Lumen 2018

ticeable in Poland. For ten years (1646-1656), the Piarists did not have rights as a religious order and existed as a community whose members lived a life much different from the one defined by religious constitutions. The newly established Polish Vice-Province (1662) needed directives from both the German Province and from the Pi- arist Curia in Rome. It was not easy to maintain close contacts be- tween the houses because of the distances and the turbulent times. It took three weeks for correspondence fromWarsaw to reach Rome. Letters between these two cities could be sent only twice a month. 1 All these circumstances must be taken into consideration in order to understand the difficulties that the Piarist Congregation was experi- encing during Fr. Papczynski’s stay there. Father Stanislaus was deeply dedicated to the spirit of their founder, Fr. Joseph Calasantius, and shared many of his attributes. He was fascinated by his spirit of piety and penance, dedication to the neediest, and to those who were spiritually neglected. Influenced by the founder’s saintly life, he had great veneration for Divine Prov- idence, the Lord’s Passion, the Eucharist, and the Blessed Virgin Mary. He also imitated Fr. Calasantius’s ideal of strict religious ob- servance and utter poverty. 2 He was animated by the spirit charac- teristic of reformers of religious life. Papczynski was influenced not only by the founder of the Piarists but also by St. Peter of Alcantra, 3 a reformer of the Franciscans, recently beatified at that time, and by St. Teresa of Avila, canonized in 1622. All of them were character- ized by the spirit of great personal mortification and the pursuit of religious renewal, and greater strictness and asceticism in their re- spective religious communities. 4 Father Stanislaus was not alone in his pursuit of stricter religious observance. The same spirit animated other members of the Polish province of the Piarists 5, and they preserved it even after Fr. Papczyn- ski’s departure from them. 6 When Papczynski speaks in his Apology about the relaxation of the former religious observance by the Pi- arists, he mostly emphasizes the relaxation with regard to the ideal of utter poverty. He loved this ideal so much that he wrote a special S TANISLAUS P APCZYNSKI 164