CONGREGATION OF MARIAN REGULAR CLERICS UNDER THE TITLE OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION (MARIANI). - Religious congregation founded in 1673 by Stanisław Papczyński (v.), who, having left the Piarists, devoted himself to the education of poor Polish youth. Having joined with three noble lay hermits, he formed the first community of the Mariani in the forests of Puszcza Korabiewska, in the diocese of Poznań, adopting the white habit in homage to the Immaculate Conception, of whose dogma it constituted itself the herald. It received the approval of the Holy See in 1687, through the nuncio Bonvisi. During the lifetime of Papczyński three houses were opened, and in 1691 the minister general of the Friars Minor, by decree of Pope Innocent XII, assumed the direction of the Mariani and assigned them the rule of the ten beneplacita of the Blessed Virgin. During the 18th century the Mariani spread through various regions of Poland and Lithuania.
In 1750 three houses were founded in Portugal with a mission in Cederin, later suppressed with the revolution of 1838. In 1779 a house of the C. was opened in Rome, near the deaconry of Sts. Vitus, Modestus and Crescentia, as the seat of the procuration, and during the generalate of Fr. Nowicki (1776-88) the C. detached itself from the order of the Friars Minor and resumed an autonomous life. In 1786 Pius VI approved the Constitutions and granted the Mariani the privileges of religious Orders. With the partition of Poland and Lithuania in 1795 the C. suffered immense damages. In 1798 the Mariani were driven out of Rome. The failed Polish insurrection of 1831 aggravated their condition still further, and the other one of 1863, also failed, marked the end of the C.: the superior general was deported to Siberia, the fathers dispersed and the houses suppressed, with the exception of that of Marijampolė, into which the surviving fathers were gathered. In 1893 Fr. Vincenzo Senkus-Sekowski was elected general, who from 1908 remained the sole member of the C. Then came the man who was to be, more than its renewer, the new founder of this congregation, Fr. George Matulaitis (v.), who, having understood the gravity of the situation, in agreement with Fr. Senkus and with the auxiliary of Warsaw, raised up the fortunes of the C. and gave it new life. The white habit was abandoned and the prerogative of "Order" was renounced; the Constitutions were adapted to the times and the place. The religious would devote themselves in the future to the instruction and education of youth, to the ministry and to missions, and would take particular care of the Catholic press.
In Sept. 1909 the renewed C. had only two professed members and one novice. In the Chapter of 1911 Fr. Matulaitis was elected general, and he opened a novitiate at Fribourg in Switzerland, and in 1913 a second house in Chicago. After the war of 1915-18 the C. developed notably, so that in 1937 it counted 23 houses, with 451 religious. The last war has painfully struck the Polish province, while those of Lithuania and Latvia, occupied by the communists, have their houses closed, their goods confiscated and their religious dispersed, with incalculable damages.
Bibliography4 works
Alessandro Boltué