Theatines

The Clerics Regular, the Theatines are a religious order founded in Saint Peter’s Basilica, in the Vatican in Rome, on 14 September 1524. It owes its name to the old name (Teate) of the city of Chieti, of which, at the time, one of the two founders of the Order, Gian Pietro Carafa (1476-1559) was bishop. The other founder was Gaetano of Thiene (1480-1547), who, like Carafa, came from the Oratory of Divine Love and later was proclaimed a saint by Pope Clement X. The order was thus an expression of the desire for renewal of religious life expressed by the Catholic ecclesiastical world even before the Council of Trent (1545-1563). It expanded rapidly in the Italian peninsula during the sixteenth century, reaching great power when Carafa was elected Pope under the name of Paul IV. In the seventeenth century the Theatines also settled outside of Italy, for example, in Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Lisbon, Monaco, Munich, Prague and Vienna. Also engaged in missionary activity in eastern Europe and the Far East, the Theatines, like other orders, underwent a period of severe crisis in the late eighteenth century to their renewal, begun by Pius X in the early twentieth century.