St. Peter Canisius

Who they were

Peter Canisius was a Dutch Jesuit, among the Society's first ten members, sent into the German speaking lands when Catholicism there was collapsing. His answer rebuilt it so thoroughly that history calls him the second apostle of Germany after Boniface. The instrument was the catechism. His three versions, for children, for students, and for adults, in clear question and answer, went through hundreds of editions, and for generations knowing your Canisius simply meant knowing your faith.

He founded colleges across the empire and preached in the great contested cities, and in the most polemical century Christianity has ever produced he kept a courtesy that was itself an argument: his recorded principle was that more is accomplished by warmth than by attack, and he forbade his men to abuse opponents from the pulpit. He worked until a stroke at seventy and dictated books after it. He was named a Doctor of the Church in 1925, and his feast sits in Advent's last days.

Why people turn to St. Peter Canisius

Catechists, directors of religious education, parish volunteers, and religion teachers, with St. Robert Bellarmine. And anyone defending the faith in a hostile room who wants his actual weapon, which was clarity plus courtesy and never one without the other.

How to ask their intercession

Before the class, the RCIA session, or the argument at work, ask for the Canisius combination by name. He received the teenage St. Stanislaus Kostka at Dillingen and sent him on to Rome, which is a fair thing to ask him to do again for a young person you know.