Lumen 2018

97 Polish Roots It was as early as 1633 that King Ladislaus IV and Prince Stanislaus Lubomirski invited the Piarists to Poland. At that time, the order did not have a sufficient number of teachers to be able to establish their schools in Poland. But the events connected with the Thirty Years’ War forced the Piarists to escape from Moravia in 1642 and to seek shelter in Poland. At that time, some of them went to Warsaw at the invitation of King Ladislaus IV, while others were invited by Prince Lubomirski to his ancestral estate in Podoliniec in the Spisz region. Papczynski joined the Piarists in 1654 when they had already estab- lished those two houses in the territory of Poland. 10 The Piarists opened their school in Warsaw before 1648. At first it was only an elementary school. Later, they also opened a middle school. In 1656, during the war with the Swedes, their school, monastery, and church were burned down, but only a year later they began to rebuild and finished this task after the peace treaty of 1660. Around the year 1663, a new college, 11 in which Fr. Papczynski taught, 12 was opened. In 1642, the Piarists came to Podoliniec from a novitiate house in Leipnik. They also opened a novitiate in Podoliniec, in which Stanislaus Papczynski stayed from 1654 to 1655. In 1643, a college was opened in Podoliniec with the two first grades of grammar ( in- fima and media ), to which a third one ( suprema ), i.e., syntax, poetics, and rhetoric, 13 was added later. In the 1649-1650 academic year, we find Stanislaus Papczynski 14 listed among the students of syntax in Podoliniec. From the very beginning, the college in Podoliniec thrived and soon became an important academic and religious center. Within the first twenty years of its existence, it produced fifty priests, and four- teen of them joined the Piarists. One of them was Fr. Papczynski. 15 Soon the congregation opened several other houses: in Rzeszow (1656), Kazimierz near Cracow (1664), Chelm (1667), and Lowicz (1668). 16 At the Piarist Fathers