Peter Kanis was born at Nijmegen in the Netherlands and studied at Cologne, and in 1543 made the Spiritual Exercises under Peter Faber at Mainz and became the first Dutch Jesuit. He attended the Council of Trent as a theologian and then spent forty years in the German lands, teaching at Ingolstadt and Vienna, founding colleges at Prague, Munich, Innsbruck, and elsewhere, and serving as the first provincial of the Jesuits in upper Germany.

Canisius saw that the Reformation had spread through the catechism and the pulpit, and he answered in kind. His Summary of Christian Doctrine (1555) and his shorter catechisms of 1556 and 1558 were reprinted hundreds of times in many languages and became the standard Catholic teaching for children and households across central Europe. Their influence reached even Lutheran Sweden in the 1570s:¹

Catholic books were translated, especially the catechism of the Jesuit Canisius; and these were distributed in large numbers among the people.¹ J. H. Merle d’AubignéHistory of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin, bk. 12, ch. 11

Canisius spent his last years at Fribourg in Switzerland, where he died on December 21, 1597. Rome called him the “second apostle of Germany” and canonized him in 1925. More than any other man, he gave the Counter-Reformation in Germany its popular voice.

Catholic Opponents