Saint Peter Damian

Saint Peter Damian was a hermit and prior of the hermitage of Fonte Avellana, cardinal bishop of Ostia, and one of the chief reformers of the Church in the 11th century. He was born in 1007 in Ravenna and died in 1072 in Faenza. He is a Doctor of the Church, and his liturgical memorial falls on February 21.

He came from a noble but poor family. He lost both parents early, and his childhood was not free of want and suffering. He was cared for by his sister and by his elder brother Damian, who took him in as a son; the surname Damian comes from this brother’s name. Peter studied in Faenza and in Parma, where at the age of twenty-five he was already teaching. He is counted among the finest writers of the Latin Middle Ages.

Around 1035 he gave up teaching and entered the hermitage of the Holy Cross at Fonte Avellana, on the border of the Marche and Umbria, where the hermits lived austerely in the spirit of Saint Romuald. For the edification of the monks he wrote the life of that saint, and in time he became prior. He drew up a rule for the eremitical life and founded several new hermitages and monasteries. He called the hermit’s cell the place where God converses with men.

From the hermitage he followed closely the life of the Church, in which simony, that is, the buying and selling of ecclesiastical offices, and moral decline among the clergy were then spreading. He wrote about this openly and called popes and bishops to renewal. In 1057 Pope Stephen IX made him cardinal bishop of Ostia, and Peter left his monastery unwillingly and with sorrow. As papal legate he undertook difficult missions: in Milan he brought about a settlement in the dispute over the reform of the clergy, and in France he defended the rights of the abbey of Cluny. Benedict XVI called him the soul of the Gregorian Reform.

He saw himself above all as a monk. In 1067 he obtained permission to return to Fonte Avellana and resigned the diocese of Ostia. The quiet did not last long: two years later he was sent to Frankfurt to prevent the divorce of King Henry IV from his wife Bertha. He left letters, sermons, lives of saints, prayers, and poems. In the treatise Dominus vobiscum he wrote that the Church is at once one in all and whole in each of her members, and so a hermit in his solitary cell also prays in unity with the whole Church. He signed himself Peter, the last servant of the monks.

At the beginning of 1072 he went to his native Ravenna to restore peace after the local archbishop had supported an antipope. On the way back he suddenly fell ill and stopped at the Benedictine monastery of Santa Maria Vecchia in Faenza. There he died in the night between February 22 and 23, 1072.

Peter Damian was never formally canonized. The people venerated him as a saint from the day of his funeral in Faenza. In 1828 Pope Leo XII extended the celebration of his feast to the whole Church and declared him a Doctor of the Church. Dante placed him among the saints in the Paradise of his Divine Comedy.