1557, in a small village of the Northern part of
Spain, Peralta de la Sal, in the Kingdom of Aragon.
Calasanz was a very gifted person who became priest and, soon after his ordination,
was appointed personal secretary to several bishops. The trust of his superiors in him,
together with the self-awareness of his intellectual values, made him dream high about future
positions in the Church… He could become a canon of a renowned Spanish cathedral, maybe
a Bishop, a cardinal… who knows!
Thus in the year 1592, exactly 100 years after the arrival of Christopher Columbus to
the Americas, Calasanz left Spain, crossed the Mediterranean Sea, and arrived in Rome. He
went with the illusion of achieving a high position, but God introduced him in a kind of middle
age’s crisis, and connected him with the reality of many abandoned children in the streets of
Rome.
Let us go to Rome! It is the time of the Renaissance. It is the time when monumental
buildings, including the Vatican, were constructed in the Eternal City. One immediately thinks
of the magnificence and splendour of palaces, fountains, avenues and big mansions. Along
with this reality made out of great painters, sculptors, architects, philosophers, scientists, etc.
most of the people were starving, excruciated by plagues and misery, and gripped by the world
of ignorance and vice.
Children were the main victims of the situation. Abandoned to their fate, they were
spending their days in the streets, playing cards, fighting, stealing, and creating lots of
embarrassing scenes geared towards crime and pillage.
Our hero, St. Joseph Calasanz, spent the rest of his life in Rome never to come back to
his country. He died at age 91. Why? Because he met God in those children, and decided to

give up his entire career, money and possessions, in order to be near those abandoned
children.
What did he do with and for children? Simply, he “invented” the school for all, starting
from the very tender age and from the poorest among the poor, so that the intellectual
knowledge advocated by the great artists and thinkers of the Renaissance only for a few, may
become patrimony of every human being, without exclusion, starting with the little ones and the
poor. This is the audacity of the divine inventor of the First Free, Popular Christian School.
At a certain moment, once he had already started his popular and free Christian
education, Calasanz received the news that he had been granted a canonry in Seville, one of
the most important cities in Spain. He declined the proposal saying: “I have already found the
way to serve God in these little poor children and I will not give it up for anything else in the
world”. This was his discovery, this was his invention, and this is today his dream made true
through his followers, the Clerics of the Pious Schools, also known as The Piarist Fathers.
As it happens to the saints, Calasanz passed also his Calvary, his dark night on earth:
defamations, false accusations, distorted reports against him and his Order… And finally Pope
Innocence X issued an official document in which the Order of the Pious Schools was
practically dissolved. It was the year 1646; he was 89 years old, and about to die. He obeyed
instantly with the words of Job: ‘The Lord has given, the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the
name of the Lord’. But this was not a hindrance to encourage the Piarists: ‘Finally -he wrotethe
document that shows clearly the ruin of our Order has come out. But I hope that the more
men denigrate it, much more will God exalt it’. And his words became true. Several years after
his death the Church reviewed his process once more, and realized the tremendous injustice
made against him. Then the Order became what it had been from the beginning.
His dream of school for all, without any prejudice of caste, social background or religion,
is still very alive. When the governments of the world put the greatest emphasis on education
as the main weapon for progress and human development, we can immediately think of
Calasanz, a contemporary of Galileus Galilei whom he held in great admiration and with whom
many Piarists collaborated; a passionate seeker of the Truth, who defines the educator as
“collaborator with the Truth”.
In 1948 Pope Pius XII proclaimed him ‘Universal patron Saint of all Christian Public
Schools’ and, regarding the many struggles he underwent and bore with much patience, the
same Pope spoke of him as “the Job of the New Covenant”.
Remembering St. Joseph Calasanz we congratulate all the teachers, independently of
their religious convictions, for when they dare to teach, they are bringing children closer to the

Truth, Christ himself and by so doing, they are honouring the divinity dwelling in every child’s
heart. “Congratulations, Calasanz!”
Father Fernando Negro Marco, Sch.P.