St. Peter Damian

St. Peter Damian was born in 1007 at Ravenna, the youngest child of a large and poor family. Orphaned early, he was treated harshly by one brother and set to tending swine, until another brother — Damian, a priest of Ravenna, whose name Peter later took in gratitude, according to tradition — rescued him and saw to his education. The gifted young man became a celebrated teacher, but around 1035 he abandoned his career for the hermitage of Fonte Avellana in the Apennines, a community of hermits living in the spirit of St. Romuald. Elected prior in 1043, Peter made Fonte Avellana a center of monastic fervor and founded or reformed hermitages across central Italy. His own life was one of severe asceticism, deep prayer, and constant study of Scripture, and he became one of the most forceful writers of the eleventh century — letters, sermons, treatises, and lives of the saints marked by learning, wit, and uncompromising moral seriousness. His famous treatise the Book of Gomorrah confronted the corruption of the clergy of his day with unflinching candor. Peter's holiness and ability drew him, against every personal inclination, into the reform of the whole Church. In 1057 he was compelled to accept the office of cardinal-bishop of Ostia, and successive popes sent him as legate on the most delicate missions of the Gregorian Reform era — to Milan against simony, to France, to Germany, where he dissuaded King Henry IV from divorcing his wife. Again and again he begged to return to his hermitage, and in his last years he was allowed to live once more as a simple monk. Returning from a final legation to reconcile his native Ravenna with the Holy See, he fell ill and died at Faenza on February 22, 1072. Venerated immediately, he was never formally canonized — his cult is pre-Congregation — and in 1828 Pope Leo XII extended his feast to the universal Church and declared him a Doctor of the Church. His relics rest in a chapel of Faenza's cathedral. His feast is celebrated on February 21, and Dante honored him with a place among the contemplatives in the Paradiso.