CONGREGATION OF THE CLERICS REGULAR MARIANS UNDER THE TITLE OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION (MARIANS). — Religious congregation founded in 1673 by Stanislao Papczynski (v.), who, having left the Piarists, devoted himself to the education of poor Polish youth. Having joined three noble lay hermits, he established the first community of the Marians in the forests of Puszcza Korabiewska, in the diocese of Poznan, wearing the white habit in homage to the Immaculate Conception, whose dogma he became the herald. It received the approval of the Holy See in 1687, through the nuncio Bonvisi. During Papczynski’s lifetime 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 Marians and assigned them the rule of the ten beneplacita of the Blessed Virgin. During the eighteenth century the Marians spread throughout various regions of Poland and Lithuania.
In 1750 three houses were founded in Portugal, with the mission in Cederin, but they were later suppressed by the revolution of 1838. In 1779 a house of the C. was opened in Rome, near the diaconia of SS. Vito, Modesto e Crescenzia, as the seat of the procuratorship, and during the generalate of Fr. Nowicki (1776–88) the C. separated from the order of the Friars Minor and resumed an autonomous existence. In 1786 Pius VI approved the Constitutions and granted the Marians the privileges of religious Orders. With the partition of Poland and Lithuania in 1795, the C. suffered immense losses. In 1798 the Marians were expelled from Rome. The failed Polish insurrection
of 1831 further aggravated their condition, and the other, in 1863, also unsuccessful, marked the end of the C.: the superior general was deported to Siberia, the fathers were dispersed and the houses suppressed, with the exception of that at Marijampolè, to which the surviving fathers were concentrated. In 1893 Fr. Vincenzo Senkus-Sekowski was elected general, and from 1908 he remained the sole member of the C. It was then that there came the man who was to be, more than its renovator, its new founder, Fr. Giorgio Matulaitis (v.), who, understanding the gravity of the situation, in agreement with Fr. Senkus and the auxiliary bishop of Warsaw, restored the fortunes of the C. and gave it new life. The white habit was abandoned and the prerogative of «Order» renounced; the Constitutions were adapted to the times and the place. In the future the religious would devote themselves to the instruction and education of youth, to ministry and missions, and would take particular care of the Catholic press.
In September 1909 the renewed C. had only two professed members and one novice. At the Chapter of 1911 Fr. Matulaitis was elected general; he opened a novitiate at Fribourg in Switzerland, and in 1913 a second house in Chicago. After the war of 1915–18 the C. underwent considerable development, so that in 1937 it numbered 23 houses, with 451 religious. The last war grievously struck the Polish province, while those of Lithuania and Latvia, occupied by the Communists, have had their houses closed, their properties confiscated and their religious dispersed, with incalculable losses.