Described as the “first great Catholic educator to appreciate the power of the printed book”, St Peter Canisius is also credited with being one of the first people to found a Catholic press. He has also been described as the second apostle of Germany, the first being St Boniface, the Anglo-Saxon missionary from Devon. He was canonised by Pope Pius XI in 1925 who, at the same time, declared him to be a Doctor of the Church.
St Peter Canisius was at the spearhead of the Counter Reformation and he played a leading role in Catholic revivals in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in the second half of the 16th century.
He was born in 1521 in Wijmegen, now Holland, but then part of the Diocese of Cologne. His father was a burgomaster of the town. He initially wanted to be a lawyer and he studied Arts at the University of Cologne and Canon Law at Louvain. While in Cologne he made regular visits to the Carthusian monks of St Barbara and, eventually, he decided to take a vow of celibacy and returned to Cologne to study theology.
St Peter joined the Society of Jesus on 8th May 1543 in the Rhineland city of Mainz after he underwent a course of spiritual exercises under the direction of St Peter Favre, one of the first companions of St Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. He dedicated himself to studying, teaching and writing, producing editions of the works of St Cyril of Alexandria and St Leo the Great even before his ordination.
He was ordained a priest in Cologne and in 1546 attended the Council of Trent before he was called to Rome by Ignatius, staying with the saint for five months. Afterwards, he taught briefly at the first Jesuit school, in Messina, and made his solemn profession. Then in 1549 he was ordered back to Germany to perform his apostolate there.
Before he left Rome, he prayed for the success of his mission in Ss Peter’s Basilica, calling on the intercession of Ss Peter and Paul. He would later recount this moment in his spiritual journal. “There I felt that a great consolation and the presence of grace had been granted to me through these intercessors,” he wrote. “They confirmed my mission in Germany and seemed to transmit to me, as an apostle of Germany, the support of their benevolence. You know, Lord, in how many ways and how often on that same day you entrusted Germany to me, which I was later to continue to be concerned about and for which I would have liked to live and die.”
St Peter went to the University of Ingolstadt, where Catholic teaching was in dire need of reform, following the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation that had left the faith in the Germanic countries in a real danger of dying out. He became renowned for his prayerful life, his virtues, for his excellent teaching and his courtesy in debate. He made such an impression at the university that he soon found himself promoted to rector.
St Ignatius told him to go with a group of Jesuits to Vienna, however, because the Church in Austria was in an even worse state than in Germany. There, St Peter engaged in pastoral work with the poor, the sick, imprisoned and with men condemned to death.
The saint founded the College of Prague in 1556, which was so good that Protestant families sent their sons there too. He was later appointed the provincial of a new Jesuit province covering southern Germany and, basing himself at Augsburg for the following six years, he produced a Manual for Catholics.
He served as provincial until 1569 and in this period he established a network of Jesuit communities throughout the Germanic countries which acted as “starting points” of the Catholic, or Counter, Reformation of the succeeding decades.
St Peter also took part in the Colloquy of Worms with Protestant divines, he served as Papal Nuncio in Poland; he took part in the two Diets of Augsburg, and in the last session of the Council of Trent where, in 1562, he spoke on the issue of Communion under both Species and on the Index of Prohibited Books.
Among the saint’s greatest contributions to the Church were his catechisms, however. His major work was produced following an invitation by King Ferdinand of Austria to produce a vast Compendium of Church doctrine. The result was his Catechism, published in 1555, and was addressed chiefly to students who could understand the elementary notions of theology. This he later simplified into a Smaller Catechism for youths and the generality of lay people and then into a Shorter Catechism for younger children. These books became the main tools of the Church in central Europe in the education of Catholics and in preparing them to debate with Protestants. Some 200 editions were printed in the saint’s lifetime alone and the books were still being used for instruction in the Catholic faith for centuries after his death.
In 1580 St Peter was sent to Fribourg, Switzerland, to establish a college which had for long been desired by the citizens of the Catholic canton. He devoted himself entirely to teaching and to preaching. This college was to become the University of Fribourg which remains one of the world’s leading theological faculties.
He was debilitated by a stroke in 1591 but continued to write until shortly before his death at the college on 21st December 1597.
St Peter was beatified by Pope Pius IX in 1864 and in 1897 Pope Leo XIII proclaimed him to be the “Second Apostle of Germany”.
In a general audience of 9th February 2011, the German Pope Benedict XVI described St Peter Canisius as a man with the “ability to combine harmoniously fidelity to dogmatic principles with the respect that is due to every person”, a man who refused to succumb to anger or to blame the majority of German people who had given up their Catholic faith for Protestantism. His actions, he said, were “aimed only at presenting the spiritual roots and at reviving the faith in the Church. His vast and penetrating knowledge of Sacred Scripture and of the Fathers of the Church served this cause: the same knowledge that supported his personal relationship with God and the austere spirituality that he derived from the Devotio Moderna and Rhenish mysticism”.
Benedict said that characteristic of St Canisius’ spirituality “was his profound personal friendship with Jesus … which was the core of his personality — nourished by love of the Bible, by love of the Blessed Sacrament and by love of the Fathers, this friendship was clearly united with the awareness of being a perpetuator of the Apostles’ mission in the Church”.
“And this reminds us that every genuine evangeliser is always an instrument united with Jesus and with his Church and is fruitful for this very reason,” the Pope said.
Friendship with Jesus had been inculcated in St Peter Canisius in the spiritual environment of the Charterhouse of Cologne, Pope Benedict noted, and “he subsequently deepened the experience of this friendship, familiaritas stupenda nimis, through contemplation of the mysteries of Jesus’ life, which form a large part of St Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises”.
His was a Christocentric spirituality rooted in the profound conviction that no soul anxious for perfection fails to practice prayer daily: in his writings he insists on the importance of the liturgy, but he also emphasises the need of the laity to develop their union with God through the practice of such daily prayer.
What the example of this saintly man can teach each of us is the necessity to persevere in daily prayer in spite of the hectic and distracting environments in which we find ourselves, to find those moments each day to unite ourselves to God.
According to Pope Benedict, he also teaches clearly “that the apostolic ministry is effective and produces fruits of salvation in hearts only if the preacher is a personal witness of Jesus and an instrument at his disposal, bound to him closely by faith in his Gospel and in his Church, by a morally consistent life and by prayer as ceaseless as love. And this is true for every Christian who wishes to live his adherence to Christ with commitment and fidelity”.