Saint Joseph Calasanz

Priest

Feast Day

August 25

Life

1557–1648

Canonized

1767

Order

Order of the Pious Schools (Piarists, Sch.P.)

Born

Peralta de la Sal, Kingdom of Aragon

Saint Joseph Calasanz (Spanish Jose de Calasanz) was born at Peralta de la Sal in Aragon on September 11, 1557, the youngest of seven children of a notarial family. After studies at Estadilla, Lerida (where he took degrees in law and canon law), Valencia, and Alcala de Henares (where he completed theology), he was ordained priest at Sanahuja on December 17, 1583. He served the Spanish dioceses of Albarracin, Lerida, and Urgell as vicar general and capitular until 1592, when in fulfillment of a vow he traveled to Rome.

At Rome he became a member of several confraternities engaged in catechizing children of the Roman ghetti and slums and was profoundly affected by the misery of the city's uneducated poor children. In 1597, with the parish priest of Santa Dorotea in Trastevere, he opened the first free public school for children of the poor in modern Europe, teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, Latin, and Christian doctrine without charge to children who had been excluded by inability to pay tuition.

To staff the rapidly growing schools, in 1602 Calasanz organized his lay teachers as the Pious Congregation of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools, raised in 1617 by Pope Paul V to a religious congregation under simple vows and in 1621 by Pope Gregory XV to a religious order under solemn vows, with a fourth vow of dedication to the Christian education of the young, the Order of the Pious Schools (Piarists, also Scolopi). Calasanz served as Superior General until 1646. By his death in 1648, the Piarists had thirty-seven houses in eight provinces (Italy, Spain, central Europe, Poland), educating thousands of poor boys; among his pupils were the future astronomers Galilei (briefly, in his Florentine school), Borelli, and others.

The last years of his life were embittered by the schemes of two ambitious confreres, Father Cherubini and Father Pietropaoli, and by the related canonical investigation of 1645-1646 that resulted in the temporary suppression of the Piarists by Pope Innocent X (the Brief Cum sicut ad nostras of March 16, 1646), reducing the order to a society of secular priests for thirteen years before its restoration. Calasanz, then almost ninety, accepted the suppression in silence and died at Rome on August 25, 1648, aged ninety. The order was restored by Pope Clement IX in 1669. Pope Benedict XIV beatified him in 1748; Pope Clement XIII canonized him on July 16, 1767, on the same day as Saint Jane Frances de Chantal. Pope Pius XII declared him patron of all Christian schools by the brief Providentissimus Deus of August 13, 1948. The Memorial in the General Roman Calendar is observed on August 25.