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.

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 Jos? 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 there, too. There is much more to the story than pedophilic priests and a cover up, but sadly, the patron saint of Catholic schools quite clearly performed the same sort of cover-up that has brought disgrace to his contemporary equivalents.

St. Joseph Calasanz had seen the need for schools for poor children. He founded the Piarist Order in 1592, insisting that his Piarists had to live austere lives, dressing simply, wearing sandals in the winter, eating bad food and little of it. The rules included that they could not swim, play games, play guitar, or kiss even their mothers. The rules were broken with zeal by Father Stefano Cherubini, originally headmaster of the school in Naples. Father Stefano enjoyed sodomizing the pupils, and this became known to Calasanz, who could do little since Father Stefano came from a powerful family of lawyers. Calasanz therefore promoted Father Stefano, to get him away from the scene of the crime, citing only his luxurious diet and failure to attend prayers. However, he knew what Cherubini had really been up to, and he wrote that the sole aim of the plan "... is to cover up this great shame in order that it does not come to the notice of our superiors." Cherubini was even made head of the order in 1643 and the elderly Calasanz was pushed aside. Upon this appointment, Calasanz publicly documented Cherubini's long pattern of child molestation, a pattern that he had known about for years. Even this did not block Cherubini's appointment, but other members of the order were indignant about it, although they may have objected to Cherubini's more overt shortcomings. With such dissention, the Vatican took the easy course of suppressing the order.

Liebreich has written a strong yet detached and unemotional account of the events, with a broad look to political and religious forces of the times. She knows that 21st century horror about how priests abuse children is not going to be the same as supposed 17th century sensitivity about it, but she also shows that this does not really matter. The church had clear teachings on the subject at the time, but concentrated more on how pedophilia endangered the souls of the priests who engaged in it; throughout the correspondence in the book, Calasanz and other priests fretted about public scandal first, and offense to God second, with no mention at all to the wrong done to the victims of the abuse. In one of the parallels that Liebreich effortlessly draws to our own times in her final chapter, Pope John Paul II issued a quiet papal directive in January 2002 to say that priests were afflicted by these sins of their brethren and that such scandals made other fine priests look bad; the victims are still being ignored. The question of whether the church could have made a difference if it had learned from the Piarist scandal may be argued back and forth, but that it did not learn and that it continued to shield priests who habitually victimized their young charges is sadly beyond dispute.