Lumen 2018

not agree to his return, it would mean that God wanted to have this mission fulfilled in a new congregation and, in spite of initial failures, wanted him to proceed in this direction. 261 It should be said that the conflict between Fr. Stanislaus and his Piarist superiors lasted for a relatively short time and was limited to only a few people. There were no misunderstandings since the be- ginning of the novitiate in 1654 until 1664. The first conflict erupted in connection with the provincial chapter in 1664 and other events after its conclusion. The crisis took a sharper form in 1670, after Fr. Stanislaus had been abducted and incarcerated. The period between these events, i.e., between the summer of 1668 and January 1670, was a time of relative peace and intense work. It must be also re- membered that Fr. Papczynski made accusations only against Fr. Cosmas Chiara, Fr. Wenceslaus Opatowski, Superior of the Province, and Fr. Francis Haligowski, Rector of the Warsaw house. There was no open conflict between Fr. Papczynski and Fr. Michael Kraus, even though the latter did not agree with Fr. Stanislaus’s ideas. 262 This is how Fr. Papczynski characterized his Piarist superiors of that time: “I have respect for the Superiors of the Pious Schools, but not for all of them. I respect those who deserve to be superiors, but not those who are intruders and climbed the peaks of superiority by trampling the laws of nature, the laws of the Church, and the backs of their subordinates.” 263 Those superiors did not even suppose that they were fighting a future candidate to the honors of the altar and failed to realize that people like Fr. Stanislaus, who know how to oppose human author- ities in the name of common good and do so humbly, with dignity and love, are worth their weight in gold in the Church. Unextinguished love In spite of all the suffering that he had experienced during the last years of his stay at the Piarist Fathers, the love for them never died S TANISLAUS P APCZYNSKI 218