The son of a nobleman of Aragon, St. Joseph Calasanctius was born in 1556. At an early age he felt called to devote himself to the education of youth. This ideal he realized in Rome in 1597 by founding a new congregation of Clerks Regular known as the Piarists. The institute developed rapidly but the founder was constantly opposed by collaborators who had been forced upon him. He bore this treatment with admirable serenity. St. Joseph Calasanctius died in 1648 at the age of ninety-two. Pius XII named him patron of all Christian schools for the poor.