PEDOFILIA CLERICAL
Página anterior, aqui
Secrecy and shame
A tragic story of betrayal among American Catholics
By W. David Myers. W. David Myers is associate professor
of history at Fordham University and the author of "Poor, Sinning Folk:
Confession and Conscience in Counter-Reformation Germany." He is finish
February 29, 2004
Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church
in an Age of Scandal
By David France
Broadway, 656 pages, $26.95
The shattering impact of "Our Fathers," David France's gripping account of the
sexual-abuse scandal that has crippled American Catholicism, did not hit me
fully until nearly halfway through the book. On Page 256, I read of how the
notorious John Geoghan had lured one 12-year-old boy away from home in
Dorchester, Mass., to console him after the boy's father had died:
"Geoghan grasped his hand on the boy's bare knee. 'I'm sorry to hear about your
father's death. For a young boy like you that's an awful loss.' By the time he
uttered that last word, the priest's hands were inside the child's shorts.
Geoghan deliberately used a family's grief and his own privileged position as a
counselor to prey repeatedly on vulnerable young men. As court records
demonstrate, Geoghan's activities were already well known in the Boston
archdiocese and to Cardinal Bernard Law, who had transferred him out of
Dorchester for just this kind of act. In other words, Law was fully aware of
Geoghan's criminal depravity and knowingly sent him into another parish and
another group of boys.
I thought I had reached the limits of my outrage over this criminal oversight,
but then I read Page 319, which describes one family whose father had been
abused by Rev. James Porter in 1960 and whose son was among the last to be
molested by Geoghan in the 1980s. And then on Page 545 comes the story of the
priest specializing in teenage mothers . . . well, you get the picture.
Readers should take France's book seriously, not because of the relentless
recounting of horrific details, but because France has used these tragic
episodes to weave an intimate and sad narrative of American Catholicism in the
last 50 years. He makes quite clear that the crisis was not simply the creation
of renegade priests, stonewalling bishops and headline-hungry reporters. The
abuses that exploded into view in the late 1990s had their source in a culture
of shame, secrecy and sexual denial that enveloped not only the clergy and the
hierarchy, but also the parents and even the abused young people themselves.
Everyone was complicit, leaving no party untouched.
The book begins with a fine recounting of a young man inspired to the priesthood
by Alfred Hitchcock's film "I Confess." In the movie, a dedicated young priest
holds on to a secret revealed in the confessional, though by doing so he
subjects himself to a false accusation of murder. This heroic image is an
appropriate opening, because what emerges most clearly is that secrecy was at
the heart of the sex-abuse scandal and, indeed, of American Catholic culture
itself. Molesting clergymen relied on their superiors to cover up indiscretions
under the guise of spiritual or psychiatric counsel. Bishops kept even the worst
transgressors away from the eyes of the police, who themselves were frequently
Catholic and deferred to the church. Perhaps worse, though, abusers knew they
could intimidate their devout parishioners in working- and middle-class Catholic
neighborhoods. Time and again, an event would end with the perpetrator telling
an adolescent boy that no one would believe him. The prestige of the church and
the shame of being sexually victimized conspired to keep kids quiet and their
parents in denial, the consequences becoming apparent only later in severe
social and psychiatric trauma.
As France notes, the inspired young Hitchcock fan found himself guarding other
secrets--those of his own desires. Whether gay or straight, a seminarian in the
1950s and 1960s was expected to keep his sexuality closeted and under control,
his urges sublimated in service to a church that saw the age's greatest danger
in the siren song of secularism seducing seminarians to sexual servitude. The
real, everyday struggle meant ceaseless combat with the unruly flesh, the
unbearable lightness of being non-sexual. To the author, celibacy was not the
only or even the main problem. Instead, the refusal to acknowledge or even to
discuss matters of desire and identity meant repression and self-loathing.
Though this was particularly true for seminarians wrestling with homosexuality,
it affected everyone. The Catholic closet was a large one indeed.
Too many priests failed in the endeavor. France astutely focuses on the seminary
classes of the late '50s. The roll call of the Boston seminary class of 1960 was
a litany of names that would fill the pages of The Boston Globe 30 years later.
Chief among them was Joseph Birmingham, the most abusive priest of all,
beginning in the weeks right after his ordination. His victims even formed their
own support group later: Survivors of Joseph Birmingham. Birmingham escaped the
public notoriety that would later attend Geoghan by dying well before the
scandal broke.
All these seminarians were sent unprepared into a rapidly changing America, with
new possibilities of sexual awareness and new challenges to ecclesiastical and
self-discipline. In the ethnic Catholic enclaves of greater Boston (and America
as well), however, priests possessed extraordinary stature, facilitating almost
unlimited contact with young people. Even someone as jaded as this reviewer
gasped to read about the casual way some clerics could invite young men to
sleepovers at weekend cottages and houses (call them Neverland Ranchettes) and
the fashion in which parents disregarded their sons' tales. Those parents who
complained found their anger swallowed up in the archdiocesan bureaucracy. At
best the offender might be sent to an archipelago of psychiatric centers across
the U.S. dedicated to the treatment of priests suffering from this malady. At
worst--and quite frequently--accused clerics might just be transferred to
another parish.
The culture of secrecy and lack of accountability bred arrogance among church
officials, who treated case after case as individual "pastoral" matters.
From Louisiana to California to Boston, bishops
protected their clergy and their reputations, consistently ignoring the bruised
bodies and psyches of the victims. These practices continued into the 1990s,
ceasing only when lawsuits and investigative journalism forced the issue into
the open. Whatever one thinks of trial lawyers and reporters (and France is not
at all naive about their motives), in this case their work served the public
good, period.
To his credit, France presents the many sides of this tragic story, including
Law's spiritual struggle in trying sincerely to grasp the damage he has caused.
France also sympathizes with priests coming to grips with their own feelings and
actions after a prolonged and enforced sexual adolescence.
The reviewer must ask, though, on what grounds France seems so ready to accept
some clerics' claims to innocence while pillorying others? Is it that some
clergy were willing to talk painfully but openly about their inner lives and
needs? This is an important theme for the author, who argues that greater
openness to sexual identity in the church during the late 1960s and 1970s
allowed priests the chance to work through the difficult passage to sexual
adulthood, even without abandoning celibacy. Abusive behavior subsided as a
newer, smaller and psychologically better-prepared generation of young priests
came to the fore. It is the author's contention that the sexual
revolution--including the emerging struggle for gay rights--powerfully affected
the Roman Catholic clergy, even celibate clergy, and for the better.
Unfortunately, as he notes, the hierarchy here and in Rome continue to blame the
sexual-abuse scandal on the unbridled permissiveness of a godless secularism,
now identified with an open and defiantly proud gay culture. The backlash,
France implies, threatens to throw the entire system into the closet once again,
starting the tragic cycle all over.
Should that occur, though, a major difference will be apparent. The
co-dependence between clerical secrecy and lay shame has, one thinks, now been
decisively broken. The painful learning process demonstrates the value of
transparency over secrecy. More important, though, the social world that defined
American Catholicism in the late 20th Century has changed. France may
overemphasize the importance of sexuality, underestimating the significance of
social class. The tightknit, working-class ethnic parishes in which the church
was so powerful have scattered. The authoritative voice of the priest now
competes with other media and other messages. American Catholics are wealthier
now, better educated and more assertive. Whether conservative or liberal, they
are less willing to accede passively to the dictates of priests and bishops who
cannot command but must convince the laity of an action's rightness. American
bishops have never recognized that their actual power depends mostly on the
willingness of the lay faithful to go along. In the wake of scandal, outrage and
declining donations, will the hierarchy, in Rome or in America, ever come to
recognize and accept this fact? Your guess is as good as mine.
The scandal, the coverup, the aftereffects
Two books examine the sex abuse
crisis that has rocked the Catholic Church
Reviewed by Joseph Di Prisco
Sunday, March 14, 2004
The Silence We Keep
A Nun's View of the Catholic Priest Scandal
By Karol Jackowski
HARMONY; 209 Pages; $23.
Our Fathers
The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal
By David France
BROADWAY; 656 Pages; $26.95
Zhou Enlai, premier of China until 1976, was asked his opinion about the effect of the French Revolution. His verdict: "Too soon to tell." If a cold- blooded tyrant cannot enjoy the long view, who can? As stories keep breaking about the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church and the coverup of crimes against thousands of children, and with the arrival of the exhaustive study by the John Jay School for Criminal Justice late last month, it may also be too soon to assess what has been wrought.
Even so, soul-searching is under way. Will the church survive? Of course. Will it change and, if so, how? Everyone has a dog in that fight. Only professional deniers can think that this, too, shall pass. Then again, there were those who thought that nutty Martin Luther was a blip on the screen. Readers seeking the one definitive work are out of luck; for now, at least, they should read two: "The Silence We Keep" by Karol Jackowski, a nun for 40 years, and "Our Fathers" by David France, Newsweek senior editor. As different as these works are from each other, they illuminate the dark corners and secret life of the church.
This tragedy is much more than Enron in the Popemobile. Jackowski has perhaps an ideal viewpoint. As a nun, she is both insider and outsider when it comes to church business. Hers is a personal book that benefits from the lessons derived from inhabiting the contradictions imposed by the patriarchal culture of Catholicism. France concentrates largely on the crisis in 2002 that engulfed the Archdiocese of Boston, led by now-disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law. France's account goes back to the 1950s and takes a 360-degree view of some priests who perpetrated the crimes and some bishops who covered them up, as well as those survivors sacrificed on the altar of ecclesiastical expediency.
C.S. Lewis wrote in "Reflections on the Psalms" that "Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst." Lewis may or may not be correct, but Jackowski and France do show that the monsters are banal and human. They also show how the church's higher aims have been subverted by a bureaucratic program of covertness, entitlement and arrogance. It was Jesus himself who said it were better to put a millstone around your neck and cast yourself into the sea than to "put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me'' (Matt 18:6). When the bishops reached for their flotation device (the absolute pastoral imperative and moral unimpeachability of the church), it turned out to be an anvil.
At the same time, Jackowski proposes that the crisis may rejuvenate the church; it may even demonstrate, as it does for her, divine intervention. And according to France, although many of the survivors have renounced the faith of their childhood, many have reaffirmed it and attempted to save their church.
The scandal itself was made possible, if not inevitable, by the church's "structures of deceit." Both books invoke this term, made famous by Garry Wills' 2000 book "Papal Sin," which cleared the way for theirs. The church's hypocritical, entrenched and theologically baseless opposition to married or female priests, contraception and homosexuality, etc., proceeds from these structures and breeds cynicism and contempt. As a result, a pall has fallen on the great and good work done by the church, and noble, altruistic priests and nuns (the vast majority) have become a talk-show punch line.
Jackowski breaks her silence eloquently, honestly. She also does so repetitively, and the rhetorical transitions are not seamless. Nonetheless, "The Silence We Keep" has an undeniable force, one not vitiated by an occasionally supercilious tone that this popular author's fans may find charming. Finally, her book succeeds by virtue of her passion, intelligence and love. Her disquisitions upon virginity, sisterhood and the emerging priesthood are fresh, easily worth the price of admission.
And though France lapses into breezy journalese, he normally writes with steely discipline. His narrative sweep is generous, authoritative, smart, powerful and -- at the risk of using a much-abused term -- novelistic. The cast of characters brought to life is impressive; for every memorable villain there is an equally unforgettable hero, with most somewhere in between.
Reading these books in tandem clears the underbrush of conventional misunderstanding. No one will labor under a delusion that the priesthood is, or ever was, an invariably celibate institution. No one will assume that homosexual priests (a significant percentage) are more likely to molest children. Non-Catholics may learn that an increasing number of devout Catholics believe that women should not be barred from ordination. And despite the Vatican's politicized insistence that the scandal has an American accent, the virus has spread worldwide.
At one point in her book, Jackowski wonders if the time is ripe for an American Catholic Church. Even if it isn't, the church must rebuild trust. Truth commissions may lead to forgiveness someday. This is where France in "Our Fathers" does the heavy lifting, providing, in effect, a fascinating etiology of evil. The evil manifests itself in the church's mundane, institutionalized pursuit of self-interest at the cost of the lives and innocence of children. France has given us a kind of "All the Cardinal's Men," and one triumph is his portrait of Law.
A charismatic leader who once operated with the best of intentions, Law lives now in disgrace. Nonetheless, readers may be surprised to see him painted at times almost sympathetically, almost tragically. Almost. The author reserves his unqualified respect, however, for those courageous survivors and Catholics who resisted the hierarchy. The admiration David France earns is rivaled only by the heartbreak and indignation generated by his brave, important book.
Berkeley writer Joseph Di Prisco is the author of "Confessions of Brother Eli" and "Sun City.''
Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal
By David France
Broadway, 656 pp., $26.95
"Sin: A Cardinal Deposed" opened recently at the Bailiwick Repertory Theatre in Chicago. The play's unlikely topic is the conflict, played out in 2002, between Cardinal Bernard Law and Mitchell Garabedian, the Boston attorney who represented 86 survivors of sexual abuse at the hands of John Geoghan. Law's depositions provided the literary source for playwright Michael Murphy. The play gives the final word to one of Geoghan's victims, Patrick McSorley, who was found dead on Feb. 23 in a friend's Boston apartment. Geoghan himself was strangled to death in prison last year.
All of which raises the question: Who would choose to spend discretionary time sitting through the depressing tale of predator priests, greedy lawyers, and duplicitous church officials who lied, dissembled, and covered up both serial pedophilia on the part of others and their own criminal negligence, gross mismanagement, sinful cooperation with evil, and astonishing disregard for the victims (some of whom, tragically, were not "survivors")?
Presumably, the same kind of people who will "sit through" "Our Fathers," David France's wrenching, painfully vivid 656-page re-creation of a fraction of the thousands of acts of priestly sexual abuse and lives devastated in the Boston archdiocese over the last 50 years -- the same period covered in the John Jay College survey of priestly abuse across the nation. (While concentrating on Boston, France also profiles representative cases in California and elsewhere.)
Readers, be prepared. "Our Fathers" induces the kind of nausea one feels after stumbling upon the scene of a fatal traffic accident. France, a skillful storyteller, is relentless. Vignette after vignette explores the dreary architecture of the betrayal of innocence -- the predator's exploitation of the church's reputation for holiness to insinuate himself into the lives of young boys (and, less frequently, young girls); the hurricane-force shock experienced by the unsuspecting, first-time recipient of the priest's insistent (and occasionally violent) sexual "ministrations" (as predators Geoghan and Paul Shanley, among others, described their acts of molestation and rape); the child or young adult's repression of the experiences, leading in many cases to lifelong bouts of self-hatred, disabling addictions, and/or isolation; the reluctance of society, including, in the most disturbing cases, the parents of the victim, to believe or support him or her; and, not least, the brutal message conveyed repeatedly by church officials: Your suffering at our hands is negligible, in any case far less important than the damage to our reputation that would accompany a public acknowledgment of the truth.
"Our Fathers" moves beyond these precincts of pain to examine the enabling culture of denial and secrecy that shaped the distressing behavior of too many church officials. France, who covered the crisis in 2002 as senior editor of Newsweek, employs the same vignette-driven style in describing the legal and political dimensions of the crisis, from the fulminations of Catholic lawyers, judges, and former mayors against their archdiocese, to the changing cultural role of The Boston Globe, to the ecclesiastical politics and intrigue that unfolded in Boston; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C. (home of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops); and the Vatican. In these truncated, tense accounts, the author draws upon the dramatic license of the novelist to enliven the facts-based reportage of the crusading journalist. (France takes us, improbably, inside the minds of Roman Catholic cardinals, the pope, and other central characters to whom he had no direct access.) He further intensifies the feeling of grim immediacy by structuring the story as a modern tragedy. (The book opens with a long list of dramatis personae, including popes and politicians reaching back to the '50s.)
How to assess such an admittedly riveting work? On the one hand, the unmistakable zeal of the author is placed at the service of the victims and survivors of this terrible era in American Catholic history. One must be grateful to France for making it impossible for any reader of his book to underestimate the impact of sexual abuse upon children and young people. Beyond this triumph, the book also reflects prodigious research into newspaper accounts, legal documents, church treatises, and other personal lives affected irreversibly by the scandal. France interviewed countless individuals, including Catholic laity such as Jim Muller, the Boston physician (and Nobel Prize winner) who founded Voice of the Faithful as an expression of his moral outrage. Also figuring prominently is Thomas Doyle, the priest who repeatedly warned American Catholic bishops of the recidivism of pedophiles and their presence in the Catholic presbyterate, only to see himself largely ignored and later demoted for his efforts. That France's account, thorough without attempting to be comprehensive, appeared in print roughly one year after the last of the events it describes (Law's resignation) is itself a remarkable accomplishment.
The speed of production also accounts for the book's limitations. Inaccuracies and distortions occasionally creep into the narrative. Some of these were unavoidable, given the moving target. At the time of writing, for example, the most reliable data on the extent of priestly abuse nationally were contained in a late 2002 study by the New York Times. It found that 1.8 percent of the American priests ordained since 1950 had been accused of sexual crimes. Regrettably, the record is far worse. According to the national survey released on Feb. 27, Catholic diocesan records indicate that 4,392 priests were accused of engaging in sexual abuse of a minor between 1950 and 2002. This number represents 4 percent of the 109,694 priests in active ministry during that time.
On the other side of the ledger, France's righteous zeal for the survivors/victims also leads him, now and then, to rely on hyperbole and interpretive liberties that serve, unfortunately, to weaken his credibility. Alcoholism, we are told, "ran endemic" among the nuns and priests who administered Catholic schools. (No one doubts that alcoholism was a problem; no one has demonstrated, however, that it was rampant.) As the Catholic Church entered the 1990s, France judges, the priesthood was thoroughly discredited and "seemed in danger of vanishing." Hardly.
Apart from such quibbles, the overall tone and content of the book are driven by the determination to demonstrate that a major "cause" of the scandal was the church's erroneous teachings on sexuality, reinforced by "repressive" attitudes and unwise practices, including mandatory celibacy for priests.
France may well be correct in this assumption, but it remains nothing more than an assumption in the absence of careful scrutiny and examination of the larger picture of Catholic priesthood in the latter half of the 20th century. Such scrutiny will require something more solid than "instant history" whose tragic and poignant character is allowed to eclipse every other dimension of Catholic ministry. One searches long and hard in "Our Fathers" for evidence that most priests, even in the disgraced Boston archdiocese, were neither pedophiles nor abusers but instead humble and often heroic servants of the people of God. That they accomplished this underreported feat while laboring under the presumed burden of celibacy and other restrictions on freedom of sexual self-expression is also part of the dramatic story of these years. That story cannot be told without careful consultation of this difficult but rewarding account by David France. But neither can it be told by this alone.
Saint who
covered up for child abusers
Stephen Bates, religious affairs correspondent
Thursday April 15, 2004
The Guardian
The Roman Catholic church's mishandling of paedophile
scandals among its clergy is not a modern phenomenon but has been going on for
hundreds of years, a new book, published today, reveals.
It describes how the priest who is the patron saint of Catholic schools covered up sex abuse.
Father Joseph Calasanz, the 17th-century Spanish priest who founded the Piarist Order to educate the children of the poor, remains a revered figure, canonised in 1767, with an elegant statue at St Peter's in Rome.
Among those educated by the order, which currently has 1,500 priests across the world, have been Goya, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Bruckner, Victor Hugo, Gregor Mendel and Antonio Gaudi.
But now a British academic has uncovered a secret, hidden for more than three centuries in the Vatican archives: Calasanz, whose order was suddenly and mysteriously shut down for a period by Pope Innocent X in 1646, was guilty, like many since, of suppressing accusations of child abuse against his colleagues.
Karen Liebreich, a Cambridge-educated historian, claims: "The contemporary Catholic church's practice of moving a suspected paedophile away from the original scene of the crime for fear of ensuing scandal and the backlash clearly has long antecedents."
Her book, Fallen Order, quotes from a letter Calasanz wrote to the headmaster of one of the order's schools in Naples in 1631 about a priest accused of abuse: "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, which has enjoyed a good reputation until now, would lose greatly."
The accused priest, Stefano Cherubini, a member of a well-connected Vatican family, did not hesitate to pull strings with Francesco Albizzi, assessor of the Inquisition, and managed to supplant Calasanz briefly as head of the order.
It was not until 1646 that the complaints against him and other senior Piarist priests became widespread and the order was temporarily closed down.
Calasanz moved priests and even promoted them when claims of abuse were made against them - a system of "promotion for avoidance" the church has practised ever since.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the current leader of the church in England and Wales, was fiercely criticised when he admitted moving a priest who subsequently committed further offences against children. The scandal prompted the church to develop new guidelines for dealing with allegations and with employment of staff.
Pope Innocent's decision to close the order has usually been explained by its alleged indiscipline, Cherubini's political machinations, and even the friendship of members with the heretical astronomer Galileo.
But Dr Liebreich's research and a close analysis of the 10 volumes of letters left by Calasanz, and of the further volumes of correspondence he received, indicate a different story. An even fuller picture might have emerged had another accused priest not burned many of the order's archives in 1659.
The book states: "Molesting children was a grave misdemeanour then, yet the authorities, despite innumerable protests, did nothing. It can only be that they did not consider abuse of children by a priest to be a matter of enough gravity to prevent that priest becoming universal superior of a teaching order."
Dr Liebreich said the modern order might be shocked to learn the outcome of her research. But she added: "I am not sure that the Vatican will even read what I wrote."
John Cornwell, the writer on Catholic affairs, said: "The book seems to me to be an original piece of work. The problem of paedophilia is not as simple as the Pope believes."
Fallen Order by Karen Liebreich; Atlantic Books, £16.99
Sins of the
fathers
Karen Liebreich invites us to draw comparisons across the
centuries with her account of paedophile priests in 17th-century Italy, Fallen
Order
Miranda France
Saturday May 22, 2004
The Guardian
Fallen Order: A
History
by Karen Liebreich
384pp, Atlantic, £16.99
Pope John Paul II has kept noticeably quiet on the subject of Catholic priests who sexually abuse children. But in 2002, after high-profile cases in Europe and the United States, he was moved to acknowledge the problem - briefly.
Paragraph 38 of his annual Holy Thursday letter alluded to priests who succumb to "the most grievous forms of the mysterium iniquitatis [mystery of evil] at work in the world". Such behaviour puts other priests in a bad light, said the Pope, without mentioning what it does to the victims.
Fallen Order focuses on sexual abuse within a religious order in 17th-century Italy, and the attempts to cover it up. The book invites us to draw comparisons across the centuries, and it is infuriating to see how little the rhetoric of the Catholic Church has changed in these matters. Its aim can still seem to be to make abuse less terrible by couching it in euphemisms, especially Latin ones, then attributing it to outside forces, rather than to the criminal behaviour of a responsible adult.
The Piarists began as a religious order dedicated to teaching poor children. A Spaniard, Jose Calasanz, founded the first Pious school in 1597, in Rome, at a time when free education barely existed. The order exists to this day, although now its schools are more exclusive. Past pupils include Mozart, Goya, Haydn, Victor Hugo - and Egon Ronay.
In marked contrast to the Jesuits, Piarists taught in the vernacular, not Latin, and over philosophical mathematics they favoured "abbaco", or mercantile arithmetic. Children learned how to calculate the interest on loans, exchange rate mechanisms and geometry. Calasanz hoped that these skills would help them to find jobs "in banks, in warehouses, in counting houses and in other trades".
Not only were his teaching methods innovative, but Calasanz's staff included some of the great men of the time, including Ventura Sarafellini, the calligrapher who created the inscription "Tu Es Petrus" around the inner ring of the cupola of St Paul's. Calasanz also knew Pope Gregory's barber and doctor, and found them useful intermediaries.
Even Galileo became involved with the Piarists when a group of scientifically minded priests was sent to start a Pious school in Florence. Their espousal of his heliocentric theory, at a time when Galileo was falling foul of the Inquisition, was to prove very dangerous for the order.
Alongside their modern teaching methods, Piarist brothers practised an austere Christianity. They wore horse-hair habits and were expected to eat little and badly. Calasanz was so dedicated to discomfort that he ate his meals with one foot lifted in the air, "to suffer even while eating", or lay on the floor and made the other brothers trample him on their way to the refectory. Piarists were not allowed to swim, play the guitar or kiss their mothers. They were never supposed to be alone with a pupil.
Its austerity notwithstanding, the movement grew quickly, with schools opening across Italy (including one at the summit of Vesuvius, which was promptly swallowed up by the volcano). By the 1630s the expansion was so rapid that Calasanz wished he had another 10,000 teachers to meet the demand for new schools. Yet by 1646 the order was discredited, and banned by Pope Innocent X. What had happened, in one decade, to quash such a flourishing movement? (It was only restarted at the end of the 17th century.)
The reason given at the time was "internal dissent", but Karen Liebreich stumbled on what she felt to be the real answer while researching a doctorate on public education in a musty Florentine archive. Calasanz is the patron saint of Catholic schools, and Liebriech had been dutifully wading through his 4,869 letters - not a joke among them, she notes grimly - when she came across the telling euphemism: il vitio pessimo - "the worst sin".
Liebreich took that nugget and sniffed out more information at the Vatican Secret Archive, fortifying herself with tax-free coffee (delicious, apparently). When the Inquisition Archive finally opened to the public in 1998, she went there too.
The story that Liebreich can now unravel is as racy and full of machinations as The Name of the Rose. We learn about the sinister Father Gavotti, who wore gold-trimmed stockings under his habit, and whose paedophile tendencies, said a contemporary, caused "a terrible stench to everyone nearby". There is nasty Mario Sozzi, who shopped his enemies to the Inquisition, and was struck down by a kind of leprosy. His treatment involved being wrapped naked in the still pulsating body of a recently slaughtered ox. Sozzi died anyway - but his colleagues enjoyed eating the ox.
The real villain of the piece is Stefano Cherubini, headmaster of the Naples school, who threatened to destroy the order if allegations of his abuse of children were made public. Cherubini was the son and brother of powerful papal lawyers, so Calasanz pandered to him, promoting Cherubini away from the scene of his crime. "Your reverence's sole aim," he wrote to a colleague, "is to cover up this great shame in order that it does not come to the notice of our superiors."
This is where Liebreich's rattling good story becomes also an indictment of the Catholic Church's head-in-sand approach to priests who harm children. She gives a chapter's worth of examples, including our own Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, who in 2002 appointed a priest he knew was suspected of paedophile activities to the position of chaplain at Gatwick, where he still had access to children. The cardinal blamed his own "naivety and ignorance", an excuse Liebreich shows to be very well-worn.
Fallen Order is meticulously researched and beautifully written, with some splendid vignettes of life in 17th-century Italy, at the time of the plague, and of Galileo's discoveries. However, Liebreich does get bogged down in the nitty-gritty of her story. We learn a good deal about who did what to whom, when and how. The most interesting questions - why do so many Catholic priests interfere with children? Why does their church not take the problem more seriously? - could have done with more attention.
Liebreich argues that it is possible to compare attitudes to paedophilia then and now. There is no question, she says, of imposing "an alien and modern morality on an earlier period with a different scale of ethics". And yet there is at least one clear difference. Priests knew that it was wrong to abuse children, but only in so far as it affected their own souls. There was apparently no concern about the damage done to children. Even the father who wrote to Calasanz