PETER
759
PETER
induced the students of the university to found a
sodaUty of the Blessed Virgin. During Lent, 1578, he
preached at the court of Dulce Wilham of Bavaria at
Landshut. The nuncio Bonhomiui desired to have a
college of the society at Fribourg; the order at first
refused on account of the lack of men, but the pope
intervened and, at the end of 1580, Canisius laid the
foundation stone. In 1581 he founded a sodality of
the Blessed Virgin among the citizens and, soon after-
wards, sodalities for women and students; in 1582
schools were opened, and he preached in the parish
church and in other places until 1589.
The canton had not been left uninfluenced by the Protestant movement. Canisius worked indefati- gably with the provost Peter Schnewly, the Francis- can Johannes Michel, and others, for the revival of religious sentiments amongst the people; since then Fribourg has remained a stronghold of the Catholic Church. In 1584, while on his way to take part in another meeting of the order at Augsburg, he preached at Lucerne and made a pilgrimage to the miraculous image of the Blessed Virgin at Einsiedeln. According to his own account, it was then that St. Nicholas, the patron saint of Fribourg, made known to him his desire that Canisius should not leave Fribourg again. Many times the superiors of the order planned to transfer him to another house, but the nuncio, the city council, and the citizens themselves opposed the measure; they would not consent to lose this celebrated and saintly man. The last years of his life he devoted to the in- struction of converts, to making spiritual addresses to the brothers of the order, to WTiting and re-editing books. The city authorities ordered his body to be buried before the high altar of the principal church, the Church of St. Nicolaus, from which they were translated in 1625 to that of St. Michael, the church of the Jesuit College.
Canisius held that to defend the Catholic truths with the pen was just as important as to convert the Hindus. At Rome and Trent he strongly urged the appointment at the council, at the papal court, and in other parts of Italy, of able theologians to write in defence of the Catholic faith. He begged Pius V to send yearly subsidies to the Catholic printers of Ger- many, and to permit German scholars to edit Roman manuscripts; he induced the city council of Fribourg to erect a printing establishment, and he secured special privileges for printers. He also kept in touch with the chief Catholic jirinters of his time — Plantin of Antwerp, Cholin of Cologne, and Mayer of Dilling- en — and had foreign works of importance reprinted in Germany, for example, the works of Andrada, Fontidonio, and Villalpando in defence of the Council of Trent.
Canisius advised the generals of the order to create a college of authors; urged scholars like Bartholomaeus Latomus, Friedrich Staphylus, and Hieronymus Tor- rensis to publish their works; assisted Onofrio Pan- vinio and the polemic Stanislaus Hosius, reading their manuscripts and correcting proofs; and contributed to the work of his friend Surius on the councils. At his solicitation the "Briefe aus Indien", the first relations of Catholic missioners, were published (Dill- ingen, 1563-71); "Canisius", wrote the Protestant preacher, Witz, "by this activity gave an impulse which deserves our undivided recognition, indeed which arouses our admiration" ("Petrus Canisius", Vienna, 1897, p. 12).
The latest bibliography of the Society of Jesus de- votes thirty-eight quarto pages to a list of the works published by Canisius and their different editions, and it must be added that this list is incomplete. The most important of his works are described below; the asterisk signifies that the work bears the name of Canisius neither on the title page nor in the preface. His chief work is his triple "Catechism". In 1.551 King Ferdinand I asked the Universit> of Vienna to write
a compendium of Christian doctrine, and Canisius
wrote (Vienna, 1555), at first for advanced students,
his "Summa doctrina; christianae . . . in usum Chris-
tianae pueritise", two hundred and eleven questions
in five chapters (the first edition appeared without the
name of the author, but later all three catechisms bore
his name); then a short extract for school children,
"Summa ... ad captum rudiorum accommodata"
(Ingolstadt, 1556), was published as an appendix to
the "Principia Grammatices"; his catechism for
students of the lower and middle grades, "Parvus
Catechismus Catholicorum " (later known as " Institu-
tiones christians pietatis" or "Catechismus cathol-
icus"), is an extract from the larger catechism, written
in the winter of 1557-58. Of the first Latin edition
(Cologne, 1558), no copy is known to exist; the Ger-
man edition appeared at Dillingen, 1560. The
"Summa" only received its definite form in the
Cologne edition of 1556; it contains two hundred and
twenty-two questions, and two thousand quotations
from the Scriptures, and about twelve hundred quota-
tions from the Fathers of the Church are inscribed on
the margins; later all these quotations were compiled
in the original by Peter Busajus, S.J., and appeared in
four quarto volumes under the title " Authoritates
Sacrae Scriptura; et Sanctorum patrum" etc. (Cologne,
1569-70); in 1557 Johannes Hasius, S.J., published
the same work in one large folio volume, entitled
"Opus catecliisticum", for which Canisius wrote an
introduction. The catechism of Canisius is remark-
able for its ecc'esiastically correct teachings, its clear,
positive sentences, its mild and dignified form. It is
to-day recognized as a masterpiece even by non-
Catholics, e. g., the historians Ranke, Menzel, Philipp-
son, and the theologians Kawcrau, Rouffet, Zersch-
witz.
Pius V entrusted Canisius with the confutation of the Centuriators of Magdeburg (q. v.). Canisius undertook to prove the dishonesty of the centuriators by exposing their treatment of the principal persons in the Gosjjel — John the Baptist, the Mother of God, the Apostle St. Peter — and published (Dillingen, 1571) his next most important work, "Commentario- rum de Verbi Dei corruptelis liber primus: in quo de Sanctissimi Pra;cursoris Domini Joannis Baptistse Historia Evangelica . . . pertractatur". Here the confutation of the principal errors of Protestantism is exegetical and historical rather than scholastical ; in 1577 "De Maria Virgine incomparabili, et Dei Geni- trice sacrosancta, libri quinque" was published at Ingolstadt. Later he united these two works into one book of two volumes, " Commentariorum de Verbi corruptelis" (Ingolstadt, 1583, and later Paris and Lyons) ; the treatise on St. Peter and his iirimacy was only begun; the work on the Virgin Mary ccjn- tains some quotations from the Fathers of the Church that had not been printed previously, and treats of the worship of Mary by the Church. A celebrated theologian of the present day called this work a classic defence of the whole Catholic doctrine about the Ble.ssed Virgin (Scheeben, "Dogmatik", III, 478); in 1543 he published (under the name of Petrus Nouio- magus) *"Des erleuchten D. Johannis Tauleri, von eym waren Euangelischen leben, Gottliche Predig. Leren" etc., in which several writings of the Domin- ican mystic appear in print for the first time. This was the first book published by a Jesuit. "Divi Cyrilliarchiepiscopi Aloxandrini Opera" (Latin trans- lation, 2 fol. vols., Cologne, 1546); "D. Leonis Papae huius nominis primi . . . Opera" (Cologne, 1546, later reprinted at Venice, Louvain, and Cologne), Leo is brought forward as a witness for the Catholic teachings and the discipline of the Church .against the innovators; "De con.solandisa'grotis" (Vienna, 1554), exhortations (Latin, German, and Italian) and pray- ers, with a preface by Canisius; *"Lectiones et Pre- cationes Ecclesiasticae " (Ingolstadt, 1556), a prayer-
