Fallen Order: Intrigue, Heresy, and Scandal in the Rome of Galileo and Caravaggio

by Karen Liebreich

For hundreds of years the Piarist Order of priests has been known for its history of important contributions to education, science, and culture. Throughout Italy, Spain, and central Europe, the order's schools evolved from shelters created to educate poor children into exclusive private academies. Thousands of children were educated at Piarist schools, including Mozart, Goya, Schubert, Victor Hugo, Johann Mendel, and a host of astronomers, kings, emperors, presidents, even a pope. Yet in 1646, the Piarist Order was abruptly abolished by Pope Innocent X, an unprecedented step not seen since the Knights of Templar were suppressed for heresy in the fourteenth century. Fallen Order is the stunning story of the scandal that led to the Piarists' collapse. Karen Liebreich spent several years researching in the order's archives and in the Vatican Secret Archive, discovering a chain of complicity that went as far as Pope Innocent X himself. Although the Piarist Order was suppressed when the scandal eventually became public, it was later revived and is still in existence today, its turbulent past ignored. Fallen Order is a brilliant portrait of seventeenth-century Rome and the politics, personal rivalries, and Byzantine workings of the Vatican and the Catholic Church.

• ISBN10: 0802142206
• ISBN13: 9780802142207
• Publish Date: 13 October 2005 (first published 2 May 2004)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press
• Edition: First Trade Paper Edition
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 368
• Language: English

Reviews

[wyvernfriend]

A fine example of there being nothing new under the sun.

Karen Liebreich is one of those people who finds something interesting and decides that it really needs further digging, rather like many historians I know. In this she doccuments her finding of a Renaisance Child-Abuse Scandal involving a teaching order. It shows how trying to keep appearances caused the information to be suppressed and the people who did evil to prosper due to connections and low cunning.

It's the last chapter that really strikes home the lesson, when she ennumerates some of the child-abuse scandals that have errupted, and where the response to these abuses have been to cover things up and move the priests out of "harms way" or to promote them in order to try to try to keep them away from temptation.

It's a sad indictement of the system and the problem, that it's been going on for years is a sad truth, that it hasn't been deal with is a sadder truth.