Saint Peter Canisius

Wherever he went, ruined schools reopened, catechism classes rang with children’s voices, and cold, abandoned churches suddenly glowed again with the sanctuary lamp before the Blessed Sacrament. That tireless traveler was Peter Canisius (born Pieter Kanijs), the man called “the second Apostle of Germany” after Saint Boniface long before him, and one of the outstanding Doctors of the Catholic renewal that followed the Council of Trent.

In a time when religious division was tearing Germany apart, when hostility and bitter polemics drove people into an endless spiral of hatred, he chose the opposite path: no swords, no words of abuse against his opponents. He used gentleness, patient love and plain little catechisms to rekindle the faith in the hearts of millions of people.

Having lost his mother early, Pieter was raised with care by his father and with love by his stepmother. The boy was intelligent and eager to learn, with an unusually sharp memory. At fifteen, in 1536, his father sent him to the city of Cologne, one of the greatest university and cultural centers in Germany at the time, to study the liberal arts, philosophy and canon law. In Cologne he also often went to a Carthusian monastery in the city, where he was deeply influenced by the simple, fervent piety of the Devotio Moderna (the “New Devotion”), a spiritual movement emphasizing a plain inner life, which had spread throughout the Low Countries since the previous century.

The young student lived in a time of great upheaval: Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation was spreading like a storm across northern Germany. Many university professors and priests wavered, and not a few left the Catholic faith to follow the new movement. But Pieter was fortunate to meet Father Nicolaus van Esche, a devout and holy priest, who became his first spiritual father, teaching him how to build a deep inner life, to pray faithfully and to fast and practice self-denial amid the temptations of a turbulent city.

In his very first years as a priest, his zeal and eloquence were put to the test at once. He led the loyal professors and laity of Cologne and successfully blocked the plan of Archbishop Hermann von Wied, who had tried to turn the whole archdiocese Protestant. Thanks to Father Canisius’s steadfastness, Cologne remained a Catholic stronghold in the heart of northern Germany, while many neighboring regions had gone over entirely to the Protestant side.

But the state of the faith in Vienna at the time was bleaker than one can imagine: for twenty years not a single young man had entered the seminary; hundreds of parishes had no priest to care for them; the people had never been taught even the most basic truths of the faith; the sacraments were almost completely forgotten in daily life. Realizing that the root cause of that decline was not that people had deliberately abandoned the faith, but simply that they had never been properly taught, Father Canisius undertook a work that changed the history of the Church: he compiled a set of three catechisms, in both Latin and German. The Large Catechism, published in 1555, was for professors, priests and university students, presenting the truths of the faith comprehensively and clearly with full quotations from Scripture and the Fathers. The Small Catechism, in 1556, was for secondary-school youth and ordinary lay people. And the Basic Catechism, in 1558, was for primary-school children, written as short questions and answers, with simple prayers and vivid, easy-to-remember illustrations.

The impact of those catechisms on the whole German-speaking world was so great it is hard to measure: within a single lifetime, they were reprinted more than two hundred times and translated into almost every European language. From classes of children in remote villages to the lecture halls of prestigious universities, people learned their catechism from Canisius’s books. Many people at the time simply called the catechism “the Canisius”. People used to say to one another:

“Canisius has brought more people back to the Church with his catechism than all the other theologians put together!”

He urged the Jesuit priests and brothers under him to follow a golden rule:

“We must love with all our hearts our brothers who have gone astray; we are not allowed to insult or hurt them... Win them over with humility, truth and the example of a holy life! Never argue with bitterness or anger; for a wound can only be healed with soothing ointment, and no one ever healed a wound by rubbing stinging salt into it!”

In 1556, Saint Ignatius of Loyola appointed Father Canisius the first Provincial of the Jesuits in Upper Germany, covering Germany, Austria and Switzerland. During fourteen years as Provincial, he traveled everywhere, founding a network of excellent Jesuit colleges and universities in Prague, Ingolstadt, Munich, Innsbruck, Dillingen and many other cities. Those schools formed a whole generation of lay people and young intellectuals who were both firm in faith and deeply learned, becoming the backbone of the renewal of the Catholic Church throughout Central Europe for many generations afterward.

Three times he refused the see of Vienna, which both the emperor and the Holy See wanted to give him (a post many of his contemporaries would have accepted without a second thought), because he wanted only to be a poor religious all his life, teaching catechism to children and ordinary people. He worked without rest: writing books, preaching, hearing confessions, visiting prisoners and victims of war. When his brothers in the order, worried, urged him to rest a little before he wore himself out, Canisius only smiled and replied:

“We shall have a whole endless eternity to rest!”

He spent the whole of his last seventeen years in Fribourg. Though old and frail, he kept preaching the Word of God tirelessly in the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas. The voice of that white-haired old man still moved thousands of hearts every time he stood in the pulpit.