Saint Peter Canisius, Priest and Doctor of the Church

Peter Canisius was born in 1521 at Nijmegen in the Netherlands and in 1543 became the first Dutchman to join the Jesuits. For some forty years he worked in the German lands, Austria, Bohemia and Switzerland, a time of deep division after the Reformation: he taught at Ingolstadt and Vienna, preached, founded colleges in many cities and took part in the Council of Trent. His catechisms, the first published in 1555, went through hundreds of editions in many languages and were used for centuries, so that in parts of Germany a catechism was simply called “a Canisius”. In his last years he founded the college of St Michael at Fribourg in Switzerland, where he died on 21 December 1597. He was canonized and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1925.