“Why is John Paul II a saint even though he probably knew about abusive priests and seemingly did nothing about it?”
This is a difficult question, but we should be aware this isn’t the first time in church history this has happened. St. Joseph Calasanz (1557-1648), the austere Spanish priest and educator, had a sadly similar story.
Calasanz was the founder of the Piarist order, which added a vow of dedication to the Christian education of the young to the three traditional vows of poverty, chasity, and obedience, and founded the first free school in Europe. He was also a friend of, and defended the scientific theories of, Galileo (so take that, “Catholics absolutely must be geocentrist” crowd)–he even got into trouble with the Inquisition and the Jesuits for doing so. His work of establishing Pious Schools was so beneficial and successful that Pope Paul V had no hesitation in making them an independent society.
However.
Not only did the pleasure-loving headmaster of the Piarist school in Naples, Fr. Stefano Cherubini, sexually abuse his students, he didn’t even bother trying to conceal this fact (shades of McCarrick?). Although Calasanz was made aware of this, Cherubini was from a powerful Vatican family of lawyers that no one wanted to mess with, and he bluntly told Calasanz that his family would ruin the order if Calasanz revealed what he knew. Stuck between the rock of wanting to protect the students and the hard place of putting his order’s existence in jeopardy (which could potentially end all the Pious Schools, often the only hope for the poor children enrolled in them), Calasanz tried to go between the horns of the dilemma: He promoted Cherubini to a position where he had less access to the students.
Did it work? Well, what do you think? Not content with this promotion, Cherubini used his connections to muscle his way into actually replacing Cherubini as head of the order. (He was power-hungry as well as uncontrollably lustful.) When this happened, Calasanz finally broke his silence and exposed Cherubini’s pederasty publicly. The raging scandal that ensued (as well as the corruption that was rampant under Cherubini’s administration) was severe enough that Pope Innocent X revoked the Piarist’s status as an independent society and subjected them to the authority of local bishops, effectively suppressing them. The Piarists were later allowed to re-establish themselves and continue to exist to this day (counting among their students Goya, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, and Victor Hugo), but they will always have Cherubini darkening their history.
Controlled by politics and a desire to protect the Church’s good work, Calasanz shuffled around a child abuser and ended up granting him more power. He made a gross misjudgment that came back to bite him and, if not destroy his work, wound it in a way that left a scar for the rest of its history. Yet, despite all this, the Church recognizes his personal Christlikeness and his social work which made world-class education available to “the least of these”. It has acknowledged him through the formal process of canonization as a saint, a decision possibly validated by the fact that the tongue with which he taught and the heart with which he loved are preserved incorrupt in the Piarist mother house in Rome.
Sanctity is not the kind of thing you weigh on a scale, where if you do a certain number of virtuous actions, it outweighs a comparable amount of reprehensible actions. According to the New Testament, the point of a saint is that they exemplify God’s grace for us. With few exceptions (like the Blessed Mother), they are supposed to exemplify for us how powerfully grace can work through broken, clumsy, fallen people. Paul was not feigning humility when he called himself the chief of sinners. And, when we look at how they failed in their respective abuse crises, so, perhaps, were St. Joseph Calasanz and St. John Paul the Great. Yet God was still, despite their darkness, able to both sanctify them personally and save many others through them.
Maybe He could do the same with you and me.
St. Joseph Calasanz, patron of Christian popular schools, pray for us.
Graham Crackers 