ORZECHOWSKI (ORICHOVIUS), STANISŁAW. —
Polish priest and humanist, b. 1515, d. 1567. O. was born into a mixed Polish-Ruthenian family and therefore liked to call himself “gente Ruthenus natione Polonus.” At the age of only fourteen O. was already a canon in Przemyśl. He studied in Vienna and then in Wittenberg, where he came under the influence of Protestantism, and finally in Padua and Rome, where he recovered his Catholic convictions. In 1543 O., under pressure from his father, reluctantly received priestly ordination.
A brilliant humanist but of passionate and turbulent character, in 1546 he entered into conflict with ecclesiastical authority because of his polemic against clerical celibacy. O. maintained that celibacy was contrary to nature and to the genuine traditions of the early Church; appealing to the discipline then in force in the Eastern Church (O.’s mother was the daughter of a Ruthenian priest), he proposed the abolition of obligatory celibacy as the best remedy for reforming the life of the clergy of his time. In 1551 O. married after renouncing all ecclesiastical goods. From then until his death, despite the ecclesiastical censures imposed upon him, he stubbornly defended the legitimacy of his marriage, devoting to this cause numerous pamphlets, which, written with elegance and skill, won him many sympathizers, particularly among the nobility. Despite all this, O. simultaneously and with equal zeal wrote against the Protestants, especially against Stancaro (1502–74), then the principal propagator of Protestantism in Poland.