Saint Peter Canisius

Saint Peter Canisius was a priest of the Society of Jesus and a Doctor of the Church. In the age of the Reformation he spent several decades strengthening the Catholic faith in the German lands: he preached, founded colleges, and wrote, and the best known of his works is his Catechism. The Church commemorates him on December 21.

He was born on May 8, 1521, in Nijmegen, a city of the Duchy of Guelders in the Holy Roman Empire, today in the Netherlands. His father was the burgomaster. Peter studied in Cologne, where he grew close to the Carthusians and to people who lived the spirituality known as the devotio moderna.

In 1543 he made the Spiritual Exercises in Mainz under the direction of Saint Peter Faber, one of the first companions of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, and on May 8 he entered the Jesuits. He was ordained a priest in June 1546 in Cologne, and a year later he took part in the Council of Trent as theologian to the bishop of Augsburg. In September 1549 he made his solemn profession in Rome. Pope Paul III then blessed him for his mission in Germany, and in Saint Peter’s Basilica Peter entrusted it to the apostles Peter and Paul. With a doctorate in theology obtained in Bologna, he set out for Bavaria.

He lectured at the University of Ingolstadt and was its rector. In Vienna he preached, ministered in hospitals and prisons, and for a year administered the diocese, though he did not accept the office of bishop. From 1556 to 1569 he was the first provincial of the Jesuits in Upper Germany and founded colleges, among others in Prague, Munich, Innsbruck, and Dillingen. In 1558, at the bidding of Pope Paul IV, he was in Poland, at the Diet of Piotrków. At Dillingen he received the young Stanislaus Kostka, who had fled from Vienna in order to join the Jesuits, and after a month of trial sent him on to Rome.

His most lasting work is the three catechisms, composed between 1555 and 1558: one for students and two shorter ones, for children and for school youth. In them he set out the teaching of the faith in questions and answers. In his own lifetime some two hundred editions appeared, and in Germany the catechism was for generations called simply “the Canisius.” In religious disputes he avoided harshness and angry words. He explained in Rome that most of the Germans who had gone over to Protestantism had done so through no fault of their own.

In 1580 his superiors sent him to Fribourg in Switzerland to found a college there. For seventeen years he preached and wrote in that city. He died there on December 21, 1597, at the age of seventy-six. He was buried in the Church of Saint Nicholas, and in 1625 his body was transferred to the Church of Saint Michael at the Jesuit college.

Pope Pius IX beatified him in 1864. In 1897, on the three hundredth anniversary of his death, Leo XIII devoted an encyclical to him and called him the second apostle of Germany after Saint Boniface. Pius XI canonized him on May 21, 1925, and on the same day declared him a Doctor of the Church.