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This
doctor of the church is often called the second Apostle of Germany. Both Holland
and Germany claim him as their son, for Nijmegen, where he was born, May 8th,
1521, though a Dutch town today, was at that time in the ecclesiastical province
of Cologne and had the rights of a German city. His father, a Catholic and nine
times burgomaster of Nijmegen, sent him at the age of fifteen to the University
of Cologne, where he met the saintly young priest, Nicolaus van Esch. It was he
who drew Canisius into the orbit of the loyal Catholic party in Cologne, which
had been formed in opposition to the archbishop, Hermann von Wied, who had
secretly gone over to the Lutherans. Canisius was chosen by the group to
approach the emperor, and the deposition of the archbishop which followed
averted a calamity from the Catholic Rhineland. Shortly afterwards Peter
Canisius met Bd. Peter Faber, one of the first companions of St Ignatius, and
made the under his direction. During this retreat he found the answer
to the question he had put to himself: how best could he serve God and assist
the stricken Catholic church in Germany?
He
was inspired to join the Society of Jesus, and, after his ordination in 1546,
soon became known by his editions of works of St Cyril of Alexandria and of St
Leo the Great. In 1547 he attended the council of Trent as procurator for the
bishop of Augsburg, where he became still further imbued with the spirit of the
Catholic Counter-Reformation. His obedience was tested when he was sent by St
Ignatius to teach rhetoric in the comparative obscurity of the new Jesuit
college at Messina, but this interlude in his public work for the church was but
a brief one.
Recalled
to Rome in 1549 to make his final profession, he was entrusted with what was to
become his life's work: the mission to Germany. At the request of the duke of
Bavaria, Canisius was chosen with two other Jesuits to profess theology in the
University of Ingolstadt. Soon he was appointed rector of the University, and
then, through the intervention of King Ferdinand of the Romans, he was sent to
do the same kind of work in the University of Vienna. His success was such that
the king tried to have him appointed to the archbishopric. Though he refused
this dignity, he was compelled to administer the diocese for the space of a
year.
It
was at this period, 1555, that he issued his famous , one of his
greatest services to the church. With its clear and popular exposition of
Catholic doctrine it met the need of the day, and was to counter the devastating
effect of Luther's . In its enlarged form it went into more than four
hundred editions by the end of the seventeenth century and was translated into
fifteen languages.
From
Vienna Canisius passed on to Bohemia, where the condition of the church was
desperate. In the face of determined opposition he established a college at
Prague which was to develop into a university. Named Provincial of southern
Germany in 1556, he established colleges for boys in six cities, and set himself
to the task of providing Germany with a supply of well-trained priests. This he
did by his work for the establishment of seminaries, and by sending regular
reinforcements of young men to be trained in Rome.
On
his many journeys in Germany St Peter Canisius never ceased from preaching the
word of God. He often encountered apathy or hostility at first, but as his zeal
and learning were so manifest great crowds soon thronged the churches to listen.
For seven years he was official preacher in the cathedral of Augsburg, and is
regarded m a special way as the apostle of that city. Whenever he came across a
country church deprived of its pastor he would halt there to preach and to
administer the sacraments. It seemed impossible to exhaust him: 'If you have too
much to do, with God's help you will find time to do it all,' he said, when
someone accused him of overworking himself.
Another
form of his apostolate was letter writing, and the printed volumes of his
correspondence cover more than eight thousand pages. Like St Bernard of
Clairvaux he used this means of comforting, rebuking and counselling all ranks
of society. As the needs of the church or the individual required, he wrote to
pope and emperor, to bishops and princes, to ordinary priests and laymen. Where
letters would not suffice he brought to bear his great powers of personal
influence. Thus at the conference between Catholics and Protestants held at
Worms in 1556, it was due to his influence that the Catholics were able to
present a united front and resist Protestant invitations to compromise on points
of principle. In Poland in 1558 he checked an incipient threat to the
traditional faith of the country; and in the same year, he earned the thanks of
Pope Pius IV for his diplomatic skill in healing a breach between the pope and
the emperor. This gift of dealing with men led to his being entrusted in 1561
with the promulgation in Germany of the decrees of the council of
Trent.
Shortly
afterwards he was called on to answer the of Magdeburg. This work,
'the first and worst of all Protestant church histories', was a large-scale
attack on the Catholic church, and its enormous distortions of history would
have required more than one man to produce an adequate answer. Yet Peter
Canisius showed the way by his two works, , and .
From
1580 until his death in 1597 he labored and suffered much in Switzerland. His
last six years were spent in patient endurance and long hours of prayer in the
college of Fribourg, now that broken health had made further active work
impossible. Soon after his death, December 21st, 1597, his tomb began to be
venerated, and numerous miracles were attributed to his intercession, He had the
unique honor of being canonized and declared a doctor of the church on the same
day, June 21st, 1925.
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