APRIL 27TH, SAINT PETER CANISIUS, PRIEST, CONFESSOR, DOCTOR

Month in honor of the Most Blessed Sacrament.

From the Roman Breviary —

Peter Canisius was born at Nijmegen in Gelderland, the Netherlands, in the very year in which Luther openly rebelled against the Church in Germany, and in which Ignatius Loyola in Spain gave up earthly warfare to fight the battles of the Lord; God thus shewed what adversaries he was to encounter, and under whose leadership he was to fight. He made his studies at Cologne, where he took a vow to God of perpetual chastity, and shortly afterwards entered the Society of Jesus. After his ordination as priest, he began at once to defend the Catholic faith against the wiles of the innovators by missions, sermons, and writing books. His eminent wisdom and experience caused the Cardinal of Augsburg and the papal legates to invite him to the Council of Trent, and he was present at its sittings more than once. Moreover, by the authority of the Supreme Pontiff, Pius IV, he was entrusted with the charge of making its decrees known in Germany and carrying them into effect. Paul IV sent him to the Diet of Petrikau, and Gregory XIII entrusted him with the carrying out of other missions, all of which he undertook with an eager spirit, never conquered by any difficulties, and carried the most important affairs of religion through all the crises of this present life to a successful end. Inflamed with the heavenly fire of charity, which he had once received in the Vatican basilica from the sanctuary of the Heart of Jesus, and intent only on increasing the glory of God, it is almost impossible to describe how, for more than forty years, he took upon himself laborious tasks, and endured hardship, that he might defend very many cities and provinces of Germany from the contagion of heresy, or restore to the Catholic faith those that were infected with heresy. At the Diets of Ratisbon and Augsburg, he exhorted the princes of the Empire to defend the rights of the Church and reform the lives of their subjects. At Worms he reduced the insolent teachers of impiety to silence. St. Ignatius made him prefect of the province of Upper Germany, where he founded houses and colleges in many places. He used every effort to advance and enlarge the German College founded at Rome; he restored the study of sacred and profane learning in academies, which had fallen into a wretched condition. He wrote two excellent volumes against the Centuriators of Magdeburg; and he edited a summary of Christian doctrine, which has been thoroughly approved by the judgment of theologians and by common use everywhere for three centuries, as well as very many other works useful for public instruction in the vulgar tongue. For all these reasons he was called the Hammer of the Heretics, and the Second Apostle of Germany, and is rightly thought to have been worthy of having been chosen by God to protect religion in Germany. In these activities he was accustomed to unite himself to God by frequent prayer and assiduous meditation on heavenly things, often bathed in tears and sometimes with his soul rapt in ecstasy. He was held in great honor by men of rank, or of most distinguished holiness, and by four of the Supreme Pontiffs, but he thought so humbly of himself, that he spoke of and held himself as the least of all. He refused the bishopric of Vienna no less than three times. He was most obedient to his superiors, and ready at their mere nod to stop or to undertake all labors, even at the risk of his health and life. He guarded his chastity with perpetual voluntary self-mortification. At length, at Fribourg in Switzerland, where during the last years of his life he had labored much for the glory of God and the salvation of souls, he passed to God on the 21st day of December, 1597, in the seventy-seventh year of his age. This zealous champion of Catholic truth was adorned with the heavenly honors of the blessed by Pope Pius IX; and, as fresh miracles added to his renown, the Supreme Pontiff Pius XI, in the year of the Jubilee, included him among the Saints, and at the same time declared him a Doctor of the Universal Church.