The Rule of Life

19 3. Obedience guards chastity, and poverty nourishes chastity. Therefore, the one eager for purity exercises himself in obedience and poverty, and then he will possess chastity. The following means will be able to greatly aid anyone to preserve this angelic virtue [of chastity]: modesty of the eyes and the constant elevation of the mind to God; the flight from laziness, idle conversations, useless reading; prudent avoiding of danger- ous company; love of one’s cell, and respect for the cloister; an ardent invocation of the Holy Spirit, the Virgin Mother of God, your guardian angel, St. Joseph, the holy virgins. The Superiors will take pains lest they throw anyone into a situation endanger- ing so great a virtue, or that they would neglect someone so endangered, seeing that they will have to render to God a most strict accounting of those entrusted to them. C HAPTER F OUR M ORTIFICATION 1. Concerning internal mortification of passions, desires, and your own judgment and will – without which the oldAdam can in no way be cast off – and in which it is fitting that you be most experienced: bodily chastisement greatly contributes to internal mortification. “Put to death whatever in your nature – says St. Paul in Colossians 3 – is rooted in earth” (Col 3:5; cf. 11 As a Piarist, Fr. Stanislaus was very much attached to the legal and as- cetical concept of “utmost poverty“ that he had learned in novitiate. Due to the reform of the Piarists in 1656, he was already not able to profess it. (Later he was evidently trying to preserve or bring back at least some of its elements, by writing the Apology for the Utmost Poverty .) We do not have any evidence that in his own Institute he ever tried to introduce the “utmost poverty – either in that most strict, of the Capuchins; or in that less strict of the Piarist since 1622 – in the legal sense. Nevertheless he cherished utmost poverty as an actual experience in religious life and insisted on the need of being satisfied with the true necessities of life, and with an utmost simplicity of life (cf. for example, below, ch. 5. n.9, towards the end). In 1679 Bishop Wierzbowski witnesses to the “utmost poverty” in which the Marians were living (cf. Positio , p. 399, n. 12).